Mare Nostrum

The unpaperless office

Wow, there's still a lot of paper out there. It's striking how often the problem of dealing with paper content arises. Here are some recent conversations I've had about this topic:

• A government agency has rooms full of historically significant documents, for which there is no electronic representation.
• A university has a great fear that untold amounts of important research and teachning materials are in someone's desk drawer.
• A private corporation has a backlog of customer-related documents that need to be scanned, so that important business processes can proceed. (They count on being able to search and find things during calls with customers.)

Fortunately, our core story as a vendor is pretty simple. Scanned content is much like content from other sources, such as productivity tools. Therefore, go ahead and scan using whatever tool you want, and through the Xythos Drive, the OS-level WebDAV, or web UI upload, put the electronic content on the server. If you're using a multi-functional device, some already support WebDAV. If not, we have a connector for one manufacturer's devices, Ricoh MFDs. If you need to get fancier, adding metadata (in the scanning world, indexing) or doing other things, take a look at our plug-ins for Captiva and Omtool.

You might wonder, if we live in the age of the "paperless office," why it's important to provide these different options. The answer is pretty obvious: we're far, far away from a paperless world.