Raise your hand if you enjoy installing drivers.
No one?
Driverless network scanning — thin scanning — is here.
It works.
It’s secure.
It can save you money.
Kevin Neal ☁, both in his role as CEO of P3iD Technologies ☁ and as board member of the TWAIN Working Group understands thin scanning inside and out.
In this edition of Two Question Tuesday, Kevin explains what thin scanning is and how it can make your life easier — and more productive.
Interested in a subscription to DIR? Contact Bryant Duhon
You can watch the interview below; a lightly edited transcript follows.
Hello again back with another two questions Tuesday. My name is Bryant Duhan, I’m editor-in-chief of the Document Imaging Report published by Infosource. We have with us today a frequent contributor to DIR and a long-time friend Kevin Neal who is CEO of P3iD. And today we’re going to talk about thin scanning, which Kevin is a huge proponent of.
So let’s just start with the basics, What is thin scanning?
Neal: I appreciate it very much. I’m very passionate about network scanning. In my previous role as a hardware product manager and then working in a software company, I always thought that network-attached scanning would be a thing. Copiers and document scanners both have network interfaces. However, copiers have Ethernet while single-purpose scanners have traditionally been attached via USB. So you have to install a scanner driver on a PC, your capture software on a PC. You have to provision a computer, do Windows updates, install the right version of the scanner driver whether it’s 32-bit or 64-bit. All these things complicate the deployment process for document scanners.
In the scanning business, it was always frustrating because we had to wait for the computer to get set up in order to deploy our scanners.
So what is thin scanning? Basically it’s taking a computer, so this is a little thin client mini computer [in the video, Kevin is showing a small computing device]. The idea for these things is they have a memory chip and they have just enough power to do a computer software application on this. So you see them in hospitals, this might be mounted on the back of a screen where you’re just – you’re not storing anything locally on this. It’s just running an operating system, it’s displaying an interface. All the storage and the workflows are on a centralized server.
So, thin scanning – we’ve taken this concept of a mini computer, it’s like Intel Inside and we put it inside the scanner. So certain scanners from Xerox, they’ve taken the TWAIN Direct technology and they put it inside the scanner. Because you don’t have an operating system software that can get viruses and malware and you’re not using that computer for other purposes. It’s all the technologies inside of the scanner and it’s locked down and the software application connects to it. So thin scanning is this bundle, it’s the software application, it’s P3iD ScanBot behind the scenes and then a Xerox-enabled TWAIN Direct scanner – bundle together. And it’s a Web scanning interface.
Basically you can deploy the scanner in 5 minutes. You just go to the IP address or the host name of the scanner because it’s got an embedded Web browser to do all this setup and configuration. And then you register the scanner one time. It’s about a 5-minute process. Even if you’re not familiar with how to do it, you register it with thin scanner software.
And then it’s registered and anybody that has access to thin scanning software application can then use those scanners. So you can imagine, hey Bryant, I want to send you some documents and traditionally I’d have to scan a document and then upload the PDF file via email to you. But I could say, hey Bryant, guess what, Why don’t you connect to my scanner using thin scanner? Just go to myurlofcapture.thinscanner.com, you just go there and you bring in the documents to you directly instead of me having to scan and then attach it to an email.
I had a use case just the other day. I wanted to send my tax documents to my CPA and he said, yeah, you know Kevin, can you send those over. So I said hey, why don’t you just go just like I described, just go to a Web address and then you can pull in the documents directly to you. So this allows scanner sharing.
It allows against security because there’s no PC involved, quick deployments. So really that’s what thin scanning is, the essence of taking the computer and putting the memory and the logic inside of the scanner itself using the TWAIN Direct scanning protocol.
Okay, also just as a quick aside for anybody listening, TWAIN is an industry-neutral group (www.twain.org) . I will put the contact information down below. So if anyone’s interested in following up on TWAIN, sorry Kevin, Kevin is also on the board of TWAIN as well and he’s very involved in this stuff and truly does love it for whatever reason.
Second question is – sort of a, you know the natural follow up – what is the business value of thin scanning?
Neal: Yeah, so, so I’ll address TWAIN first. I am passionate about it because first of all it is open source software. So TWAIN Direct is open source. So you can go get it. You can develop an application like P3iD has, right. So TWAIN Direct itself is just a scanner protocol, but you’ve got to add authentication and encryption and often all kinds of other storage to it and stuff. So I am passionate about it and I encourage people to join the TWAIN Working Group.
So #2, the business value of thin scanning solutions. This is why I’m so excited because as soon as people kind of see how quickly we can deploy scanners, then the light bulb goes on because we’ve been conditioned, people that are a long-time resellers or managed service providers or ISVs, they’ve just become accustomed to, OK, you know, go get a scanning computer and like I just said before, install the software, do the Windows updates, get the right version of the driver. Like we have just been conditioned to do that. And it takes a long time, even if you’ve been doing it for a long time.
So all this time that’s consumed costs businesses a lot of money – the IT department has to do it or the end user company has to do it. Somebody is doing all that work and there’s real cost to that, but businesses really don’t understand it or really don’t calculate the cost. So those are the soft dollars that aren’t really understood.
So if you can deploy a scanner in 5 minutes like I mentioned, this is revolutionary, this change is a game changer – huge. And that’s why I’ve been passionate and advocating for thin scanning. Because if I could deploy the scanners in 5 minutes and then I can get this set up and all the settings are on the central server – guess what that means? That means that I could deploy 50, 100, 200 scanners very quickly.
And I’ve experienced this where one of our previous customers got one scanner set up with one server that was just one. And they were going to slow roll, 50 at a time to different regions of the United States. But because they found it so simple to deploy, all they did was send an instructional video to their end user clients, end user organization. So they just sent it to the stores and they said this is how you install it, just as a reference. But even the stores didn’t even need that. They just said, literally plugged it in, when they booted up the scanner, then it had all the buttons on the scanner.
So this is why I’m so passionate about it, the ease of deployment, especially for managed service providers. If you can deploy scanners quickly, guess what, your customer is getting value out of that solution almost the same day that they get the scanner. Whereas traditionally they had to spend weeks or months or sometimes they never even did get to the final deployment because they’re messing with scanner settings and the drivers were wrong and the operating system wasn’t right. You know, you hear all these things that are very complicated when it comes to scanner drivers.
So if you eliminate that and then you can change the settings on the server itself, then you as an ISV, you as a managed service provider, you as a reseller, you as an integrator, you are in control of that environment and you can – you could even see trends, for example, in the reporting tool, you could see that this scanner, you know, maybe it was rated for 1000 pages a day, but they’re scanning 5000 sheets. You could say hey you know what, you’re over-using that scanner, you might want to get another one or you’re not using it enough.
You know, maybe there’s abnormally high paper jams and it and you could say hey, you know what, this is kind of a humid environment and the paper’s sticking together or maybe the operator needs more training. So you can get some business insights from the dashboards and the reporting tools.
So really when you ask about the business value, quick deployments, rapid deployments, you can get time-to-value, centralized management of changing settings, changing profiles, and then reporting tools. You can then, you know, have an efficient process and always see your environment, right? You could see trends – for example you could see that this scanner, you know, maybe it was rated for 1000 pages a day, but they’re scanning 5000 sheets.
You could say hey you know what, you’re over-using that scanner, you might want to get another one or you’re not using it enough. You know, maybe there’s abnormally high paper jams and it and you could say hey, you know what, this is kind of a humid environment and the paper’s sticking together or maybe the operator needs more training.
So you can get some business insights from the dashboards and the reporting tools. So really the business value is quick deployments, rapid deployments, time-to-value, centralized management of changing settings, changing profiles and reporting tools. There’s a lot of business value from deploying to managing to creating a more efficient business process.
Thank you Kevin. As you were talking about the complexity, I had a flashback to my days as editor at AIIM. I literally did a follow up on what I thought would be an interesting case study and they were like sorry we can’t do it. I asked why and they said well off the record it’s still in the closet because it was too hard to roll out. It was a basic scanning implementation.
For anyone listening, I am not a technologically capable person. Kevin has shown me this – it actually looks as easy as you just described it. I think I could even do it. So if you’re interested in thin scanning, definitely check out the resources that I’ll add below.
Kevin, as always, thank you very much for your time.
Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash
