OOPS! I tried to delete a duplicate comment and deleted the entire article. -- REPOST --

I guess one advantage to being the leading SharePoint Capture software company is that you get to test lots of neat devices. When I find one I like, I like love to talk about them. Also I don't like to bash bad products, so I'll usually only talk about good stuff anyway. My latest love is the Kodak Scan Station 100, which Kodak was nice enough to lend us for a while. I was skeptical as I'm not really a multi function device fan, probably because most of them are next to impossible to setup and are tailored more towards office machines (copy, fax, print) than document imaging. The Scan Station however is not a multi function device but really a network scanning device. I have no idea what the official name of this market is called, but hopefully you're catching what I'm laying down.

Enough of the jabbering, let's get on with what this thing does. It's basically a scanner with a built in computer that runs some version of Windows XP. I only know its XP because you can see the start screen when you turn it on. Being XP it takes a bit for it to boot up, but that's okay because you'll probably never turn it off, we don't anyway. The first thing you must do is only one of the two complaints I had and that was you have to install software on another machine to build (and later edit) the configuration. This could be a problem if you are constantly adding new users or locations, but from what I've seen it's typical of any device in this class, wait I've never really seen another device in this class. I setup about 10 email addresses for all the folks that sat close enough to the device for it to be handy and then I setup a couple UNC paths to simulate scanning to a couple different types of documents (more on this later). The configuration program also allows you to setup default for just about anything else you want such as document format (PDF, TIFF, JPG), simplex/duplex, OCR and a host of other settings.

Once you have the configuration complete you simply save it onto a USB drive, bring the USB drive to the Scan Station and as soon as you plug it in, you are asked to overwrite the existing configuration. The only two things I could think to improve on here would be to plug a keyboard into the USB port and let you configure directly on the Scan Station or have the ability to save the configuration across the network since its obviously network aware.

Okay the hard parts done, time to sit back and have fun. Once setup I just simply dropped paper into the ADF, selected my location(s), which were Emails are UNC paths and press the green button. Here is my second and last gripe, and it's because the lamps take about 15 second to warm up, and I want to scan now. Really not a big issue and I'm simply pointing it out. Once warmed up scanning is relatively fast at 28 pages per minute bitonal, but slows down dramatically when doing Image+Text PDF (because of the OCR). The files were either emailed or placed on the network immediately. Heading to my Inbox I checked out the files and I was blown away. Kodak Perfect Page works and works well… I guess I didn't mention that handy feature earlier. Perfect Page is a technology that cleans up your document automatically without the user having to press buttons and think about things. It performed deskew, black border removal, auto page size detection and some thresholding on every image I scanned, which gave me very good results. Good enough were OCR and barcode detection (via KnowledgeLake Capture Server) worked consistently. The only other image cleanup thing I would have like to have seen was blank page detection, but luckily combined with our software this is taken care of.

So why would someone want to buy this device? I would say the perfect scenario is for small departments that don't either want to spend the money on a quality scanner for each desktop or just plain don't have the room. If these departments have an imaging repository capable of inputting from network locations or simply want images sent to their Inbox, this device will meet their needs and unlike some other review of this scanner, I think the price is great at $2599.

How did I test this device? I connected it via Ethernet to a 100 Mbps switch on our company network. I scanned to both Email addresses and network locations. I used KnowledgeLake Capture Server to pick up the images sent to network locations, and sent them through our image processing modules to split into multiple documents when a barcode was detected. Next Capture Server placed them in a web indexing queue where they were manually indexed and then sent to SharePoint. I tested both multi and single page TIFF files as well as Image+Text PDF files.

My final thoughts on this product are simple; I recommend it for the scenario mentioned above. This device will also soon be certified for use KnowledgeLake Capture Server.

Enjoy, Chris

A couple weeks back, Ron Cameron was telling me that he really believed that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) issue would end up being worse than the year 2000 (Y2K) problem. He told me the thought it would be at its worse when the time used to change (first of April), rather than in early March, when a lot of folks simply just changed times manually. I smiled and went along as it seemed like a reasonable prediction, but from what I've seen, I think he may have been spot on. I really hope he's wrong because so far it has been a real pain in the rear and if it gets worse, there's going to be some serious productivity loss and IT downtime getting it all sorted out.

I'm just going to spend a couple minutes talking about the things I've been exposed to so far. First, it was the Microsoft patch that was supposed to fix the problem on Windows 2003 Servers. Because we had to update servers around here, we figured it was a great time to go ahead catch up on hot fixes for the last couple months. So on we went running Windows Update, and WHAM things started breaking and the worst part was we didn't know exactly what was breaking things because we had applied multiple patches.

The first thing we had happen was on our software activation server, where a security patch decided to disable Basic Authentication and enable Windows Authentication without asking, of course this caused a stoppage to the nice people trying to activate our software. Upon some research Microsoft claimed they did it because Basic Authentication should only be used over SSL, but guess what, that sever is using SSL. Like we'd really pass our keys around without encryption. It was hard to find the problem, but at least it was an easy fix.

Second, was one of our development domains. For some crazy reason the DST patch broke one of the COM+ services on the domain controller, causing the server to quit functioning properly and putting a halt to some stress testing we had been performing. I don't know the details here, as I wasn't hands on, but the only resolution we found was to rebuild the machine. What a pain!

Next thing was all my appointments getting messed up on my Windows Mobile device. The device changed its time correctly on the new DST, so you would have figured things would have worked. But some type of confusion between this and the patch to fix Exchange had confused everything. Not a big deal, as I realized quickly (along with everyone else) what had happened and our administrator had already sent a patch over so it wasn't too bad at all, except showing up and hour late to my first couple meetings.

Finally, Darrin Bishop started telling me about a completely bizarre SharePoint 2007 issue he'd run across. Check out it out on Darrin's Workbench.

I really do enjoy the extra daylight, but I'm really starting to dread the first weekend in April.

Chris