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

Didn't get to part two yesterday, seems like work kept getting in the way. So today I decided it was time to get serious and install the VRS software that came with the fast little Fujitsu. I was happy to see that the latest version of the software (4.1) was included so I plopped the CD in and proceeded. After the install was completed, it of course asked me to reboot (I'm getting tired of doing this) but using VRS before I didn't even question it and said yes, go ahead.

At this point I didn't figure there was much need to use the out of the box software and decided to just start testing a pre release of our next version of KnowledgeLake Capture. The first thing I noticed was that VRS was using the ISIS driver which gave me the faster the speed I was hoping for, which was around 24ppm at 300dpi. VRS support with the out of the box software was limited to deskew and some basic image cleanup functionality. Blank page detection was not present, but our software takes care of that anyway, so I wasn't too worried about it.

Just a couple more things I wanted to try and that was a load test to see if there would be any obvious buffer issues and also checking to see how the scanner handled different types of paper. Of course the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) wouldn't handle the couple hundred pieces paper I was going to throw at it, so I'd have to put documents in about 30 at a time. The 5120C passed this test easily, by only pausing briefly ever 40-50 pages. Last thing was to see how it handled the different types of paper so I gathered paper with loose leaf edges, a wadded piece that I somewhat straightened out, a page out of a magazine, one side of a file folder and a 4x5 sheet of normal paper. The scanner handled the paper flawlessly and the VRS software even made me accept the page from the magazine as it was of range on contrast since I was scanning black and white. A quick adjustment and the OK button allowed me to move on. All five pages turned out great and I figured that was enough for a decent review and decided to get back to some real work.

The summarize, I will recommend this scanner to customers who need a small footprint scanner that handles color and duplex operation. Great job on this device Fujitsu.

Have a great day,

Chris

That's right, look at me, I can do hardware reviews too! Much of my desire to blog daily, or at least close to it, is to provide actual value to the ECM community, especially around document imaging. Many of you read PC Magazine or other trade rags/blogs, but very few actually care about my passion, which is of course Document Imaging on SharePoint. So to make me feel good about myself and maybe even provide some valuable insight I figured I'd start talking about different pieces of hardware I've tried that are related to the subject.

Our development teams are knee deep in the development of our 2007 product line and today I decided to start working with some early releases of KnowledgeLake Capture 2007. I'll talk more about his product soon, which is one we've kept under the cover for quite some time. I knew our hardware guy had a new Fujitsu desktop scanner locked away in his office, so before he got to work today, I snuck in and found the unopened box which contained a Fujitsu fi-5120C. Yes, that's one advantage of being the CTO, I actually have the keys… actually key card to get into the IT guys office. I arranged my desk around a little and the first thing I realized is that the people that we pay good money to clean our office, don't bother cleaning any surfaces. I blew the dust off a nice space in the corner and started setting up the Fujitsu. First off, I must say I wish every scanner in the world was a USB, but I realize that many network police officers can't stand that thought of someone having a USB port for fear they may plug in a handy hard drive and steal the electronic lunch menu.

Okay, new paragraph and I promise to get on subject. Being a true male I made the decision to forgo any instruction manuals and just started throwing CDs into my laptop. Starting with the hardware driver disk I scanned the Readme and found nothing of relative importance. Starting with TWAIN drivers, I installed the software and things seemed to go well, except for asking me to reboot. Of course I declined because there would be no reason it could possibly need to do that. On to ISIS, again simple instructions and another reboot prompt, which of course I ignored. QuickScan and ScandAll were next as I figured I'd try the native applications before jumping into my testing. Since I know reboot are never necessary (lol) I turned the scanner on launched the ScandAll application, which is supposed to use the TWAIN driver. I quickly found I couldn't scan anything so I figured I'd better follow the earlier directions and reboot.

The reboot worked, and a scan operator I became. Scanning to different formats didn't seem to change the scanners speed and it hummed right along in both Black/White and 24 bit color. Speed for Black/White was just under 3 seconds per page, and 24 bit color was just over 3 seconds per page. Browsing through the menu options I found a surprising feature called Scan to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Excited I clicked the menu option under Scan and was immediately disappointed because it seemed to be built to work with 2001 not 2003. I even did the unmanly task of looking through help, which said it would work with 2003 if I had the .NET Framework installed, which I do of course. I tried but never understood how the options could ever possibly work with 2003. Even if I figured it out, I doubt entering the information at scan time is feasible to a user anyway.

Next I tried Scan button on the scanner itself, which gave me a list of applications to scan into. I tried a couple different apps and they seemed to work really well, although my scanner options were much more limited compared to ScandAll. Once I conquered this tasks I decided to give the ISIS driver a try by loading QuickScan. The first thing I noticed was that, as I expected the scanner worked noticeably faster clocking at just over 2 second for both black/white and color. The QuickScan application works a little more like a production application which basically assumes a batch mode when you are scanning. Other than that the feature set wasn't near as large as what was offered in ScandAll.

Okay, that's enough for today, I have to try and keep these entries at a reasonable length. Not to mention I have to get home and finish the Haunted Forest for the kids tonight! Tomorrow I will install VRS (Virtual ReScan) and let you know how it worked out of the box, and of course how good the package worked with our own KnowledgeLake Capture. What I did learn today though, was that the 5120C scanned reasonable fast and handled normal paper very well. So far I'm pleased, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

Happy Halloween,

Chris