Captovation Promotes Network TWAIN

There has been a lot of talk recently in the digital copier industry about the value of embedded platforms. Over the past couple years, the likes of Canon, Ricoh, Sharp, and HP have all introduced developers’ toolkits for creating applications interfaced directly through the touch screens on their hardware devices. These platforms have attracted interest from document capture ISVs like Kofax, eCopy, NSi, Omtool, and others.

Ken Peterka, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Captovation, has discovered a simpler way for creating a direct connection from MFPs to his company’s Web Capture application. That is by leverging the “network TWAIN” driver packaged with some MFPs, including the Ricoh Aficio 1232C that was recently installed at Captovation’s offices. “After downloading and installing the TWAIN driver into Web Capture, it automatically located the scanner attached to the network,” said Peterka. “Then, by selecting the ‘start-from-scanner’ option, we were able to initiate the scan by walking up to the MFP and pressing the ‘Start’ button.”

After images are scanned at the MFP, they show up in the Web Capture desktop application, where they can be previewed and indexed. “It represents a simple way of initiating a scan to the desktop [which is a very popular destination for MFP capture],” said Peterka. “It eliminates the extra steps associated with scanning to an e-mail address or a network folder and downloading the image from there.”

The network TWAIN implementation also provides preview functionality that users often don’t get when capturing from MFPs, and if they do, it is often restricted to a small touch screen. Also, as compared to some embedded applications, the network TWAIN implementation enables users to do indexing at their desktops, instead of the MFP. This means they are tying up a shared device for a shorter period of time.

Peterka suggested workgroups leveraging network TWAIN could potentially get away with sharing one concurrent seat of Web Capture among 10 users. This would price a 10-user network capture application at around $2,000. “I’m really just trying to make people aware of this functionality,” Peterka told DIR. “We bought our MFP from the largest MFP dealer in the Minneapolis metro area. They have more than 40,000 units installed, and said they weren’t aware of anyone using a network TWAIN feature.”

Web searches indicate that in addition to Ricoh, network TWAIN drivers are available on devices from Konica Minolta, Oki Data, IBM, and Canon. Peterka added that the only drawback to Ricoh’s network TWAIN implementation is that it locks down the scanner once it is activated—preventing other users from completing their jobs. “I imagine that is something that could be fixed on future versions,” he said. “After all, if you can put print jobs, in a queue, why couldn’t you set it up to put scan jobs in the queue as well?”

Network TWAIN A Misnomer
DIR caught up with Visioneer Senior VP of Engineering Jon Harju, the founder of JFL Peripherals and one of the industry’s foremost TWAIN driver developers. We asked him what he thought about networked TWAIN. “There is no network add-on for the TWAIN protocol, although it’s pretty easy to configure a TWAIN driver to run over the network,” said Harju. “Basically, it involves fooling the device into thinking it’s directly connected to the PC running the capture application. It’s not a true network implementation. This is why the PC hijacks the device when you initiate the scan.”

For more information: http://www.captovation.com; http://www.jflinc.com/index.html