News Analysis: eCopy's news systems connect most copiers with enterprise e-mail, CRM and document-management solutions, but customers will benefit if they never even know.eCopy on June 26 announced ShareScan OP 4.0, the first version built on an open platform that supports all multifunction peripherals, those network-enabled copiers that can also "print" to PDF and are replacing laser printers in many enterprise settings.
The move expands ShareScan's potential market far beyond the 50,000 current Canon-only licenses, covering Canon competitors such as Xerox, Ricoh, Fujitsu, Savin and HP. According to eCopy, 2.5 million new MFPs ship yearly industrywide, added to the 10 million of the machines currently in use, covering 30 to 35 people each, on average.
What's that mean to Joe Office Worker? A lot, even though only a handful of the millions of office workers whose Canon copiers are wired with eCopy's ShareScan OP could tell you just what it is, or does.
They just know that, when they put a piece of paper on their copier and hit the "send" button, it works. An electronic copy of whatever it was they were copying alights in PDF on their desktop, e-mail, accounting or HR department, or wherever it was ordered to go over the network, straight from the copy station.
That's the idea, said Bill DeStefanis, director of product management for the Nashua, N.H.-based company. The developers rigorously test eCopy systems with office workers by giving them brief written instructions and no other information. If they figure it out in a couple of minutes just standing at the copier, eCopy counts it as a success.
"These things just show up in your office," DeStefanis said. "What we think we have is an easier way to run it, that a mere mortal can work with, with no training."
By removing the complexities of PDF—putting resolution, security and routing details of PDF creation "under the hood"—eCopy takes PDF to the cubicle-dwelling masses who neither care nor have the time to plumb the depths of Acrobat or comprehend the techno babble of encryption, hot folders and bit-depth.
Busy workers also don't want to be bothered with navigating six screens deep into a copier's tiny menu-screen hierarchy just to be able to shoot a PDF back to their desktop; eCopy removes this stumbling block by hooking up a more intuitive touch-screen PC next to the copier, complete with a PC keyboard for entering metadata and other brief tasks an employer might require when dropping a PDF into the company knowledge base.
Share and Share Alike
While most MFPs already create PDFs, eCopy takes those PDFs and connects the peculiar copier operating systems and TWAIN drivers to the outside world—shunting PDF files over network connections directly into popular content management systems from EMC, Hummingbird, Interwoven, and Open Text. It can also tap into Microsoft Exchange e-mail systems, which makes the latest networkwide e-mail address book available at the copy machine for document delivery.
Hooking up all MFPs to all the enterprise document software systems that crave PDFs coming out of ShareScan is, on paper, a daunting task. The company prepared for it by building a network of more than 100 third-party developer partners to help create all the "connections"—eCopy's official name for the software widgets—that its customers crave.
"We've taken the time to understand the paper-capture concept of MFPs; the challenge to software vendors is that they all have different APIs and interfaces—there's no Windows operating environment for copiers," DeStefanis said. "We've taken the time and investment to build software around all the different [copier OS] architectures."
The value they bring to ECM (enterprise content management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software vendors and their partners, DeStefanis added, is—if they build to the eCopy SDK—they open up all copiers as efficient onramps for paper documents into their systems.
"The alternative for these companies," DeStefanis said, "is 'you can go learn Ricoh, HP, Canon, Toshiba architectures and learn the nuances of each one of the scanning interfaces.' They're very unlikely to make that investment."
Next Page: eCopy Desktop upgrades, too
Another piece of the eCopy puzzle is its PC client utility, eCopy Desktop. Some licenses come with ShareScan, and many customers license additional copies. Something of a competitor to Nuance (formerly ScanSoft) PaperPort, the software enables organizing and assembling PDFs from files scanned from the copier as well as image and document files from your hard drive or Internet.
Along with the updated ShareScan, eCopy announced Desktop 9.0 this week, which adds OCR (optical character recognition), stronger document merge capabilities, compression features and one-click PDF creation from Microsoft Office apps. IT folks can use new network-deployment features that allow remote control of features and security settings.
Nuance and eCopy, who take very different distribution tracks—Nuance through retail, eCopy through copier manufacturer dealers—will be more direct competitors in the coming year. eCopy Desktop 9.0 moves closer to PaperPort in feature set, and Nuance continues to work with MFP manufacturers to get PaperPort bundled with KonicaMinolta and Okidata MFPs, as well as Kodak document scanners.
PDF proliferates in the office
For PDF market watchers, eCopy's moves reflect an interesting trend. eCopy doesn't really care what the dominant electronic document format is; it will build its software and hardware to use whatever file format is en vogue, be it PDF, Microsoft's XPS, or its own ".cpy" format.
From eCopy's point of view, right now PDF dominates the space because of its sophisticated security, its wide international implementation and stability, and the fact that some governmental agencies—local, state, federal and international—have legislated PDF as the only electronic format they will accept.
While it behooves eCopy to keep an eye on PDF alternatives such as Microsoft's XPS and open-standard formats on the horizon, DeStefanis says that for now, PDF is far and away the format eCopy's customers are demanding its software and hardware generate. It's enough of a sure thing that eCopy ponies up license fees for the Adobe PDF libraries instead of "rolling its own" basic subset for PDF output.
"We're neutral," DeStefanis says. "We take information on paper, convert it to PDF, and we put it some place. So, to the extent that PDF's pervasive, that's great for us. If Microsoft goes with Metro or some alternative file format, we'll have to develop to that as well because it will be important. Whether it dominates PDF, who knows?"
Document Management 
