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- The AIIM conference<\/li>\n
- The ARMA conference<\/li>\n
- The CES tradeshow<\/li>\n
- The Macworld conference<\/li>\n
- None of the above<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n
The answer is not as obvious as most of us would have guessed such as the AIIM conference.\u00a0 After all, AIIM is known as a leading organization in \u2018image management\u2019 so of course this would be the world\u2019s largest collection of scanning devices ever.\u00a0 The correct answer is \u201cNone of the above\u201d.\u00a0 I would strongly argue, and have plenty of evidence, that Salesforce.com\u2019s recent Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco was by far-and-away the largest collection of scanning technology to ever be assembled at one conference.\u00a0 Specifically I\u2019m referring to the number of camera-enabled devices at this conference and creating images from smart phones instead of document feed paper scanners.\u00a0 There were 90,000 registered attendees and each attendee probably averaged two devices whether they were iPhone\u2019s, Andriod\u2019s, iPads, Galaxy\u2019s or whatever.\u00a0 These devices were in abundance, that\u2019s for sure!<\/p>\n
Therefore, conservative estimates of around 180,000 camera-enabled mobile devices plus all the devices in the vendor\u2019s booths themselves probably puts the number of \u201ccapture\u201d devices at around 200,000!\u00a0 This is a remarkable opportunity to leverage the fact that most of the devices these days include high-quality cameras.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Of course I\u2019m not talking about large production-type scanners typically seen at the annual AIIM conference where you would capture a stack of 100 or 500 pages at a single time, for example.\u00a0 I\u2019m talking about \u2018transactional\u2019 capture where the use case is to capture one, or just a few, documents at a time.<\/p>\n
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Education and awareness \u2013 Old habits die hard<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
Even with all these devices readily available to all attendees, and all this revolutionary software on display I witnessed utter failure, not because any of these people or technologies were bad, but because people were not aware of the incredible advances in Mobile Data Capture.\u00a0 Let me clearly explain what I mean by utter failure with specific examples.<\/p>\n
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1. \u00a0Mobile Data Capture Use Case # 1:\u00a0 Business Card with recognition on device<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
First, I had several people hand me their business cards.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Why not just take a picture of the card and automatically put in to Salesforce as a contact?\u00a0 Yes, the technology does exist!<\/p>\n
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2. \u00a0Mobile Data Capture Use Case # 2:\u00a0 Marketing materials with recognition hosted<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
The next utter failure was when I was handed some marketing materials. \u00a0What typically happens with these items?\u00a0 That\u2019s right; they often get filed right into the circular file cabinet (a.k.a. trash bin) to never be found again.\u00a0 Why not just snap a photo with a smart phone and have the document made into a fully Searchable PDF image and then stored in some system?\u00a0 Then I can quickly, and easily, retrieve it in the future based on some keyword related to the material that I was looking for.\u00a0 This functionality is not only very useful for retrieval purposes but also general organizational purposes.\u00a0 For example, at a typical tradeshow you will meet many people and get introduced to new companies that you probably hadn\u2019t known of before.\u00a0 In these cases you will most likely only remember something vague about the company, person and\/or product but not the actual name of the person, company or product.\u00a0 Therefore, you can easily search for a term such as \u201cconsulting\u201d to retrieve all the documents with that particular word contained in them.<\/p>\n
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3. \u00a0Mobile Capture Use Case # 3:\u00a0 Batching and document collections<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
Then one of the last utter failures I would like to share is a personal story but it just goes to illustrate that capture from mobile devices is not top-of-mind like it should be because the technology is so new.\u00a0 Like most of us returning to our offices after a business trip, we will have acquired various documents during our travels such as meal receipts, contracts or just environmental photos to save and share with our fellow colleagues.\u00a0 While the types of documents themselves could be vastly different, the collection of these documents will most likely have something similar such as the location or name of the event.\u00a0 In my case the similarity between these documents was \u2018Dreamforce 2012\u2019.\u00a0 So what I did was whip out my handy iPhone and snapped several photos at once to create a collection of documents.\u00a0 This was a very different user experience that I was used to where I would take a picture of one image, and then uploaded.\u00a0 Then take a picture of a second image, then uploaded, and repeat the process until I was finished.\u00a0 This was simply a horrible experience and I would delay getting this information saved electronically because I dreaded the time wasted doing this activity.\u00a0 With the ability to capture many images at once, it allowed me to get these images uploaded quickly without much effort at all.\u00a0 Next, since the documents were different sizes, I used the auto crop feature to automatically resize the images to the proper size.\u00a0 Then, to make my stored images really smart I added \u2018tags\u2019 so that I can type a search term such as \u2018biz card\u2019 and find all the business cards stored on my phone.\u00a0 I then had the option to send to a wide variety of popular cloud storage destinations, send via e-mail or even print.<\/p>\n
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\n Batch capture<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
Capture several items at once instead of one at a time.\u00a0 Greatly saves time when gathering a collection of related images.<\/span><\/td>\n
Enhance Image<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Auto binarization, auto cropping, page rotation and other useful features to create excellent image quality.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n Tags<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Easily add tags, or metadata, to each image to make them searchable or better organized.\u00a0 Custom tags can be added at anytime.<\/span><\/td>\n
Batch Collections<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Your smart phone can now be a simple version of a mobile document management system with the ability to save collections of images on the phone itself.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
<\/p>\n
So the question begs, with this great capture technology literally at people\u2019s fingertips why is it that we seem so na\u00efve about this amazing technology?\u00a0 I think there probably are several viable reasons including, but not limited, to the following:<\/p>\n
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- Awareness that this type of technology exists in the first place.\u00a0 More education is needed.<\/li>\n
- As a society we are on \u201cmobile application overload\u201d so we have a difficult time weeding through all the available applications and try and find the most useful ones.\u00a0 There\u2019s an app for that!<\/li>\n
- We are still in the early days of mobile application development.\u00a0 Companies rush to get an application to market first, then will gradually add business productivity capability such as mobile data capture.<\/li>\n
- Use case scenarios need to be clearly defined and return on investment needs to definitively articulated.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n
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