Wayne Hoff said "I'm describing a specific situation where distributed scanning and centralized processing makes business sense. This is scanning of a specific record type as part of a specific project, and within that project the parameters you mentioned would absolutely have to be controlled."



Agreed, Wayne. So what proportion of all deployments of MFCs actually fit this scenario? 1%? 0.1%? Less?



You also said "What has come about in the last 3 years or so (or maybe sooner, I'm not sure) is a network connection to MFC's [sic] and software tie-ins so that they can communicate directly with the main server no matter how far around the world they are from each other."



I would say this may take a bit more work with a dedicated scanner, but perhaps not too much more work. The banks in the USA have been doing that with check scanners for a number of years, thanks to the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act" of 2003 (AKA Check 21 Act). See http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/alerts/check21.html, http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/check21/consumer_guide.htm, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_21_Act.



Warmest regards, as always.



Fred

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