Thank you for the friendly invitation to disagreement!
I think our disagreement is not about the functionality of MFC's but around the
context of their use. You're describing MFC's as they are used commonly in
offices today - installed by IT or office services and used as desired by
employees with attention to nothing more than the green button that makes it
all go. 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 - DPI,
record font size, B&W text, high-quality originals, etc. - otherwise, as you said
earlier, garbage in garbage out.
I also was unclear about what I meant by imaging software tying to
scanners. 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 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. That means paper is scanned on an MFC
in a field office and seconds later it's part of a batch in head office, ready for
QC, validation, and release. I'm aware of one partnership between an MFC
vendor and an imaging software vendor where this line of communication is
direct, and with the copier interface providing directions to boot.
I agree that MFC's are bad for general scanning purposes, and not just bad,
but terrible. My argument though is that there may be a use for them in
unique, well-controlled circumstances.
Wayne Hoff, CRM
Calgary, AB
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