Some companies use a combination of the following hardware types to meet specific needs. The three common categories of scanner hardware installations are:
Individual scanners- Inexpensive desktop scanners are convenient if you scan single page documents frequently throughout the day, or scan confidential information. Personal scanners can also be practical for infrequent scanning of small stacks of documents. Typical users in this category are managers, and the credit or personnel departments.
Dedicated scanning workstations - Practical when an entire workgroup needs to scan documents, or when there is a frequent need to scan large batches, perhaps 25-50 pages, of documents at a time. If a networked computer with a scanner is dedicated for imaging, users throughout the company can use the workstation to scan as needed.
If you use a central computer like this, you can set up personal folders on the workstation, and then save scans into these folders. Or instead, you can manually save images to a file server. Upon returning to your desk to index the images, you can access your imaging folders on the workstation or file server. Accessing images this way is even easier if you map a drive letter on your computer to the network computer or folder. Dedicated workstations are often used by Accounts Payable departments.
Network scanners - You can configure a document server to automatically route scanned documents to recipients. This solution requires a Windows NT network with sufficient available bandwidth, along with a device like the AXIS Network Document Server.
A document server lets a company set up a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) scanner with an IP (Internet Protocol) address on an Ethernet network. This solution requires that Microsoft Internet Information (IIS) server is running, and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) must be enabled and configured. The server can then be instructed to scan and route images to various folders on the network, or even e-mail images to recipients.
When scanning a document or batch of documents, use the document server to select the recipients. Once scanning is completed, the documents are routed to the correct destinations, often network folders. This lets users access and index the images from the networked folders, for example. Network scanners are more automatic and convenient than dedicated scanning workstations, but they demand more network resources. Depending on the network's speed and configuration, network constraints may rule out this installation option.
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