Question: Every office these days has an MFP (Multi Function Printer) device, or two. Maybe more. The relevant IT question is : How can the office get the most use from this MFP device? Once converting office paper into electronic documents, text searchability seems like an important function. The problem is twofold: i. Many office MFP devices offer no, or very limited, OCR (optical character recognition) capability, and ii. running OCR directly from the MFP device, even if possible, will slow down the machine processing rate tremendously. Of course, slowing down the MFP increases the waiting time for anyone using the device. How then do you OCR from an MFP device without slowing down machine throughput?

Answer: The best solution to this problem is based on a separation of processes. Do not run the OCR directly from the MFP device, even if it has OCR support. The performance of an OCR system embedded on a typical MFP devices tends to be mediocre, at best. In addition, trying to run the OCR process in real-time, in sync with your MFP, will take up much of your MFP resources and hurt your processing speed.

Any heavy-duty CPU process, such as OCR, should be taken off the MFP device and performed elsewhere. A perfect OCR solution for MFPs consists of assigning to each user (that needs OCR) a passcode that, when in “scan to folder” mode, actually scans to a watched folder. That is, the MFP scans the file and drops it in a watched folder and proceeds to the next document. Meanwhile, the watched folder for this user is being “watched” by another process on a separate machine.

This other process, such as our PdfCompressor, can perform all post-scan processes to this document such as OCR, web-optimization, compression, security, and meta-data, and then deposit the document in the user’s actual ouput scanning folder. This solution keeps the MFP available and running at full capacity, while providing extremely functional PDF documents to the end-user.