Thanks Lee - that sounds like a great solution.
I'd take the fax machine off them! and give them the help they need to
help themselves. When we implemented our solution, it was simply not
being used, with people preferring to print a document , take it off
the printer, fax it then shred it. By making the actual fax internal
only we made it pointless to work in this way and they began faxing
directly from their desktop. Of course, there will always be actual
paper to be sent and our current solution makes that unduly hard!
Thanks,
Simon
Lee Howard wrote:
On
2004.07.23 02:36 David Evans wrote:
I'd ideally like to be able to connect a scanner directly to the lan
and
for a user to be able to pop a document in it and send it to
his/her
desktop. From here it could be sent as a fax or used in other ways.
I've a couple of clients that have a networked scanner that they access
from their browser. The scanner (anything would work, I guess, but
ones with ADFs seem to work better for them) is directly connected to a
Linux server running, among other things, SANE, Apache, and PHP. The
user drops the paper into the scanner. Then the user enters "scanner"
into the URL box of their browser. A PHP-produced page on the Linux
server connected to the scanner comes up with as many options as you
can conceive of (scan, copy, fax to numbers, etc.). They then complete
the HTML form, and press a button, and then the action occurs. In most
cases they simply have a copy of the scan pop-up in a new browser
window (in PDF, in Acrobat Reader), and then they do with it what they
will from there.
Sadly, if they had wanted to fax it they normally would have gone over
to the fax machine first, and thus they almost never use the networked
scanner device as an outbound fax client. In my experience, the only
way to convince offices of heterogeneous computer skills to actually
use the fax server for most of their outbound faxing is to actually
take the fax machine away. It's either a learning curve thing, or
there must be a certain feeling of accomplishment to see the paper go
through the machine, dial, and complete in that fashion. Maybe taking
that away from them is like taking the pacifier from a child. I
haven't ever yet been so brave because I have concerns about how much
productivity will be lost over the where-is-the-fax-machine squabble
and the coping with the new arrangement.
Lee.
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