What is good scanning software?

Scanning software is a computer program designed to perform the function of acquiring a digital copy of the printed document and saving it in one of the file formats established in the market for the storage of digital images.

So, from the first impression, this should be a very simple application for anyone to use easily. However, there are thousands of scanner models out there on the market, serving individual customers as well as enterprises of any size. Therefore, when developing scanning software, software developers try to satisfy all customer types with one product. For a system administrator or any person who is an experienced PC user, working with such scanning software could be a piece of cake, but end users of such scanning software are different. Usually, if we speak of information technology systems implementation within a company, it sometimes is not that hard to technically implement the software system, but it could be a challenge to have your employees actually using it.

Principal qualities of "good" scanning software

So, what does it take for scanning software to become “good” in the eyes of a simple end user? Here we can speak about several things which really matter:


1. Simplicity. It is no surprise that anyone would prefer the scanning software to be simple to use. Starting from installing the program, to the initial set up (or no set up required) and work process: every step is equally important and is greatly valued by the end users. Of course, everyone would say that they want the scanning software to have one button to perform all operations, but this is impossible. Still it is the main task for software developers in the first place to aim for simplifying the use of scanning software.


2. Quality. Of course, the quality of the resulting document or a document digital image can only be reached when there is a pretty advanced technology running in the back of the scanning software. Nowadays we cannot blame it on the scanner all the time, as there are plenty of technologies out there available which are tailored for document readability enhancement, graphic noise removal or text fields preparation for better OCR – it all should be present in scanning software and it really adds up to a full picture when we can really estimate such value as “quality” if we speak of scanning software.


3. Speed. When scanning one page of an A4 document had to take 1 or 2 minutes back in the 90’s it was necessary and everyone had no choice but waiting. Today you can find scanners with 120 pages per minute scanning speed, 2 pages per second! But we all have to understand that the scanning software has to also keep up to such speed of scanning. No options!


4. Added value. You have scanned a document and have saved it on your hard drive. But what else would you want from the scanning software to offer you? We send lots of emails every day at work or at home, so, it should be a good thing to having the scanning software attach your scanned document to the e-mail message with a single click. And if you send the documents via email much, it should offer some kind of a document compression features to let you have the finest quality document but of a lower size. Or apply OCR (optical character recognition) to your scanned document and have its text content available for content search and copy-paste to other digital documents.
   
   In the end it all comes down to individual feeling about the scanning software that you are testing or have chosen to use it within your organization or at home. While there are various scanning softwaredevelopers and types of such computer programs, we would recommend trying Cognitive Technologies company product - Compressimo, which utilizes the core Cognitive PDF/A technology as a good foundation to make you confident about the technology level and offers a simple, user-friendly interface to perform day-to-day scanning operations.