Many network scanning devices are configured to send scan jobs to users’ email inboxes. Since most companies run Microsoft networks and use Outlook, they don’t run into compatibility problems with this solution, and there’s a smaller setup cost. But what if you aren’t using Outlook? Or what if you simply don’t want a solution that’s going to bog down your mail server even more? After all, scans are image files, and those can get pretty huge. A better solution is to scan to a network folder using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Here’s how it works.

Your network engineer enables an FTP server on your network and designates a mapped, shared network drive and folder as the target FTP folder (e.g., F:\FTP) with a login for authentication. Since your network is behind a firewall, all you need to know is the internal IP address of the FTP server. Anything sent to that address via FTP will go directly into the designated folder (F:\FTP, in this example).

Most high-volume copiers also have scanning capabilities and will scan to email or to an FTP address. If they also have a web-interface for administrative use, you can configure these settings via a web browser, assuming you’ve assigned static IP addresses to your network copier/scanners.

On Sharp copiers, for example, scanning is an “Image Send” function, and the user simply has to pick an “address,” which could be an FTP folder or subfolder. In most environments, you’ll want a separate scanning “inbox” for each of your users. With Sharp, this is easy to set up, although it has to be done on each machine and for each user.

Access the copier’s web configuration page by typing the copier’s static IP address in a browser window. Enter an administrative login (which your Sharp vendor should give you). Then go to the Image Send / Destination page. Select options to create a new FTP destination and then enter user ID (which will appear as a folder tab on the copier), the internal IP address for the FTP server, login information, and subfolder information (which is how you create separate inboxes for each of your users).

Say you want to give both Harry and Sally separate inboxes. From a workstation, just browse to F:\FTP and create subfolders called “Harry” and “Sally.” The path to Harry’s inbox would then be F:\FTP\Harry, and that’s how he would access his inbox for scans. Sally would browse to F:\FTP\Sally.

Remember that your network engineer has already configured your FTP server so that all FTP jobs go directly to F:\FTP. That means that when configuring each user’s destination folder on the copier’s web configuration page, you only need to enter their subfolder. For destination “Harry,” for example, you would simply have to enter “Harry\” in the subfolder information field. For Sally’s destination, you would just enter “Sally\” in the subfolder field.

Once those subfolders are created on the network and the Destinations are configured for the copier/scanner, your users would simply press the Image Send function at the Sharp copier, select Address, and then select their named tab (e.g., Harry). Then the Go button to run the scan job.

That’s basically it. Once they return to their desks, they can access their respective scanning inboxes by simply browsing to them. From there, they can rename the files and move them to whatever location they need to be saved, which involves basic file management techniques.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Paperless Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.