One of the biggest problems for companies in digital transformation is the issue of moving their hard copies to digital. In fact, most companies find themselves wrestling with a mix of new technology that makes digital a part of everyday life—and legacy systems or workflows that still rely upon paper signatures, files, and processes. As the mobile-only movement forges ahead, that leaves many employees stuck in a place of inefficiency—able to access some documents, but never able to capture everything they need, especially when working remotely. Enter: Adobe Scan.
If there is one company that seems to understand the digital transformation, it’s Adobe. For years, they’ve been at the forefront of the mobile cloud app movement, and their teams have worked tirelessly to create seamless user experiences amongst their cloud, signature, and design programs. It’s not surprising, then, that they have taken the lead in bringing high-quality digital scanning capabilities to mobile users.
Adobe’s digital document “ecosystem” already includes cloud-based signature programs and document storage. The new Adobe Scan app—available free for users on iPhone and Android platforms—helps make those processes even easier. Adobe recognizes that paper documents are still being used by some segment of the business community—and it’s helping users transfer those documents to the digital realm.
When I first heard about Adobe Scan, I was excited, but still unsure how it would differ from the wide range of scanning apps already on the market. After all, I’ve had a scanner app on my phone for years, and it works well enough. How would Adobe Scan be different?
First, when you open your app, you’re automatically guided to either scan your first doc or toggle to view past scan jobs. After scanning a few pages, I was impressed just how easy it was to crop, sort, re-order, and enhance the quality of the scans—something I definitely haven’t found with other scanning apps on the market.
What was most exciting for me, though, was what happens after the scanning takes place. Yes, you can turn the document into a PDF. But in doing so, you also get optical character recognition (OCR) so you can pull the text from the document and re-use in other formats, including Word or InDesign. For anyone looking to get their paper files into digital format, this alone is huge. Yes, there is some benefit in being able to store digitized docs, but the real value is being able to effectively search, grab, and pull from them. For me, this is a huge bonus of Adobe Scan.
The other huge benefit of Adobe Scan is that it allows users to route the documents for signature, store them, and even import them into Adobe Reader Adobe DC for further design and organization. In fact, the app actually prompts you to make sure you have the free Adobe Reader app so you can start pulling text and commenting on the file, right from your phone Again, this is huge for those of us who do a lot of work remotely via phone and don’t want to go through the motions of scanning a document on our phone, just to run to our desk to pull text or edit it.
Adobe is proving itself to be a solid partner for companies seeking to go paperless in the digital transformation. While it may once have seemed an impossible feat, Adobe is finding ways to make all paper “digital”—moving them from the world of 2-D to the living digital ecosystem. Although there may be other quality scanning apps out there, Adobe Scan is the only one with the full Adobe ecosystem in place to help make those scans useful in a business environment. I’m actually surprised it took them this long to determine the need.
In developing Adobe Scan, Adobe is committing itself even further to the “mobile first” movement, acknowledging that more people than ever before are using their phones for business applications, and that they need professional-level tools to keep their businesses running. I’ll be using it moving forward—and I’m excited to see what other mobile-first apps they create.
Additional Articles on This Topic:
Introducing Adobe Scan
Going Paperless: How Digitizing Workflow Is Improving Efficiencies
How Cloud Computing and Technology Enable Better Communication
This article was brought to you by Adobe Document Cloud . Opinions and thoughts are those of the author.
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Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.