Cost Effective Scan-to-FTP Products?

An anonymous reader asks: "The law firm I work for uses a document routing system that picks up TIFFs or PDFs in server directory and processes them. We're using digital copiers with scan-to-FTP functionality to get them to the server's input directory. So, we need a cheap, easy to use unit for doing scan-to-FTP (or SMB). Copiers are just too expensive to sprinkle around a floor and PC-scanner solutions are just too big, complicated and time intensive for the users. I have found a couple possibilities doing web searches, but I'm still wondering what other Slashdot readers are using for this."

Comments

SANE and scripting

[cduffy]

There's no reason to buy something off-the-shelf for this -- SANE's scanadf (with one of the drivers which can detect the scanner's start button press -- I just hacked up a solution for this with a slightly modified version of SANE's Fujitsu drivers and a less slightly modified version of the buttonpress detection tool out of SANE's "experimental" CVS module yesterday), in conjunction with a script for doing the upload, will do the trick. (Alternately, you could use NFS, SMBFS, DAVFS, etc. in place of FTP and just do a simple filesystem mount; I'd consider that more straightforward). I typically call scanadf with a filename based on the current timestamp -- so push the button and all the papers in your hopper come out as files named on the date/time the scan was started and the page# (based on ordering within the ADF). This means you need to have reasonable defaults for your scanning settings if you're going to do the single-button-press thing -- but for my purposes, 300DPI black-and-white works for just 'bout everything.

As an aside: One of my personal projects is building an setup that uses SANE, HylaFAX+iaxphone+asterisk and CUPS to scan items to a network drive (either shared space or, if they log in, password-protected space; this latter functionality is important for HR and other folks handling confidential documents); scan items to an outgoing fax; allow folks to print incoming faxes queued in their name and all that other nifty jazz. Don't know when I'll actually have something ready for release, though -- might be a bit, particularly as taking something I threw together as a once-off (which this will be, at first) and packaging it up for redistribution and reuse takes time.