We’re very excited to announce the latest version of the world’s most popular desktop scanning and document management solution, PaperPort 14.

PaperPort 14 expands on the capabilities most valued by its millions of loyal users: fast and simple scanning, easy-to-use document organization, robust support for PDF, and connectivity to network folders and applications.  The new release also includes significant innovations that place PaperPort 14 at the center of two significant trends driving increases in personal and business productivity – mobile devices and cloud computing.

Even more exciting is the new cloud-based service we’ve announced in conjunction with PaperPort 14 … PaperPort Anywhere.

PaperPort Anywhere lets you manage and access documents in the cloud using web browsers, as well as using free apps from Nuance for Apple and Google Android mobile devices. The service uses the Nuance OmniPage OCR engine to automatically create searchable documents from scanned and camera-captured documents, as well as faxes, making paper content as easy to search and find as digital documents.  Finally, you can organize, access and share all of your document content on the cloud, using PaperPort Anywhere.

PaperPort Anywhere also integrates with the new release of  PaperPort 14. Using PaperPort 14, you can automatically sync Windows folders and files with PaperPort Anywhere.

PaperPort Anywhere with up to 1GB of searchable storage is free. For more details on PaperPort Anywhere visit www.PaperPort.com. You can also purchase your upgrade to PaperPort 14 directly from PaperPort.com

We’d love to hear what you think of both the new version and the new service.

This morning, Nuance announced the completion of the Equitrac acquisition. We are all very excited to officially be a part of Nuance and for the terrific opportunities that await us, our partners and our customers.

This is a major milestone in the process of integrating the two companies. However, if you are a customer or partner, we want to emphasize that there is no change to the existing contacts or online resources that you are accustomed to.  It is business as usual. Nuance is committed to the full range of Equitrac products and partnerships. And we will continue to keep you informed of information related to the integration of the Equitrac business with Nuance as it becomes available.

What is not business as usual is the impact Nuance now has on the market.  With the addition of Equitrac, Nuance brings an unmatched set of people, products and intellectual property to help organizations win the battle over paper.  Nuance’s full portfolio of solutions will speed and optimize the way office workers create, edit and share documents in organizations of any size across the globe.

The benefits of incorporating the Equitrac business into the Nuance Imaging group cross over to both customers and partners alike, and sets a new standard in the print management, cost recovery and scanning marketplace. With the completion of the acquisition, Nuance now offers:

• Complete Document Automation Solutions –Nuance is the first and only software company with integrated and complete document automation solutions for printing, scanning and workflow – from the desktop, to the MFP, to mobile devices, and to enterprise applications.
• The Most Robust and Global Partner and Channel Network – We have strong distribution and channel partnerships with nearly every MFP and printer vendor in the world, including Brother, Canon, Dell, HP, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Samsung, Sharp, Xerox and more.
• Unrivaled Sales and Customer Service – The sales and support team is the most experienced in the industry for print and scanning solutions, and is also by far the largest team dedicated to delivering unrivaled levels of service to our customers and channel partners worldwide.

While today marks the completion of the 34-year story of Equitrac as a business entity, it is really just the start of a new chapter for the Equitrac portfolio of products – and the eCopy ShareScan portfolio.

It is no surprise that the industry reaction to the acquisition has been very positive. Bringing together best-of-class solutions and people creates immediate opportunities for our customers and partners to take advantage of, and it paves the way for continued innovation in office technology. We look forward to working with all of you as we create the next chapter.

We would like you to join us for a product tour designed specifically for legal professionals.

Title: Product Tour for Legal Professionals: PDF Enterprise 7 from Nuance
Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm EDT
Presenters:  Tony McKinley, Senior Sales Engineer, Nuance

In this exclusive webcast, you will see features and learn benefits of Nuance PDF that are designed specifically for the legal professional:

• Create 100% industry standard PDF files from any PC application
• Combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF
• Convert PDF files into fully formatted documents with one click
• Edit text and images directly within PDF files
• Apply digital signatures and security settings
• Get compatibility with all PDF software

The session will close with a 10-15 minute live Q&A session.

This webinar has limited capacity so reserve your seat today!

We would like you to join us for the second topic in the MPS webinar series, Leveraging your existing investments.

Title: MPS: Leverage your existing investments
Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm EDT
Presenters:  Randy Dazo, Director of Solutions and Services at InfoTrends and Bill DeStefanis, Senior Manager, MFP Product Management, Nuance

In this exclusive webcast, you will learn:

• Advanced MPS solutions offerings you should consider when making an MFP investment.
• How to create an RFP to select the right provider for you, at the start of the MPS process, to ensure your solution can grow with your business.

The session will close with a 10-15 minute live Q&A session.

This webinar has limited capacity so reserve your seat today!

We’re proud to announce our plans to acquire Equitrac.

The acquisition expands Nuance’s document imaging portfolio and adds Equitrac’s market-leading print management products to our eCopy ShareScan® scanning and workflow solutions.

Equitrac will also strengthen our global channel partnerships with MFP vendors like Canon, Xerox, Konica Minolta, Ricoh and HP – each of whom sell both Equitrac print management and Nuance eCopy scanning solutions through their dealers or as part of their MPS portfolios.

Please read the full press release here.

The deal will close sometime in the late summer. We’ll keep you updated with posts and blog entries but I’m really interested in anyone’s thoughts or reactions to the news …

We’re at the AIIM show this week talking with customers, partners, press and analysts about the evolution of Managed Print Services (MPS) to Managed Document Services (MDS). We’re very focused on this move because Nuance eCopy ShareScan and eCopy PDF Pro Office are at the forefront of MDS initiatives. We posted a press release that outlines 5 key elements for MDS that we believe anyone evaluating or considering either an MPS or MDS solution ought to incorporate in their thinking. Read the full press release here.

And stay tuned for more on MDS and these 5 elements. We’re working on a webinar series, a white paper and research to help educate our customers and the market on this exciting next phase for MPS.

We’d like to invite you to join us for our upcoming webinar that offers our customers and friends a first look at the special features and functionality of Nuance PDF Converter for Mac, the newest member of our Better PDF for Business product family:

In this webinar, you’ll learn about key capabilities and benefits of Nuance PDF Converter for Mac:

• Annotate and Edit
• Turn PDF into Editable Text and Documents
• Scan to Searchable PDF
• PDF to Fully-Formatted and Editable Files  
• PDF Document Assembly
• Safeguard Information

PLUS: We’ll spend 10-15 minutes answering questions from the audience.

Special Offer: All webinar registrants will receive an exclusive 30% discount offer on the purchase of Nuance PDF Converter for Mac through March 31, 2011.

Don’t delay — this webinar has limited seating, so please reserve your seat today.

We’re excited about growing our PDF family of solutions with Nuance PDF Converter for Mac. 

Now Mac users can effortlessly create, view, edit and schan 100% industry-standard PDF files. PDF for Mac uses our OmniPage docuement conversion and OCR technology to turn PDF files back into editable text documents and turn scanned PDF files into searchable PDF files.

Even better, users can connect to separate cloud services including our NuancePDF.com document conversion for conversion to fully-formatted word processing files and spreadsheet documents.

We’ll be giving everyone a First Look at Nuance PDF for Macintosh very soon … check back for details.

To learn more about the product, download a free eval or purchase, go here.

We had an inquiry last week from a reporter about handwriting recognition. This reporter found it interesting that literally no software provider had broadly addressed handwriting recognition it in the consumer space since the days of the Palm handheld PDAs.

This is a very interesting question and there are many reasons why engineers and companies have not been successful in tackling this problem.  There are both technical and practical business reasons for the absence of a solution that when combined make this problem almost impossible to solve.

First, let’s discuss the technical difficulties and solutions.

Tackling this problem on a PDA was easier for a few reasons.  First, a PDA has the benefit of dynamic information that provided the time and position of the stylus.  In a paper or scanned image of the document this information must be calculated for each character.  Secondly, the PDA required block (non-cursive) letters and in some cases was even stricter in exactly how you drew your characters.

There exists very good handwriting recognition software today, including technology available from Nuance, which can recognize block letter handwritten characters on scanned documents.  Very good means that with neatly drawn block letters you can attain a recognition rate in the mid 80% range.  Machine print can be recognized in the 99% range.

Now let’s discuss the business reasons for not making this current technology available.

Even though Nuance has hand print recognition technology we don’t provide it in our consumer products.  It’s only available to other developers who wish to incorporate it into commercial applications.  The reasons are as follows:

Consumers are using less and less handprint in their communications.  When was the last time you received a handwritten correspondence that you wanted to convert into an editable digital document?  Almost everyone sends email these days so the demand to convert handwritten text has greatly diminished.

Second, while an 80% recognition rate sounds impressive enough, in practical use recognition can be far less accurate.  Even in the best cases it’s simply not accurate enough to please most consumers.  Therefore the value of the technology is greatly diminished.

And finally, consumers simply don’t like to be told how they must write a character.  This was the principal reason it failed on PDAs.  Good penmanship or the lack thereof, is not something people like to concentrate on.  It’s human nature.  And trying to recognize cursive handwriting is simply impossible.

 How many of you handwrite communications on a daily basis? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts about handwriting recognition and how you perceive its value. Feel free to comment on this post.

Nuance’s own Bill DeStefanis was a guest blogger last week on the MPS section of  “This Week In Imaging.”

Bill’s post examines five areas where the print management and document capture value propositions converge in Managed Print Services and offers insights into these key areas.

Check out Bill’s post here.