Nuance News & Articles

It may be the holiday season, but there’s still activity in the document management software space. This week Nuance connects scanning to over 20 different clouds, Workshare upgrades its document exchange abilities, Kofax took a look at document capture in the enterprise, while AnyDocs got healthy. We also took a look at what exactly business process management is.

This week, with some of the dust beginning to settle on Oracle’s OpenOffice decision, Google is backing LibreOffice with advice and funding, SharePoint seems to be gaining ground in records management, Nuance closes the Equitrac deal, we took a look at document management on-premise or as an SaaS and Office 365 may be on the way.

This week in the enterprise, popular collaboration platform Yammer announced three new integration tools that aim to take the company above and beyond its competition. Meanwhile, the share price for LinkedIn continues to climb into what could be scary territory.

With some concern, we wondered what Nuance (news, site) could add to OmniPage that it hasn't crammed into any of the 17 previous editions. Panic not, there's lot of good new stuff for those drowning in paper documents.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (news, site) continues to consolidate its position in their imaging and voice recognition technologies space, this time with the announcement that it is to buy Equitrac for US$ 157 million in a cash deal that is expected to close in September -- and put an end to speculation that Apple might be looking to buy Nuance in turn. The company is strongest in the healthcare sector where they provide document scanning, document management, OCR and forms processing solutions.

This week, Microsoft has announced details of its upcoming Service Packs for Office on PC and Mac, Perceptive’s ImageNow integrates with Dynamics AX, Motive’s Cloud Vault is launched on Azure, Kofax releases Express 2.5 and Nuance releases its new PDF Connector.

Nuance Communications (news, site) has been adding to its eCopy ShareScan Suite in slow increments over the years. In April it added some new functionality in v4.35 and eCopy SDK. This week it released v5.0 that builds on that providing just about everything needed to automate paper-to-digital scanning.

While there are a large number of PDF converters on the market at the moment, there are few that can claim enough functionality so as to place themselves as a real competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The recent upgrade by Nuance of its PDF Converter to Enterprise 7 looks set to do that and, the company says, at a third of the price.

While much was made about the release of Office 2010 in May, the announcement that Microsoft intends to make an Office release for Mac in October has been relatively quiet. Also this week there has been a number of releases that aim to make PDF conversion much easier.

Nuance Communications (news, site) has added to the document automation capabilities of eCopy ShareScan, the company’s multifunction peripheral scanning system.

Nuance (news, site) offers up a new document reader that can turn PDFs into Office documents.

Mix eCopy's (news, site) server offerings with Nuance's multifunction printer (MFP) capabilities and you get a US$ 54 million acquisition. You also get network scanning solutions that connect a range of MFPs to business applications and content management systems. 

Said Nuance after purchasing eCopy with common stock: "Nuance and eCopy share a vision of connecting MFP devices to a wide range of applications in an easy and productive way."

Part of said vision is expected to yield: 

• Premier Desktop and Server Products: Scanning solutions that maximize gains in productivity and cost savings and provide MFP partners with an ability to deliver valuable solutions to more customers.
• Strong OEM Channels: Combining Nuance and eCopy's respective partners ( including Brother; Canon; HP; Konica Minolta; Océ; Ricoh; Sharp; Toshiba; Xerox and others) will serve to enhance these vendor partnerships worldwide and deliver greater value to all OEM and channel partners overall.
• Expanded Reach for Desktop Solutions: eCopy already has an extensive list of channel partners. By giving such an opportunity  for Nuance, there is much room for Nuance PDF Converter Professional, OmniPage and PaperPort to grow.
  

“The MFP industry is poised to benefit greatly from our mutual focus on delivering integrated solutions that solve real business problems for customers,” said Edward Schmid, eCopy president and CEO. “The combination of eCopy and Nuance creates an organization that can drive the expansion of this opportunity, and is an important advancement for our MFP partners and customers. We are pleased to join the Nuance team and help fulfill our objective of putting paper to work.”