KYOCERA Announces New Branding and Focus on Solutions at 2012 Dealer Show

May 21, 2012 12:22:28 PM

By Dan DiGiacomo

While the theme of KYOCERA’s 2012 Pan-American Dealer Meeting urged attendees to “Focus on Success,” the company also had several major changes to announce—including new global branding and new U.S. leadership. Ed Bialecki, senior vice president of sales, led the meeting’s general session at The Venetian in Las Vegas with the announcement that, as of April 1, the organization had officially changed its name globally to KYOCERA Document Solutions and appointed Nori Ina as president and CEO, KYOCERA Document Solutions America, replacing Michael Pietrunti. The name change is accompanied by a new logo and underscores KYOCERA’s commitment to providing customers with complete solutions rather than just hardware.

KYOCERA plans to launch 10 new software solutions in the second quarter, and the company was demonstrating many of the new offerings on the floor of a Tech Fair. The Fair was separated into areas identifying vertical markets—such as government, education, legal, and healthcare—and showcasing the integration between KYOCERA’s HyPAS-enabled devices and solutions designed to address workflow issues in those markets.

The focus on penetrating vertical markets was particularly evident in the company’s presentation of DMS Link 4.0, which enables users to establish an interface between a KYOCERA MFP and an existing document management system. KYOCERA has tailored the latest version of DMS Link—which now offers Nuance OCR as an optional upgrade—to each vertical market with pre-set workflows optimized for each vertical market. For instance, DMS Link 4.0 for Healthcare features pre-set workflows that handle medical forms processing with barcodes, patient registration forms, medical wristband printing and insurance billing. An education-targeted version of the software focuses instead on the challenges faced in a school setting, such as indexing, archiving and printing activity and course registration and enrollment forms and records tracking to monitor student progress. In addition, KYOCERA demonstrated versions of the software for the legal and finance sectors, and touted its willingness and ability to tailor the software for a given enterprise’s particular needs or challenges.

Targeting the legal market directly is Legal Sender, an embedded solution for A3 and A4 MFPS due in July that scans and sends legal documents as email attachments. From a website, users can enter a court name and email address where a set of documents are to be routed, then choose the maximum size of the documents so that larger documents will automatically be split into multiple emails if necessary. Once entered on the site, the user can verify or modify the sending information at the MFP control panel before scanning and sending the job. A QuickScan option allows users to print bar-coded cover pages for multiple jobs to be sent at once. When a stack of documents is placed in the MFP’s document feeder the barcode on the cover page directs the job to the appropriate court and email address.

Another solution potentially useful in the legal and medical fields is DL Verify, currently in testing with a June release (depending on dealer feedback). DL Verify, compatible at first with A4 MFPs, lets users scan both sides of a driver’s license, then prints a verification page confirming the license’s veracity. This is useful in confirming identities, and also for sending a person’s ID information to autofill forms. However, bar-coded driver’s licenses are currently only standard in 39 states.

In the education market, KYOCERA will release Teaching Assistant 2.0, an embedded solution that allows educators to print customized test and answer sheets, then scan and grade their students’ work. New features in this iteration include the ability to save and email PDF and CSV files of test results and summary sheets and save the results to a USB drive, and increased grading options (including the ability to add plus and minus grades).

Universal Solutions

KYOCERA also spotlighted several solutions that are intended for use across all markets – perhaps most significantly an updated KX print driver set to launch in May that will feature an icon-based interface and simplified, customizable workflow structure. For instance, in addition to allowing each user to customize the interface to their liking, users will now be able to easily switch between PCL and PostScript emulations within the driver, versus having to navigate through device “Properties” to make the switch. The KX driver will also feature fully adjustable Ecoprint settings, administrator privileges that allow some options (such as color printing) to be password-protected, and more. The KX Driver will work in conjunction with KYOCERA Net Admin 3.0, the company’s newly revamped network device management utility for IT administrators. The biggest change for the latest version of Net Admin (aside for the name change from “KMNet Admin”) is the ability to clone a device’s settings and replicate it for other devices, which will save administrators time when rolling out HyPAS apps to entire fleets.

In terms of mobile workflows, KYOCERA is launching the Cloud Connect app, which enables users to print from and scan to Evernote accounts using a KYOCERA HyPAS-enabled MFP’s touch screen, eliminating the step of scanning to a PC workstation, then sending files to Evernote. Cloud Connect supports JPEG, PDF and TIFF files, and may expand to include other cloud storage sites in the future.

Another useful mobile app is KYOCERA Mobile Print, which enables users of Apple iOS and Android-based mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets to print documents and images to and scan from HyPAS-enabled KYOCERA printers and MFPs in their network. The app handles PDF, JPEG, PNG, TXT and HTML documents, and enables print tracking by an administrator.

KYOCERA also unveiled Sharepoint Connector 4.0, the latest version of the software that enables users to scan from a KYOCERA MFP into an existing Sharepoint library. Like DMS Link, Sharepoint Connector offers an optional Nuance OCR upgrade.

Finally, KYOCERA has teamed with API Technologies on the Cryptek Netgard MFD, a drop-in, in-line, multi-factor user authentication solution that integrates with KYOCERA HyPAS-enabled MFPs. Netgard MFD requires users to authenticate with a certificate-based PKI smart ID card and personal identification number (PIN), preventing unauthorized users from accessing sensitive documents and also tracking device usage. The system, currently employed by government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Defense, supports local user authentication as well as network authentication with LDAP or Active Directory.