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SharePoint Solutions Offer Upside for You and Your Clients

Written by Jamie Bsales | Apr 27, 2012 4:22:28 PM

Microsoft SharePoint is the software maker’s fastest-selling product ever, so it’s a good bet that some of your clients are using it for document collaboration, management and more. And thanks to SharePoint’s “plain vanilla” nature, an entire industry has cropped up around offering add-ons to tailor the platform to specific needs. This opens a huge opportunity for resellers, who can help customers improve business processes while capturing the recurring revenue that goes along with a solutions sale. BLI recently looked at several SharePoint-related offerings that fill the bill.

For example, Lexmark Scan to SharePoint provides a means of scanning hardcopy documents from a compatible Lexmark MFP to one or more SharePoint repositories. A completely device-resident solution that gets installed on MFPs incorporating Lexmark’s eSF platform, Scan to SharePoint can capture documents in a variety of formats (including PDF, JPEG, TIFF, HTML and TXT) and gives users two-way access to SharePoint repositories—all directly from the control panel of the MFP, with no server-resident software (other than SharePoint itself) required. Read our full Solutions Report to see if Lexmark Scan to SharePoint is a worthy add-on for your Lexmark MFP buyers.

Moving beyond the MFP, KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint 2010 provides enterprise content management (ECM) features for organizations looking to leverage an investment in Microsoft SharePoint. Using KnowledgeLake Imaging and its associated components, users can capture hardcopy documents and search, view, share, edit/annotate, and route electronic files. The server-resident software runs on top of the popular SharePoint platform, layering document management and ECM capabilities on top of the underlying security, document storage and collaboration infrastructure SharePoint delivers. KnowledgeLake Imaging is the core component in a suite of offerings, and a range of optional components allow organizations to tailor an ECM platform that suits their needs. BLI tested the platform and found a lot to like. See our Solutions Report for the full evaluation.

If capture is all your client needs, consider placing a product such as Digitech Systems PaperVision Capture SP for SharePoint. It offers most of the same features available in the company’s PaperVision Capture product (the Report can be found on the BLI Solutions Center), but can send files directly into a Microsoft SharePoint library. Features include barcode recognition (1D and 2D) and zonal and full-text OCR functionality to help grab index data, scan profiles for frequently used scan operations, and a variety of automatic image enhancements. See the BLI Solutions Brief for more information.