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TWAIN Direct Developers Day proves what folks at the TWAIN Working Group have been saying for the last three years: TWAIN Direct is the best way for developers and manufacturers to dovetail capture hardware with software. After working with TWAIN Direct for the past 30 days, software developers representing a wide range of solution providers descended on Florida—in the middle of a hurricane—to build, test, and demonstrate working TWAIN Direct projects within their applications.
What Is TWAIN Direct?
TWAIN Direct is an opensource, zero-footprint protocol that enables imaging hardware to communicate with software. This is a sexy and succinct way of saying TWAIN Direct is free, works in all kinds of computing environments, and doesn’t require specific drivers to interact with different devices. In other words, you don’t have to eat the cost of royalties or pass them on to your customers; you can integrate your solution into any environment you can imagine (which means your customers can use the technology that they prefer to use). You don’t have to dedicate a ton of time and money to maintain your software to support new hardware/computing environments and customers don’t need to install and manage extra IT infrastructure just to support the solution.
| Some of the many benefits that come with using TWAIN Direct. |
TWAIN Direct Projects at TWAIN Developers Day
The neat thing about TWAIN Developers Day was its diverse range of applications on display—it's truly a flexible platform that can serve all kinds of image acquisition use cases in all kinds of applications. Participants included developers from blockchain, healthcare, capture, ERP, and biometric authentication solutions providers.
Participants were given access to the TWAIN Direct sample source code contributed by P3iD Technologies in a sandbox hosted by Lyrid (cloud development platform). Visioneer provided participants with Xerox D70n—the first scanner on the market to support TWAIN Direct natively—and Xerox W130 scanners to test their projects.
| Keypoint Intelligence was proud to be a sponsor of TWAIN Direct Developers Day 2022. |
Verve Corporation
Verve Capture Suite is an enterprise capture solution that enables businesses to build their own capture automation applications in a no-code development environment. Used in conjunction with TWAIN Direct, developers can create one application to work with all TWAIN Direct-enabled scanners. Without the TWAIN Direct integration, developers would have to take extra steps to enable workflows for each device used.
At Developers Day, Verve used TWAIN Direct in their Entry Module of the Verve Capture Suite to scan documents into a workflow. The neat thing about this demo was that Verve CEO Dana Showers walked us through the demonstration in person, while Application Developer Jon Bangsberg drove the demo, configuring and kicking off the scan job from the other side of the country. This is another key benefit of TWAIN Direct—it embraces the idea that everything can be connected, accessed, managed, and used from everywhere.
ICE Health Systems
ICE Health Systems is the developer of an electronic healthcare records system that shares the company’s namesake. It provides healthcare practices with tools for managing patients, patient records, and inventory. It also offers reporting and financial tools, global communications, as well as telehealth capabilities—basically everything they need to run their practice.
ICE Health Systems uses TWAIN Direct to streamline the process of integrating images acquired from intraoral scanners and x-ray machines directly into the patient’s file in ICE Healthcare Systems. That way, dental professionals can spend more time focusing patient care and let computers handle the clerical work. The usage of TWAIN Direct in ICE Healthcare Systems is a testament to its versatility and viability outside of the office space. It’s not just about getting information off of paper and into some cloud repository somewhere; TWAIN Direct can benefit anyone who needs acquire images from any kind of hardware.
Barlea
Barlea uses the power of blockchain to create secure data sharing ecosystems for healthcare providers. The solution can work with TWAIN Direct scanners to acquire images, but the beauty of this solution is that it can be used to control who can access and modify document—and keeps an audit of everyone who has ever accessed and modified the document. The solution also allows for the usage of smart contracts so that documents cannot be accessed or changed without a consensus among those associated with that contract.
iVALT
iVALT is a biometric multifactor authentication platform, but iVALT doesn’t rely on two dimensions of identity like most MFA providers. They use five (a phone number, device ID, biometric credentials, GPS location, and timestamps) to verify if the user is authentic. TWAIN Direct manages the image acquisition so iVALT can verify user identities. iVALT's TWAIN Direct use case is another example of the protocol’s versatility.
Keypoint Intelligence Opinion
As each participant presented their projects, I couldn’t stop thinking: "If this is what can be done with 30-days of part-time focus, what can be accomplished in a month with full-time focus? How much time and money can developers and manufacturers save and reallocate to bigger problems if they use TWAIN Direct? How many industries can TWAIN Direct impact?” I suspect that the answer to all these questions is “a lot.”
Everyone stands to benefit from making TWAIN Direct the de facto image acquisition protocol, including capture hardware manufacturers, software developers, and end users. If it were as prevalent as TWAIN is now, then manufacturers and independent software vendors could spend more time improving products and adding features instead of developing new drivers (or upkeeping code to support those new drivers). More time and energy could be focused on solving actual problems, and the only thing that’s really preventing that is coming to a consensus. So, this is a call: if you develop capture hardware or need to integrate images into your software, consider building on TWAIN Direct. We have no reason to wait. It’s time to traverse the final frontier of capture with TWAIN Direct.
If you are interested in learning more about TWAIN Direct and how you can use it to improve your own hardware or software, check out the TWAIN Working Group’s website. Otherwise, log in to the InfoCenter to view research on digital transformation, document capture, and the future of office through our Office CompleteView Advisory Service. You can also log in to bliQ to learn more about the different TWAIN Direct technologies available on the market today. If you’re not a subscriber, just send us an email at sales@keypointintelligence.com for more info.