Buyers Laboratory - News Article

Companion Solutions Bring Versatility To imageRUNNER ADVANCE Series

By Jamie Bsales, Associate Editor, October 9, 2009

At the Canon Integrated Solutions Showcase held last month in Las Vegas, attendees got a sneak peek at the first imageRUNNER ADVANCE models—products Canon executives characterized as the company’s most important introductions since the original imageRUNNER line debuted 10 years ago. True to the “Integrated Solutions” phrase in the name of the event, the imageRUNNER ADVANCE series is about more than improved hardware: The line brings with it a spate of new or enhanced software offerings that put the machines at the center of a company’s workflow.

More Than MEAP

As expected, all of the announced and upcoming models in the imageRUNNER ADVANCE series support MEAP, Canon’s platform for running a host of embedded applications directly from the control panel of a compatible device. Less expected was the announcement of particular SKUs, called Solution Models, that include a trio of productivity-enhancing workflow software called Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE Essentials (customers can still order base model SKUs that don’t include the software). That suite is made up of imageRUNNER ADVANCE Desktop, a PC-resident application for accessing and working with files stored on the device's hard drive from a networked desktop PC; an updated version of Canon’s Workflow Composer, which lets administrators create custom workflows and push them out to the devices as one-touch control-panel buttons; and imageRUNNER ADVANCE Tracker, a tool that lets users track device use by user or by function.

Dennis Amorosano, Canon’s
Senior Director of Solutions
Marketing and Business Support

“With imageRUNNER ADVANCE, Canon is making knowledge workers more productive in the day-to-day work they have to get done,” said Dennis Amorosano, senior director, Solutions Marketing and Business Support. “People are the most important element of an organization, and these tools allow them to focus on more strategic tasks for the business, rather than on trying to get the technology to work.”

Details On Desktop

According to Canon, imageRUNNER ADVANCE Desktop turns a user’s PC into a “command station” for workflow tasks. It delivers basic make-ready and collaboration abilities, allowing users to access documents stored on an imageRUNNER ADVANCE device then print, send or archive them. The program’s Binder feature lets users combine stored documents via intuitive drag-and-drop actions. Users can even make small changes in a stored document—such as fixing a typo, changing a date or updating a price—from within ADVANCE Desktop without having to launch the native application it was created in or track down the original document. The document can then be saved back to the imageRUNNER ADVANCE device’s hard drive or to another network repository as a PDF or in Canon’s proprietary .iwb file format. The benefit of the latter is that it retains the finishing information, too, so users won’t need to re-enter settings for duplexing, stapling and so on when it’s time to print the document again.

Updates To Workflow Composer

The second component in the imageRUNNER ADVANCE Essentials suite, Workflow Composer, is an updated version of the company’s tool for creating and deploying workflow templates that distill complex multi-step tasks into simple one-touch commands. For example, a typical workflow might be that an order comes into the sales department, then paperwork is completed, copied and sent to other departments, with a confirmation faxed to the customer. Using Workflow Composer, the imageRUNNER ADVANCE device can be programmed to scan the document, e-mail the file to accounts receivable and shipping simultaneously, fax the document for confirmation to the customer at a pre-registered destination, while archiving the order in a designated Mail Box—all from a single button on the device’s touch-screen panel. A Personal Jobs button can show workflows associated with a particular individual, while a Shared Jobs button can show templates accessible to a group or users.

On Canon’s existing imageRUNNER platform, Workflow Composer macros are layered on top of the device’s Universal Send features; with the imageRUNNER ADVANCE platform, Workflow Composer elements no longer require Universal Send. Workflow Composer also now includes connectors to Microsoft SharePoint repositories, Canon’s imageWARE Document Server platform (see below), and FTP and SMB folders. As before, workflows are easy to program; they can be entered and saved directly via the MFP’s control panel, or built within the graphical Workflow Composer utility (loaded on a PC workstation) and pushed out to multiple devices on the network.

Advances In Accounting

ADVANCE Tracker

The third element in the imageRUNNER ADVANCE Essentials suite is imageRUNNER ADVANCE Tracker. The next version of Canon imageWARE Accounting Manager for MEAP, Tracker is tied to a user’s log-in at the device to track usage. Administrators and end users can drill down into the data kept by Tracker to see granular statistics, such as the percentage of color jobs versus black-and-white jobs, broken down by device, group or individual user. Unlike Accounting Manager, Tracker allows a more interactive experience. For example, an administrator can set a message to appear on the device’s control panel when a particular user logs on to prompt them to do less color printing.

Document Collaboration On A Workgroup Level

imageRUNNER ADVANCE models will also support the optional imageWARE Document Server solution, which lets users share and collaborate on documents stored on networked imageRUNNER ADVANCE devices. Canon emphasized that Document Server is not a replacement for enterprise-wide document management applications such as its own imageWARE Document Manager or third-party platforms such as DocuWare, but rather a workgroup-level platform that lets the centralized MFP act as a convenient file server for documents that often need to be shared, printed and delivered electronically.

What’s New With uniFLOW

Canon partner (and partial subsidiary) NTWare displayed the latest version of its uniFLOW Output Manager, which now features secure printing, whereby users send a print job and then release the job when they authenticate at any imageRUNNER ADVANCE device on the network. This modular server-based print management application offers rules-based secure printing to help customers track and reduce hardcopy costs. For example, Output Manager can be configured to allow a one-page job to be sent to a locally connected printer, but if the user tries to send a large multi-page job to that printer, the system will pop up a message that shows the cost of printing to the (usually more expensive) local device compared to the cost of sending the job to the central imageRUNNER ADVANCE device.

PaperToOffice Pro

An imageRUNNER ADVANCE device running PaperToOffice Pro for MEAP was also exhibited. Developed by Panasonic (and interestingly, not available as an embedded application on that company’s MFPs), PaperToOffice Pro lets users convert paper documents directly to editable Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (as well as .txt and PDF files) on the fly directly from the MFP’s control panel. Users simply select the PaperToOffice Pro icon on the control panel’s touch screen then enter file format, destination and other parameters and hit Start. The resulting file appears in the selected destination folder as an editable document (the solution employs the OCR engine from ABBYY), ready to be changed and stored as needed without the chore of re-keying an entire document.