There are still a lot more paper forms being processed than would otherwise be if it were not for the fact that in a lot of scenarios, organizations need to acquire a dedicated scanner. Adobe Systems today moved to eliminate that requirement by making it much simpler to use a tablet or smartphone to capture an image of a document.
Lisa Croft, group product marketing manager for Adobe Document Cloud, says thanks to investments Adobe made in Adobe Sensei machine learning algorithms and optical character recognition, the fidelity of those images has been considerably improved. As a result, the latest update to Adobe Document Cloud now supports a free Adobe Mobile Scan application for Apple iOS and Google Android devices that allows end users to employ the cameras on a mobile computing device to recognize text in a way that enables paper documents to more easily be converted into PDF files.
“Both the cameras on the mobile computing devices and the algorithms being developed to capture documents are getting a lot better,” says Croft.
At the same time, Adobe announced that it has made it much simpler for end users to sign a digital document using a mobile device and that Adobe Document Cloud now supports the electronic signature standard developed by the Cloud Signature Consortium. As part of that effort, Adobe also revealed today that Adobe Sign is now integrated with the ServiceNow suite of cloud workflow applications. Finally, Adobe is also making available email templates and time stamps that can be employed within workflows.
For all the hype surrounding digital business transformation, Croft notes that most organizations are primarily focused on taking advantage of mobile computing devices to become more efficient while at the same time improving the overall customer experience.
Despite the best efforts of IT organizations, there’s still a massive amount of paper being consumed in support of business processes. That may not change any time soon. But it does look like one day soon, reliance on paper will be more the exception than the general rule.
