Common Questions about Integrated Scanning (FAQs)

This article covers common questions about PaperCut’s Integrated Scanning feature

What is Integrated Scanning?

PaperCut Integrated Scanning provides a clean and consistent interface for users and administrators whether in a single or mixed fleet of MFDs. The earliest version of PaperCut that supported Integrated Scanning was v15.3. For more information and an overview of Integrated Scanning, please take our tour here.

What can I do with Integrated Scanning?

You can scan to your email, your home folder, a network folder location, or into a business document workflow from the configured devices in your organisation. Most recently in v18.1.4 we have added support for scanning to cloud connectors such as DropBox , Google Drive & OneDrive. For more information, take a look at our tour of Scan to Cloud feature here.

How do I set up Integrated Scanning?

Integrated scanning requires devices that run PaperCut MF and the specific actions can be configured on your PaperCut server. For information about how this works and how to set up, then please have a look at the Integrated Scanning section in our PaperCut MF Manual.

Is my device ready for Integrated Scanning?

Quite Possibly! The requirements vary between manufacturers, but you can check out our Embedded Solutions page here to confirm that your brand is listed. Specific model compatibility is always growing, so to find if your device will support integrated scanning, we recommend reaching out to your PaperCut Authorized Solution Center.

Can I scan to an email address that is not my own?

Absolutely. Your system administrator can set-up scan actions to any email address. In general good security practice in organisations is to scan to your email address and forward it from there, however Integrated Scanning has the flexibility to accommodate both requirements.

Will Integrated Scanning work with my business systems?

Through scan to folder, and the addition of a extra file containing descriptive information on the scanned file (XML), integrators will be able to import your scanned documents into business systems for organising or processing. A more in depth look at the use of this file can be found in the ImportScannedDocuments article.

My business does not have a “corporate” style network, can I use Integrated Scanning?

Of course, the set-up may be slightly different, but then your business set-up is unique to you. Scan actions can be created to scan to email, folder locations and popular cloud storage areas.

Will this fit with my Security Policies

Users can be required to authenticate with PaperCut before being allowed access to the Scanning functions. System Administrators define the actions that users can take, ensuring documents are only scanned to allowed destinations.

I have devices connected to Site Servers, will it work?

Yes. Site Server support Integrated Scanning. However, when in offline mode, starting a new job is not supported.

Can I import user’s home folder information from a different AD field ?

By default, PaperCut imports user’s home folder information from user’s home folder field in AD. You can import this information from a different field. Information about this is given here.

Can I scan jobs to a subfolder of user’s home directory?

By default, PaperCut saves the scanned jobs to User’s home folder. It is possible to save scan and XML files to a subfolder under the user’s home folder. You can do so by specifying the sub-folder in the following config key - system.scan.home-sub-folder. You can specify only one level of sub-folder, for example, Scans is valid, but PaperCut/Scans is not. The default value is Scans. This value is optional. If it is not set, the top level user’s home folder is used. Information on how to change a config key is given here.

I am trying to set up scan to user’s home folder. It is not scanning the files to the user’s home folder. What should I check?

When setting up Scan to Home folder, you need to make sure that PaperCut Application service is running under an domain servive account that has Read and Write access to the user’s home folder. Detailed information on how to run the service under an domain account is given here.

When I try to scan an extremely large job it keeps failing to send or save. What should I do?

PaperCut has been configured with a file size limitation of 20MB for Integrated Scanning, and sometimes scan jobs may exceed this size. Your email may also be configure with a maximum attachment size as well, but if you are certain the bottleneck is PaperCut then you will want to use the Config Editor in Options→Actions to increase these values. Steps can be found here.

Below are the values you will want to modify:
system.scan.email-max-job-size-kb (20480 is default)
system.scan.folder-max-job-size-kb (51200 is default)

Can I uncheck the ‘prompt for more pages’ checkbox by default?

Yes you can! Head over to the article on Prompting for additional pages when using Integrated Scanning.

I’m getting a message saying the sender is unauthenticated when trying to use scan-to-email. What gives?

If you’re using Office 365, take a look through some of the suggestions in this Integrated Scanning with Office 365 article.

Does Integrated Scanning support scan-to-folder actions in environments that use file replication systems like Windows DFS, Google Drive, or Dropbox?

The short answer is yes, Integrated Scanning supports scan to folder actions to file replication services like the above. It doesn’t matter to PaperCut whether that folder is a DFS share, syncing with Google Drive, or what have you, as long as we can write to it.

We’re concerned about SMBv1 vulnerabilities. Will disabling SMBv1 affect how PaperCut performs scan to folder actions?

During scan to folder delivery the operating system copies the file via UNC path while negotiating the transport with the latest SMB version it and the client support. As long as your server and client machines are running a recent enough operating system (Windows Vista/Server 2008 or better) everything will be fine if you turn off SMBv1 support.

When I use Scan to Email, why is the file name of my scan job truncated and the attachment is unreadable?

Typically this truncation occurs when the filename is very long and includes embedded spaces. This happens as a result of restrictions imposed by older email clients. It has been confirmed that Novell Groupwise 2014 is one of the affected clients.

What languages are supported for OCR (Optical Character Recognition - text-searchable documents)?

Over 90 languages are supported for performing OCR as of PaperCut MF 19.0. The languages to consider when performing OCR can be configured from the Options → Capture tab in the admin UI. Mixed-language documents are supported.

How does Scan to Cloud work?

Just like Scan to Email and Scan to Folder, a Scan to Cloud (S2C) job will start out at the Embedded Device before moving to the PaperCut MF server. From there, instead of going to the customer’s SMTP server or a file share, the scan job will be sent to PaperCut MF Cloud Services (MFCS), which will route it on to the customer’s storage provider (Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox / Box / pCloud).

When scanning a mixture of document sizes, can I get a PDF containing mixed page sizes too?

If you’re scanning lots of pages of different sizes (e.g. Letter and Legal, or a mix of A4 and A3), at the moment there isn’t a way to have multiple sizes in the resulting scan (e.g. PDF).

However we do have an open feature request to make this happen at some point, so you could then receive a PDF with a mix of e.g. A4 size and A3 size pages, correlating to the source page size. If you’re interested in this feature, send us a support request and quote PC-10869.

What determines the order of scan actions on the device panel?

At the minute, it’s not possible to manually arrange the order of Scan Actions, but that doesn’t mean the order is random. We put personal scan actions like “Scan to my email” and “Scan to my home folder first” as these are the most likely to be needed by users, followed by custom scan actions.

Here’s how the order works:

  • The first group is personal Scan Actions (Scan to user’s email address or Scan to user’s home folder) ordered by label.
  • The second group is custom Scan Actions (Email, Folder, or Cloud Storage) ordered by label.
  • If two Scan Actions are from the same category (Email, Folder, or Cloud Storage) and have the same label, sort them by the time they were created.

Here’s an example: