We can put a man on the moon. More to the point, we can make complicated Web code into Facebook apps and blog templates so easy to use that even non-geeks can activate them in seconds. So why is it so hard to get a standard office copier set up as an entry point for electronic document workflows, spewing scanned and searchable PDFs as easily as it does paper copies?

It can, provided your company has a network multifunction printer (MFP) instead of a traditional copier. Chances are, it does, as 3.5 million-plus MFPs sell annually (up from 78,000 four years ago), giving them the potential to become a de facto standard entry point for paper-to-PDF conversion in U.S. offices.

Many offices have already set up MFPs to make paper-to-PDF conversions and email them to users or save them to a central network repository. But having the function is one thing; streamlining the process so that one hits the "copy" button and a searchable PDF ends up on his or her hard drive is quite another thing.

PDF software vendor Nuance is attempting to cut through the technical fog and Facebook-ize the process with its Personal Paperless Document Manager (PPDM), announcing the Ricoh edition at the AIIM exposition last month. PPDM, offered through resellers of Ricoh (and sister brands Savin and Lanier) MFPs, also comes in Canon, Brother, and Xerox flavors, too, under different names.

But they all basically do the same thing: The application takes the PDF conversion and optical character recognition (OCR) process — key to making documents searchable, and not just static page images — out of the hands of the IT geeks and puts it into the hands of the office worker, says Robert Weideman, Nuance senior marketing VP.

"[PPDM] becomes the scanning client for those vendors," Weideman says. "Because of our robust PDF capabilities at the desktop, people can scan to PDF, come back to their desk, reorder the pages, insert a Word file — do document-assembly kinds of tasks."

Users running PPDM at a desktop computer can go as far as programming custom menu commands on the copier's touch screen, such as "Send PDF to my network folder" and put it through automated OCR processes along the way.

It can also output to other editable formats such as Microsoft Word or Excel  —  depending on the source document — making an file that uses Nuance's OmniPage engine to recreate onscreen the paper document's original layout.

Most MFPs come with a somewhat standard, modular operating system that interfaces with Windows PCs — and makes file routing easier — contributed in large part to Nuance's ability to interface OmniPage with the new MFPs. When MFP manufacturers opened up their touch screen buttons to third-party software, it made their paper-to-PDF conversion features available to a larger cloud of end-users, Weideman says.

"In the past, you would walk up to a copier that could scan and you'd make a copy. You may have made it collate or staple if you could figure it out. And, if you were really, really motivated, you'd try to figure out how to scan with the thing, going down three menus," Weideman says, which made basic operations like emailing a basic PDF to yourself — let alone scan-to-searchable-PDF, filed in the right place on your C: drive — a time-consuming operation. "Now, you walk up to the device, and the [custom] buttons that are there do exactly what they say...and you don't have to call IT for anything."