The Advisers Group

Monowall or m0n0wall is a open source internet gateway that can be run many different hardware platforms and has some fantastic features for the small and home office. We’ve been playing with it a lot here are sohoadvisers and I can tell you that this is a fantastic application.

I’ve used 3com Office Connect routers for years and I was looking for another but I did not want to spend any money. My 3com router was working fine but I wanted to have some Quality of Service (QOS) features which the 3com that I have did not support. QOS allows the router to prioritize traffic. Most users in the SOHO and SMB market would use the QOS feature to prioritize Voice over IP (VOIP) traffic. VOIP traffic would be traffic that a Vonage or other VOIP phone creates when making an internet call. The VOIP network traffic gets priority over email or web traffic to ensure that you get the best sound quality from your phone. Monowall does not call this QOS in their product, they call it traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is one of my favorite features of Monowall. Used correctly, it ensures that one person won’t hog all of the bandwidth. This feature alone was worth the switch for me.

You can also setup Monowall as a VPN server using IPSec or PPTP without the need for any additional hardware. You or your employees can connect from public access points, and still know your data is secure.

Another noteworthy feature is the Captive Portal feature. Captive Portal directs all web traffic to an authentication web page prior to accessing the internet. If the user can’t authenticate, they can’t get on the internet. This works just like a public Wi-Fi Hotspot does. You need to enter either a username and password or an authentication token. With this, you can make your own Wi-Fi Hotspot allowing your guests or clients to connect with Wi-Fi.

Anyone that has ever put a document in a copy machine and pressed start has scanned an image. Scanning is that easy, what you do with the scan is how you can improve your business.

Scanning is the process of taking a hardcopy document and converting it to a digital format. Instead of keeping the hardcopy documents in metal file cabinets, the scanned images can now be stored electronically in electronic file cabinets. This save space and if setup correctly it can be found quickly and easily by anyone with access to the location where the file is stored.

Scanning can be accomplished in a number of ways.

• Scan to email - The document is scanned from a MFD, using the MFD internal mail client the scanned document is then sent by email to the recipient. In most cases the file is sent in a image only PDF format. That means that the scan looks just like the original hardcopy document but it can not be searched for keywords.
• Scan to folder - With scan to folder the document is scanned to a folder on the network. From there it can be accessed by anyone.
• Scan to desktop - Building on scan to folder, an application like Nuance PaperPort watches the network folder for scanned document. Once it sees a new scan it takes the scan out of the network folder and puts into the PaperPort desktop. At this point the user can convert the document to a text searchable PDF. A text searchable PDF looks just like the original image and it can be searched for keywords. Once it is in a text searchable PDF it can easily be found in PaperPort.
• Middleware scanning applications - Middleware scan applications like NSI Autostore, Xerox SMartSend, and xSolutions Scan Flow Store,  can take scanned images and convert them to almost any file format and send them to a number of locations with little or no intervention from an end user. A common use of a middleware scanning application would be to scan to a document management system like Microsoft SharePoint or Xerox DocuShare. 

That brings us back to the how can scanning benefit you? With scanning you can take all of your hardcopy documents that are sitting in the file cabinet and make the readily accessible for anyone that needs them. This can save you space, time, and money.