Microsoft is continuing the cross-platform push with its mobile apps, bringing its Office Lens scanner app to the iPhone and Android devices. The app, which was previously exclusive to Windows Phone, allows people to scan documents using their phone’s camera and then upload them to one of the Office 365 apps like OneNote.
On the iPhone, Office Lens supports automatic edge detection for easy scanning, along with optical character recognition technology that can translate words on a page into searchable text. The app also supports scanning from a whiteboard, so people can scan meeting notes and share them with colleagues. In each case, the image is automatically straightened and sharpened to make it easier to read.
Once an image is scanned, users can find it within OneNote or OneDrive by searching for contents inside the document thanks to OCR. The app also performs recognition of business cards, and can automatically convert them into contacts for a user’s phone.
For right now, the Android app is only available as a preview, so people have to jump through a few extra hoops in order to add it to their phone.
These capabilities are similar to ones offered by other scanning apps, including the scanning technology built into Evernote. The big difference for Office Lens is its tight integration with Microsoft’s other apps, which should make it more appealing to people who live and die by work they do inside Office 365.
The cross-platform launch of Office Lens is a part of Microsoft’s ongoing trend of expanding its software offerings to iOS and Android. The company recently launched a new Outlook app for both platforms, and has brought versions of Office to both the iPad and Android tablets.
