The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Capture and Imaging | Sharepoint and Office 365
SharePoint is making inroads as an ECM or Records Management system, primarily because of its document library features, price, and integration with Office. But, for SharePoint to move beyond that and become the system to do document-centric transactional processing, you’ll need to customize and plan your SharePoint installation more carefully.
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Capture and Imaging | Document Management | Sharepoint and Office 365
1. Do you need a scanning application or a capture application? The marketplace is filled with applications that provide a means to convert paper to digital form, and I like to divide the offerings into two distinct silos: scanning applications and capture applications. If all you need to do is load paper and scan to a document library, and your volume is fairly light, scanning applications provide a simple, easy to use interface for these types of operations. Capture applications focus on efficiency, standardization, and automation. They provide enhanced feature sets like 2D barcode reading, zone OCR, data extraction, enhanced backend integration, and more. There is a gray area between the two silos, as most scanning applications have some basic capture features. Choose wisely young Luke Skywalker, and if you can, select an application that can live in both silos.
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Making an ECM implementation successful requires planning and attention to detail. The best way to create the right solution is to identify organizational goals and priorities. Learn how to manage a successful implementation in our free guide.
Capture and Imaging | Enterprise Search | Sharepoint and Office 365
There are many methods of capture and search that have been refined to allow users to find the right information they're looking for in traditional document management. Below are eight methods that are useful in SharePoint. Some of them are common to all document management systems, and some are specific to SharePoint.
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Capture and Imaging | Document Management
"Should I buy or rent OCR capabilities?" This is a common question businesses ask themselves when they're starting to get serious about their capture strategy. If you're wondering if you should purchase a document management application for your data extraction and forms processing or outsource the job to a service bureau, the answer is a dissatisfying "Well, it depends." Answering this question should include making a solid business case that includes a cost-benefit analysis using a formula like Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to determine the return on investment. However, the answer usually comes down to the company's philosophy of building versus renting. The renting companies believe in focusing on their core competency and reducing costs while outsourcing anything that falls outside core functions. The building companies are often more focused on maintaining control. The following should be considered in terms of answering the in-house vs. outsourcing question for your organization. Here are eight things you should consider when deciding to buy or rent OCR capabilities:
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Hailed as the way in which we can breathe life into our static, paper documents, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has made strides in the recent decades – becoming a staple module in just about every software package managing documents - From Nuance’s PaperPort to EMC’s Documentum. OCR itself can mean various things. Wikipedia offers this definition: "… the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text (2008)." While many estimate the accuracy levels for OCR engines can reach 98 or 99 percent, it has been my experience this is very difficult to achieve in most commercially-available software suites for the small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Many variables can affect the accuracy levels of output, ranging from document condition to readability.
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Scanning speed The most common question that gets asked during the sales process for a scanner is, "How fast is it?" Almost everyone thinks that the higher the speed of the scanner, the higher the output. The fact is, this is not always the case. Beyond a certain level, the scanner will be idle due to the inability to feed documents at that speed. This is especially true when scanning mixed documents, where it becomes impossible to use the scanner to full speed. The scanning speed is measured either in ppm (pages per minute) for simplex scanners or ipm (images per minute) for duplex scanners. Today, there are scanners ranging from 20 ppm to 200 ppm. Unless the purchaser is an internal or external service bureau (or a similar operation of scanning very high volumes of the same document type), the lower speed ranges are likely sufficient for many.
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