Document Scanning - Information, Software Reviews

Top 5 Reasons to Use Kofax Express to go Digital

2010-12-09T11:20:00.000-08:00

1. It still uses VRS, you can do all the clean up and image correction you can with the full Kofax version

2. The batch management is great

3. It works well with all MFD and scanners, setup is super easy

4. Indexing and barcode reading are full featured

5. It's free to try, check it out now

Top 5 Reasons for UIA with VOIP

2010-11-30T09:52:00.000-08:00

CIO has a great article on the top reasons for unified messaging:

The first wave of enterprise search helped companies tap into the world of text+, sometimes referred to as "unstructured" or "semi-structured" information. Primary drivers included the need to monetize digital content, reduce risk through compliance, or increase employee, customer and partner productivity. These early implementations provided significant value and solved important problems; they also demonstrated limitations that have lead to demand for the next generation — Unified Information Access (UIA).

This article details the top 5 most important reasons the world's most visionary enterprises are upgrading to UIA.

Service Bureau Case Studies: Mountain States Imaging, LLC

2010-11-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

Based in Colorado, Mountain States Imaging, LLC provides first-rate document scanning, document conversion, and document management services. MSI’s capabilities include indexing and online document hosting, as well as database integration with files kept as paper, microfilm, microfiche, and aperture cards. PSI:Capture successfully provided Mountain States Imaging with custom flexibility and countless automated options, resulting in reduced processing time and improved client service. The financial benefits have also been noted, as MSI experienced an estimated overall ROI in approximately nine to ten months.

http://www.psigen.com/industry_solutions/service_bureau_scanning_capture_imaging_software_solution.aspx

http://www.msimaging.com/

PSI: Capture 2 months in.

2009-03-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

PSI Gen software the former Scan HQ was our selection for a new scanning solution.

After two months in production we are really happy overall.

Read more.

Adobe Flaw

2009-03-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/20/Adobe_flaw_heightens_risk_of_encountering_malicious_PDFs_1.html

Finger Prints from Blank Paper

2009-03-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a fingerprint, from any sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner.

Read More.

Ever Wonder what Newspapers might be Like in the Future?

2009-03-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Jeff Reifman has a wonderful post about reading the New York Times on the Kindle II.

Check it out.

Recovering Delete Email

2009-02-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

MSExchange.org has a great article on how to retreive a deleted email, from Exchange 2003:

See it here.

Amazon Kindle 2 announced

2009-02-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

Just as expected, Amazon announced the second-generation Kindle ebook reader with the exclusive Stephen King novel UR today -- the page actually went live during the press event. The new version will still cost $359, but it's much thinner than the angular original -- in fact, it's thinner than an iPhone at just .36 inches.

Changes to Digital Storage Rules

2009-01-07T11:15:00.001-08:00

Exactly two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly enacted a package of changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a set of legal guidelines that govern all levels of courts in the United States.

Among them were changes to rules 26 and 34 through 37, which clarify the issue of e-discovery of critical evidence.

These amendments, adopted by the court in April 2006 and placed into effect on Dec. 1, 2006, say businesses must be able to quickly find and make available relevant data when required by a court—federal or otherwise. Often, business information that could also serve as evidence in a criminal or civil lawsuit is required to be made available in as few as 30 days.

That means that every electronic document stored by businesses—e-mail, instant messages, computer logs, financials, voice mail, and all text and graphical documents—must be easily retrievable. It also means that an enterprise must have in place a standard, repeatable, predictable method of storing and accessing its digital data—including established rules about who has access, how long it is kept and where it is maintained.

Read the rest on eWEEK.com.

PaperVision Capture Released

2009-01-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Digitech Systems is pleased to announce the release of PaperVision Capture, which offers extraordinary flexibility and powerful information capture to organizations of any size. With PaperVision Capture, you can work with everything, implement any custom capture process you want, and track any statistic you need.
PaperVision Capture is designed to support a wide variety of capture processes and environments so you can:

- Centralize enterprise-level capture and indexing functions to a single computer or distribute them across multiple systems and geographic locations

- Utilize the graphical layout tool to customize processes thereby streamlining setup and saving time

- Scale to any size in order to meet your needs

- Write your own scripts using the custom code engine to create any process you need and integrate them directly into your automated workflow

It's all about speed, and batch management is the key. Stay on top of what's happening with your capture processes. You'll improve efficiency, because you can:

- View the status of all batches from a central administration console and organize or reassign them based on priority to make better use of available resources

- Filter batches based on any user-defined criteria to get right to what you're looking for

Ensure accurate, readable images with sophisticated processing filters that allow you to:

- Apply filters to a single page, a range of pages, or a selection of specific pages within a document

- Drop out color backgrounds to improve image legibility and accuracy of OCR and barcode recognition

- Convert color images to black and white to save storage space or to apply certain filters to only binary images

- Enjoy expanded options on many of the "standard" image filters such as border removal, image cropping, deskew, etc.

Learn More

ImageSilo R64 Released

2008-12-16T09:18:00.000-08:00

The R64 release of PaperVision Enterprise and the included ImageSilo document retrieval system has many added features including email archiving on the fly, integration with Office 2003 -2007, an updated ajax user interface among many more.

This latest system creates a more all incompassing document storage and retrieval system while adding to the already simple user interface.

Read more at http://www.msimaging.com/software.asp

Comix: 4.0.1

2008-12-16T09:14:00.000-08:00

Comix 4.0.1 is the newest release in the Comix image viewer line. Comix is a great image viewer with lots of changeable features.

Read more at http://comix.sourceforge.net/

Even the Ancients are Going Digital

2008-12-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

It looks like everyone is going digital including the world's oldest and rarest religious documents. Michigan State University has a great article on going digital and archiving documents even rare old ones.

See the whole article ....

Review of PDF Splitter & Merger 3.0

2008-11-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

The latest edition of PDF Merger & Splitter (3.0) is the best in a line to PDF tools from BrotherSoft. Consistently a 5 star piece of software the latest 3.0 build is again a great tool for working with PDF documents. In addition to the quality of the program there is also a full trial to determine what features work for your office.

Install is quick and easy but has thrown a few errors when using the trial version.

The best and title tools are merging documents and splitting documents, which is always a more difficult process than it should be with PDF’s. Although a Pro version of Adobe would do many of the same things the directory views and ease of use in PDF Merger & Splitter 3.0 makes it more than worth while for scanning service bureau PDF Merger & Splitter (3.0) es and any office that deals with lots of PDF files.

Patent for Collaborative Version of PDF

2008-11-17T08:51:00.000-08:00

A new patent granted to Rosebud expands document collaboration beyond one-to-many desktop sharing, the model used currently by WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting, and Adobe Acrobat Connect.

See the whole article here...

PDF Not Going Anywhere

2008-11-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

Although many have prophesied the end of the PDF due to new e-reader technologies, it seems like the PDF is here to stay.

In a recent PDF Zone article they detail how e-books may make a small dent in the amount of PDF's being created and scanned, but the PDF will still be a staple in computing.

In fact PDF archiving and scanning may in fact be more necessary as more people move to e-reader and online storage technologies.

See the whole article here...

Top 5 Ways to Cut Your IT Budget

2008-10-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Reduce Email issues and support with a hosted email / spam filtering solution. Email is often the most time-consuming and tedious part of a company’s IT Department. With either a hosted email solution or a hosted spam filtering solution companies can reduce the time spent with email up-time and the time and money lost with spam filtering and monitoring.
Reduce data backup and storage costs with a dedicated electronic document storage solution. Even with storage costs continuing to fall a data backup and or data storage solution can be the biggest part of IT. With hosted document and data storage solutions a company can dramatically cut the costs of storing documents, email, and data.
Reduce management and HR issues with an EMC / data solution. EMC systems can often find and reduce the inefficiencies in a company and when those solutions are combined with a hosted HR solution to tie together production and HR companies can often reduce an IT budget extensively.
Reduce custom application creation costs with an out-sourced version. Outsourcing the custom applications and portals to either a software company or a hosted version can make major strides in reducing an IT budget.
Reduce travel time by allowing telecommuting. Telecommuting can save money for the employee and the company itself. By reducing travel times companies often see better efficiency and productivity rather than less. An online document storage application or online data storage solution can make the transition smooth and even more cost effective.

Virtaal -- Document Translation Tool

2008-10-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

Virtaal is a graphical translation tool. It is meant to be easy to use and powerful at the same time. Although the initial focus is on software translation (localisation or l10n), we definitely intend it to be useful for several purposes.

Virtaal is built on the powerful API of the Translate Toolkit. “Virtaal” is an Afrikaans play on words meaning “For Language”, but also refers to translation.

Download Virtaal if you don't yet have it. The Windows setup.exe installer contains all necessary dependencies. For other platforms, ensure that you have all the other dependencies, including the newest Translate Toolkit.

Read more about the features in Virtaal, or view the screenshots.

Virtaal could be used to increase interoperability in document imaging systems.

Color E-Paper

2008-10-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

A waterproof MP3 player built for bright beach days is the first device with a color "e-paper" display, meaning it has no backlighting and thus can be read in direct sunlight. The display, from Qualcomm, consists of two layers of a reflective material. Some wavelengths of light bounce off the first layer; some pass through and bounce off the second. Interference between the two beams creates the color, and electrostatic forces control the distance between the layers.

This new e-paper technology could revolutionize other e-readers and the document imaging industry as well.

Credit: Courtesy of Qualcomm

Product: Freestyle Audio player

Cost: Around that of Freestyle's previous players, which range from $80 to $100

Source: freestyleaudio.com

Company: Freestyle Audio, Qualcomm

Green Benefits of Going Paperless?

2008-10-16T07:30:00.001-07:00

1,820 billion pages of documents were printed in 2007
The average office worker generates 2lb of paper waste per day

A four-drawer filing cabinet will hold as many documents as one CD

With much being made of going green right now, we set out to find what role electronic documents and document conversion could play in moving to greener future.

It would seem like if going paperless were able to eliminate the 1,820 billion pages of printed paper or at least make a dent in that, then it would be a real benefit for our environment.

We looked through hundreds of our case studies and talked to many of our clients to find out what real differences going to electronic documents did, at least environmentally.

It turned out that many companies that convert their back office documents to electronic versions often ended up printing them out at some point. Whether it was to send to a client, or to have a hard copy to work from they still needed a printed version. We found this surprising, but also fairly common. So if everyone is printing imaged documents is there any real benefit for the environment. The answer is yes. And it was only when we looked at some of the less obvious effects of going paperless that we found the real environmental benefits.

One that was a bit of a surprise was the fact that half of our clients were able to reduce their office space. In one case a client was able to reclaim $30,000 worth of office space and reduce not only the amount they paid for rent, but the amount of air conditioning etc… they used. We calculated their carbon footprint to be cut in half. That is a real benefit.

In another case we found that although employees were still printing out imaged documents, they were not printing the entire document just the selected pages that were returned in their search. In addition, employees were no longer printing email messages as they had in the past. This worked out to be a 33% reduction in the amount of paper the company was using. That again, is a real benefit.

Once a company moves to paperless office system there still seems to be a need to print and create hard copies of documents, however with paperless systems in place that need becomes much less and the green benefits really do stack up.

See more document scanning solutions and benefits.

Document Imaging - Mortgage Case Study

2008-10-16T07:28:00.001-07:00

Mountain States Imaging – for EMDS
Client: High-tech / Mortgage Solution and Due Diligence Company
Topic: Mountain States Imaging - Mortgage Solution Case Study

Situation

Our client was:

Edison Mortgage Solutions
In partnership with Deutsch Bank, SLS, CountryWide and many others

Challenges
The challenges facing Mountain States Imaging were:

Edison Mortgage Solutions uses many off-shore partners for various data entry and data capture processes
Mountain States Imaging was contracted to facilitate the secure data transfer and facilitation for off-shore partners
Once initial indexing and data entry was complete the mortgage was underwritten via the imaged loan document accessed from anywhere in the world

Actions
The actions Mountain States Imaging took to address these challenges were:

Created MSMQ and SFTP data transfer methods that allowed off-shore partners to work during their day-time shift with out interruption
Generated software to capture initial indexing real-time and transfer that to the online document thus creating document breaks in real-time
Identified the key areas holding the most promise for growth
Developed projections of potential growth
Assisted the organization in better online document security and better error trapping

Results

Mountain States Imaging actions resulted in:

The development of flexible access to valuable documents and information
Developed key infrastructure allowing for 24 hour processing
An effective business planning package that covered all of the necessary areas
A sound business that avoided most major pitfalls and is now running smoothly

Document Imaging Software Reviews

2008-10-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

Recently Mountain States Imaging reviewed 10 different document capture suites in order to find the best solution for our particular needs. Below demarcates the features and analysis in determining the product selection. In the end PSI-Gen PSI Capture was the best result for www.msimaging.com we found that it had all the features we needed and many of the same features in some of the other more expensive scanning solutions.

Business Requirements

1. Robust and Easy use Scanning Interface

Quickness of page display

Interoperability with multiple scanning devices

Easy to understand interface

Reduce page errors

Reduce software failure

Reduce user / employee downtime

Increase employee efficiency

2. Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

QC/Data entry module needs to export images in any format

Indexing information needs to be exported in any format

QC document rotation and re-scan indication needs to be easy to use and fast

Increase employee efficiency

Reduce errors in final products to clients

3. Job and Production Tracking

Job and production needs to be real-time and easy to measure

Job creation needs to be flexible and easy to start

Production tracking must be on a multi-user basis

Jobs should be accessible to any employee

Provide better and more detailed customer service

Provide real-time reporting

Increase efficiency

Reduce downtime

4. Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

Deployment Time

Operational Network Use

Incurred Costs

Diverse Networks

Scalability less than 10 users

Scalability more than 100 users

Increase efficiency

Reduce administrative costs

Reduce tech costs

5. Price / Cost

Starting Cost

Reoccurring Costs

Market competitive

Must truly add value to the company

1. Robust and easy to use scanning interface

a. Our scanning software selection must function with various scanners including Kodak, HP, etc...

b. The scanning interface must be easy to use and helpful in preventing scan errors

c. Quickness will also be a heavily weighed factor i.e. page per minute

d. The preferred connection method will be USB 2.0

e. Licensing must be easy to manage and migratory

2. Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

a. Mountain States Imaging works with various industries and clients and various export methodologies and indexing means will be a premium

b. Data entry modules must be easy to use and efficient

3. Job and Production Tracking

a. A centralized dashboard or tracking feature will be a key feature of any selected software suite+

b. Priority was given to products that offer management matrixes and functional reporting that is both real-time and variable

4. Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

a. The Mountain States Imaging scanning software must be centralized i.e. centrally located and easy to access

b. Flexibility should offer ample flexibility in input and output methods and scaleable solutions

c. User effected diagnostics and administrative resources should be included in the selected software package

d. Free or minimal cost tech support both online and via telephony is a highly weighed business requirement

5. Price / Cost

a. Set fees and any annual or reoccurring fees should be competitive and reasonable

Product selection criteria matrix

Scoring Methodology

Scoring for each of the Vendors under consideration was determined as follows:

1. Each sub-requirement was assigned a score (1 to 5) based on vendor product capabilities and support of the sub-requirement. (See separate “Vendor Product Notes Matrix” for additional supporting detail).

2. Each requirement has a calculated score based on the average score of the combine sub-requirements. This is obtained by adding together the scores of the sub-requirements:

Price / Costs 5.0

Tracking / Production 4.0

Scanning Engine / Interface 3.0

Flexibility / QC Data entry interface 2.0

Administration 1.0

Then dividing by the total number of sub-requirements: 15.0 / 7 = 2.14

3. The weight factor was then multiplied by the calculated score of the specific requirement to obtain a weight score for each individual requirement. The total weighted score for Price/Cost becomes 10.7 or (2.14 x 5).

product analysis

Psi Gen – Psi capture

PsiGen – PSI Capture

· Intelligent, Simple, High-Volume Document Capture.

· Automated High–Volume Document Capture

· Image Enhancement and Quality Assurance

· Automated Indexing and Reporting

· Point-and-Click Setup and Use

· Intelligent Barcode Recognition

· Windows Integrated Security and User Auditing

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

PsiGen – PSI Capture offered one of the easiest capture interfaces. Was very intuitive and easy to get what you wanted. In addition PSI Capture made it super easy to add pages together and break documents.

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

PsiGen – PSI Capture offered very good enhancement and automatic page adjustments. Data entry module if OCR is added becomes more of a QA step rather than data entry.

Job and Production Tracking

PsiGen – PSI Capture offered fairly good reporting options and the ablility to adjust and change those reports dependant on business requirements.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

Job creation and tech support were the best of all products tested. Tech support is offered 24/7 and is always tier 2 and very helpful. Job creation is flexible and easy to learn. Did not take much to recreate most of our core job process. Set up’s can be either server based or on a single workstation.

Kofax - Ascent Capture

Ascent Capture automates information capture from scanned paper or imported electronic documents. Based on criteria you define, the entire document or extracted data is digitized, then routed to an archive, database, or the next step in your business workflow. Powerful recognition engines and image enhancement features ensure accuracy, reducing or eliminating the need for manual entry and oversight.

Greatly reduce false positives by providing an end-to-end view of the network

· Automatic image correction and enhancement.

· Automatic form identification and document separation.

· Uses OCR, ICR and OMR to recognize machine-printed and hand-printed text in hundreds of languages, as well as bar codes, patch codes and check boxes.

· Integrates seamlessly with all workflow and content management applications.

· Certified to work with most production scanners.

· Turnkey reports help managers identify bottlenecks and redeploy resources to achieve optimum processing efficiency.

· Central administrator controls setup and updates, grants user and group privileges, and monitors individual and station performance.

· Imports email and attached documents.

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

Kofax offers a very easy to use scanning interface and was fairly intuitive and easy to learn. Breaking documents and adding missed pages was easy and flexible. Some options seem extraneous for scanning module.

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

Kofax offers a very fast and powerful QC/QA data entry module. Kofax Ascent Capture offers the best for error reduction and QA efficiency.

Job and Production Tracking

Kofax Ascent Capture has flexible reporting features yet was more lacking in this feature set than the other products tested.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

Kofax Ascent Capture has flexible setup methodologies. Although Kofax recommends a server centralized setup configuration. Support is 24/7 and is highly responsive. Kofax Ascent Capture offers the most in off-site or remote capture configurations.

digitechsystems – paperflow pro

PaperFlow is the most powerful, complete and full-featured document capture and indexing system on the market. Maximize your productivity with production-level scanning. PaperFlow works as a standalone system, as an integrated part of PaperVision® Enterprise and ImageSilo® or with a wide variety of other Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.

Scan and index hundreds of paper documents per minute into the ECM system or for export to any media.
Handle all scanning needs in one centralized location or simultaneously at various sites.
Eliminate keystrokes with the ability to read barcodes and handwriting, and process text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Verify captured data has been scanned and indexed properly with an optional quality control module.

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

PaperFlow while not geared towards service bureau facilities also offers a fairly easy scanning interface. Not all buttons are easily understood and not all features are easy to find. Breaking documents and adding any missing pages can be difficult. Page display was the quickest of all products tested.

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

Both PaperFlow and PaperFlow Pro have very limited QA / data entry modules. Pages cannot be view at the thumbnail level. Indexing can be slow to respond.

Job and Production Tracking

Although PaperFlow and PaperFlow Pro have reporting that offers some job tracking and production times, reports are hard to configure and difficult to modify. User creation is also time consuming and relatively un-needed.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

PaperFlow and PaperFlow Pro offer 24/7 support and are highly responsive to user inquiries. Although PaperFlow can be used to create custom deliverables custom job creation is limited and difficult to implement.

captivia – Inputaccel

Captiva’s InputAccel

Enable distributed electronic data capture of structured, unstructured and semi-structured documents from any scanner, fax machine, file system or multi-function scan device
Clean scanned documents using tools that removing speckles, deskew images, adjust page orientation and more
Automatically identify each document scanned based on user-defined business rules, regardless of the number of pages each document contains.
Leverage OCR, ICR and OMR technologies to extract data
Validate data based upon user-defined business rules

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

The new scanning module for InputAccel is updated and much easier to use than the current edition used by MSI. Page insertion and document division was a bit harder to understand than some of the other products tested. However, InputAccel was one of the cleaner and more intuitive scanning modules.

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

InputAccel continues to use an enhancement feature after scanning rather than at time of scan like many of the other products. However, enhancement features were powerful and not much slower than any of the other products.

Job and Production Tracking

InputAccel had some of the best reporting features and job tracking features. A fairly fully integrated ERP system keeps track of job costs and labor costs. However, most reports are only available after job has been completed.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

InputAccel has 24/7 tech support. Administration of users is integrated with Active Directory which makes user creation very easy. Job creation is wizard orientated and much easier than past builds. Flexibility is also a good part of InputAccel.

simple index – index capture and qc

The best overall value comes from balancing price, integration time, training time, support costs and time spent scanning and indexing. SimpleIndex gives you this value by combining powerful automation features with a one-click user interface and aggressive pricing.

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

Although the SimpleIndex scanning interface is easy to use and easy to learn it lacks key features like page insertion etc…

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

Lacked a QA module.

Job and Production Tracking

Featured very little in the way of job tracking or production tracking.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

Could not be configured to work in a server client model.

kodak – kodak capture

If you have a Kodak Scanner click on your model below to download a Lite version that works with your model. The Lite version is a production version that includes most, but not all, functions available in the full product. The Lite version can be upgraded to full functionality.

Robust and easy to use scanning interface

Kodak had one of the better scanning interfaces it was easy to use and fairly easy to learn.

Robust and flexible QC / Data entry Module

Kodak featured a very limited QA module and very little post scan data entry.

Job and Production Tracking

No job tracking or production features.

Centralized, flexible, light administration and Tech Support

Tech support is often very good but the software can be buggy and not very flexible.