Here are some more new features in the recently announced 2.6 release of our document management software. These two topics continue the series I started a few weeks ago.
OCR Assisted Indexing
Different people have different names for this feature, like ‘OCR on the Fly’ or ‘Single Click Entry’ but essentially the functionality is the same, it’s the ability to OCR a part of the document to populate the structure index fields, like ‘Invoice Number’.
Currently when a document is scanned the user has to enter the index information by looking on the document and then typing the information into each field, like Invoice Number, Date, Value etc…
With OCR Assisted Indexing the user simply drags a rectangle around the information on the image and the area inside the rectangle is OCR’d and entered into the index field. The next index field is then selected and the process can repeat, making data entry much quicker and simpler.
This kind of technology is usually found in advanced data capture products with a premium price tag so inclusion in our business edition product is a major benefit.
Obviously this relies on OCR so some documents will perform better than others and it will not OCR hand writing but most documents will give good results, and where they don’t the user can still manually key the information.
OCR Assisted Screen Scrape
Screen scraping is a simple way to document enable other applications by reading their window contents and then searching for related documents. For example looking at a purchase transaction in your accounts software, press a hotkey and view the related documents in Document Manager.
Screen scraping would work for most (about 80%) of windows forms applications, but not web applications, java applications or applications running in environments like Citrix or Terminal Services.
With 2.6 we have now added another method of reading the screen contents using OCR which now allows us to screen scrape such applications where we could not in the past. Key zones on the application window are captured, read and mapped to fields in Document Manager.
Configuring the screen scrape takes just a few minutes and requires no development skills, we will provide a mini tutorial to assist users with the configuration, and once configured it’s as simple as pressing a function key.
This makes Infonic Document Manager one of the most integration friendly packages available.
Tim