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Decisions (IFD) last week unveiled iCapture, a new version of its document scanning and indexing solution designed to work with its IBM i-based document
management system called iView. iCapture is an overhauled version of the
vendor's previous document scanning product, called iScan, which IFD says
features major enhancements in the areas of data capture, indexing, and
integration with PC-based scanners.
IFD
first launched iScan in July 2010 to serve the demand from IBM i shops for
scanning and indexing paper-based documents into electronic equivalents. iScan
was based on an optical character recognition (OCR) scanning engine OEMed from
Datacap (acquired by IBM in August 2010). The $4,800-product provided an
entry-level document scanning solution that satisfied basic batch scanning and
indexing needs, IFD's Dan Forster explained in a 2010 interview with IT Jungle.
Since
then, IFD has changed and improved iScan to such an extent that the company
felt it needed a new name. iCapture includes new OCR, optical mark recognition
(OMR), and intelligent character recognition (ICR) engines that enable the
product to automatically capture data and metadata from just about any scanned
document, including hand-written forms.
The
new recognition technology is Windows-based, and is OEMed from Irvine,
California-based PSIGEN Software. PSIGEN's solutions are based in part on
technology it, in turn, OEMs from other vendors, including Open Text. IFD wraps
its iCapture code around the PSIGEN technology, which allows customers to bring
captured forms into the IBM i environment and its IBM i-based iView software.
Another
key element of the new iCapture product is a new Advanced Data Extraction (ADE)
engine that IFD says will greatly reduce the need to manually enter metadata.
The vendor says that scripts and pattern-matching logic in ADE (also OEMed from
PSIGEN) will automatically create search metadata for a document, or enhance
the metadata that has already been collected with the OCR, OMR, and ICR
engines. The ADE can also extract complex data structures and information from
disparate documents, which IFD says further enhances document archiving and
searching capabilities.
The
capability to capture documents from PC-connected scanners that exist outside
of the IBM i environment, and store them in the IBM i-based iView archive, is
another advantage of iCapture touted by IFD. The vendor says that this
eliminates the need to have dedicated 5250 sessions for scanning documents into
the iView archive. Content that has been previously scanned can also be
automatically routed to iCapture through its "hot folder" function.
iCapture
offers a range of PDF features, including the capability to map form fields to
index fields upon import; compression of PDF files and support for passwords
upon export; support for PDF versioning features; and PDF bookmarking for
hierarchical structures.
IFD
says the overall accuracy of OCR, OMR, and ICR scanning and index creation has
also been improved with iCapture. Other product features include integration
with IFD's spool file monitoring solution, called iDocs; integration with
dozens of other enterprise content management (ECM) systems, such as Microsoft
SharePoint and EMC Documentum; and the minimization of the need to buy
third-party document processing products or to customize the product.
"By
integrating a host of next-generation document and data capture features with
this latest upgrade of iScan, we have taken intelligent metadata creation to an
entirely new level within the industry," IFD president Dan Forster says in
a press release. "It is particularly exciting to see that these powerful
new search indexing features, along with the ability to connect PC-scanners to
our iView archiving solutions without 5250 sessions, make it very easy and
affordable for multi-department enterprises to centralize their entire scan,
archival, and retrieval needs on the ever-reliable IBM."
Source: itjungle.com
