Document Imaging Blog

AIIM 2009 - What wiil it bring?

AIIM kicks off next Tuesday in Philadelphia with some new branding (Info360) and a lot of anticipation around what the show will bring. Over the last couple of years, the show has been more of a gathering place for vendors, resellers and consultants, mixed with a spattering of end user customers. Will the change in venue from Boston to Philadelphia change that? How will the economy effect numbers? And what will the buzz be about?

One topic sure to be on the minds of attendees is SharePoint. The story has moved from "What is it?" to "How do I use it?" to "What has been your experience with it?" over the past couple of years, but without a doubt it will be a prominent part of many vendor's stories -- including us. We'll be presenting on SharePoint and Document Imaging in the Canon and Microsoft theaters:

• Canon Booth - Tuesday (noon); Wednesday (3:00) and Thursday (10:30)

• Microsoft Booth - Tuesday (11:30) and Wednesday (3:30)

AIIM is still the big event in the ECM realm and is always an important place to be seen and to continue to build the ecosystem. We'll be continuing on our strategy for the show for the past few years and supporting our ecosystem partners in their booths. Join us and our partners at:

• Canon (Booth #1701)

• Equitrac (Booth #2500)

• I.R.I.S. (Booth #605)

• Konica Minolta (Booth #1425)

• Microsoft (Booth #900/MP21)

• Rochester Software Associates (Booth #2248)

We look forward to seeing you at AIIM and I'll be sure to post a couple of times from the show. What are your expectations for this years show? Leave a comment!

Webinar: “Paper That Works” – Wednesday, Feb. 11

Just a quick plug for a AIIM Webinar that we are co-sponsoring with EMC next Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. (EST) on the topic of Distributed Capture. Click here to register.

 

Here’s the abstract…

 

Centralized imaging of large volumes of documents can deliver tremendous cost savings for organizations. Yet, centralized paper processing is not the right answer for everyone all the time. As multi-function peripherals (and desktop scanners) have proliferated, the ability to capture paper documents at the source — getting them to work for you faster — is available to any organization. Discover how to get started with distributed capture—and why you should.

 

Hope you can join us on Wednesday, but if not, download Frost & Sullivan's white paper: Distributed Capture Platforms: Reducing Costs, Removing Bottlenexks & Mitigating Risk for more information.

Automating Document-Centric Processes with SharePoint

We’re excited to be sponsoring tomorrow’s AIIM Webinar, "Automating Document-Centric Processes with SharePoint” and presenting with Mauro Cardarelli, author of Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High Impact Collaboration. I’ve had a sneak peak into the content of the Webinar, and it promises to be full of practical advice for those looking to automate common paper-based processes.

One of the interesting pieces of information that Mauro will share is the difference between “automation” and “invention” in terms of business processes, which is more appropriate for paper-based processes, and what processes are good candidates for SharePoint.  In addition, eCopy’s Greg Gies will be sharing advice on the best practice approaches for integrating paper-based content into SharePoint using document imaging.

We hope you can join us for this Webinar. You can register here.

SharePoint, BPM and Document Imaging

As promised, here’s a couple of things I gleaned during last week’s AIIM seminar in Boston. If you missed the roadshow and are interested in learning more about Document Imaging, SharePoint and BPM, register for the November 19th AIIM webinar.

1. SharePoint adoption is still growing, but it has not yet moved past a collaboration and document library/portal tool in most organizations.
2. Pretty much every ECM vendor has built integration into SharePoint and is happily co-existing. SharePoint does not seem to be a threat to ECM technology vendors.
3. Records management is the major area where SharePoint lacks functionality to compete against ECM solutions.

Good information, but nothing earth shattering. What resonated with me, however, was Carl Frappalo’s keynote about BPM. He noted that when undertaking a Business Process Management initiative, technology considerations are secondary. Instead, it is all about understanding your business workflows at their most granular level and determining where the inefficiencies lie. Only then can you begin to improve those processes through re-design and, sometimes, technology.

For example, we have a customer that was spending well north of $100K each year retrieving invoices, checks and other financial documents for use by auditors. The images below represent the before and after workflows for invoice retrieval. Note that in this “before” workflow, most steps are colored Red, indicating that they are paper-based. The only electronic step is the first one…meaning that this workflow originated electronically, but then reverted to paper-based. Definitely not a path to business process efficiencies!

In the “after” workflow, the invoices are scanned at the beginning of the workflow process, enabling the rest of the workflow to be completed electronically. As important, the process is now “self-service”; eliminating the need to engage the A/P department for standard invoice retrieval tasks.

The result of this single workflow change and the elimination of paper early in a business process? $100K+ in cost savings and a reduction in process time from days to minutes!! Just think about how many processes in your organization could be improved simply by identifying areas where paper intersects with a business process.

SharePoint and Business Process Management

I’m headed down to Boston tomorrow for the AIIM seminar: "Automating Document-Centric Processes: Is SharePoint Enough?". I’m looking forward to hearing from vendors and end users alike about how far SharePoint has actually come in terms of Business Process Management and Business Process Automation. There is little question that SharePoint adoption is still hot. In fact, at our Paper Connection Forum last week, 4 of our 6 Best Practices winners are in the process of rolling out SharePoint or are already using it enterprise-wide.

However, the big question seems to be whether the technology can move from a hosted document library and collaboration tool to a technology that sits at the core of business processes.  For example, of those customers at our event last week that I mentioned, every deployment of SharePoint was focused on collaboration and content management, not business processes. I think a big part of this is a lack of understanding and I hope that tomorrow will shed some light on the topic. What do you think? What have you observed? And what would you like to find out about it? I’ll be writing a post following the seminar and would be interested to compare your thoughts to those of the seminar attendees.

And if you are interested in more information on this topic, please register for the November 19th AIIM Webinar, Automating Document-Centric Processes within SharePoint.

Enterprise Search, “Findability” and Document Imaging

Enterprise search has been getting a lot of play lately, and for good reason. AIIM is about to publish its Market Intelligence Report on Findability and, among the findings, reported that 49% of survey respondents “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. And, 69% of respondents believe that only 50% or less of their organization’s information is searchable online.

Considering that the Internet and Google have spoiled us to the point that we expect to be able to find information on anything within seconds, enterprise search is clearly a technology issue that is rising on the priority list of IT departments. But, you may ask, enterprise search technology pertains to electronic information…so how does this relate to document imaging?

Well, we believe that the rising focus on enterprise search will result in a growing demand for front-office document capture and imaging. In today’s world, the vast majority of paper documents are still scanned using centralized and/or production procedures – a back-office function. The scanning is done at the end of the business process and is driven primarily by archiving, records management, legal, or storage space saving initiatives.

Enterprise search -- and the above mentioned pain of employees need to find the information needed to do their job – is driving the need to capture these paper documents earlier on in business processes and document workflows. Paper is not going away and the information that resides on paper is just as important to employees as electronic information. The solution to this is giving front-office workers the capability to scan paper documents – and make them searchable – as soon as they enter into an organization.

As we have discussed numerous times, scanning hardware is already available to front-office workers through MFPs, networked scanners and desktop scanners. But simply scanning a document and saving it as a PDF to a network drive only moves the “findability” problem from a stack of paper to the “digital landfill”. Empower your users to make scanned documents searchable, however, and you will be contributing to an enterprise search solution.

Among many considerations, there are two core features that you should be looking for in document imaging software to help get paper-based information into searchable form:

• OCR – Optical character recognition technology – available either at the scanning device or at the desktop following scanning – will identify characters on the scanned document and convert them to a computer language that can be accessed by search technology.
• Indexing/Metadata Entry – The document imaging software should either give users the ability to add metadata and taxonomy to documents (such as document types, subjects, client codes, keywords, etc.), and/or add that metadata automatically to scanned documents (such as date, the person who scanned the document, etc.). With this metadata stored as an XML file in conjunction with the scanned image, the document is easily located by search technology.

If you can reach a point where information from both electronic and paper-based sources is searchable online, the “findability” problem will start to lessen.

Information Zen and other good info sources

AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, just launched a new online community, Information Zen. Big kudos to AIIM for starting this up and I'm pledging to be active in the new community, as well as to get my colleagues involved. Take a moment to poke around the site...it has great information on all things ECM and information management and will hopefully turn into an active community!

A big reason that I am excited about this new community is that it is another resource for both end users and vendors to discuss challenges, successes and best practices around ECM. As we all know, ECM is a big umbrella and includes document imaging as a subset. At eCopy, we've started this blog and the Document Imaging Wiki to provide a similar, central resource for document imaging. I'm hoping that we can create lots of back and forth between our Web 2.0 initiatives and AIIM's...providing awareness of document imaging within the ECM conversations and offering a place to come and learn more about specific document imaging-related information in our blog and wiki.

These Web-based resources are a tremendous asset to our industry and a big thank you goes out to AIIM for continuing to increase awareness and spur conversation.

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 4

Time to answer the last question posed during the April 9th AIIM webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Organizations. If you missed the webinar, a recording is available on our Website.  And please post a comment to this blog post if you have further questions that you would like me to answer. I’m happy to keep this Q&A going as long as the questions come in!

Our final question is around document services and came in from an IT executive at a professional services company. He asks:

Does eCopy have the ability, when dealing with a common document format to, while scanning the doc, pull data in certain areas for OCR, then using that data for naming, routing, or storing metadata in a database?

Yes and no. eCopy ShareScan comes bundled with an OCR engine for full text indexing and search purposes. For example, a document can be OCRd during the scanning process to create a searchable PDF for improved search and retrieval from databases or back end application. Our product does not automatically extract portions of data (i.e. zonal OCR) for purposes of indexing and routing. However, eCopy ShareScan is an open development environment with a published API and document services interface. Through this services interface, capabilities such as metadata extraction, barcode recognition, and image compression and cleanup can be easily added. For example, one of eCopy’s partners, I.R.I.S., has used the SDK to offer a set of document services for ShareScan.

Thanks again for all the great questions around document imaging & Microsoft. And please, if you have any other questions, please post them as a comment to the blog.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 3

In part 3 of our Q&A follow-up to last week’s AIIM Webinar (see part 1 and part 2), I’m going to answer a couple of questions around getting paper documents into Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint, not surprisingly, is top of mind with Microsoft-driven organizations who are implementing the technology in droves to enable better collaboration and document workflows. And one of the big challenges that these organizations face is how to ensure that knowledge workers are able to include information that resides on paper inside SharePoint.

Our first question asks: How does eCopy know where to send documents and metadata content to SharePoint?

Our integration with SharePoint is done through our Connector to eCopy ShareScan. Our SharePoint connectivity is predicated upon authenticated user access, i.e. the username/password assigned to users who access SharePoint. With this information, users are logged into their SharePoint repository at the MFP and can self-determine where to deposit information by browsing to the site, subsite, document library, etc. at the MFP. Alternatively, eCopy’s SharePoint connectivity can be pre-configured for a dedicated capture operation, for example, scanning resumes to a dedicated folder accessible by Human Resources. In this configuration, there is no user interaction with SharePoint, but the application intelligently knows where to store the document and what indexing information should be included with it, i.e. username, date, document type, etc.

The second question asks: What are the benefits of eCopy with MOSS 2007. And is eCopy a good connector for MOSS 2007?

The answer to the second part is yes, of course.  We recently upgraded our connector to support many of the features that were added to SharePoint in MOSS 2007, including support for multiple content types and workflows.

As for the benefits, I’ll list three of the biggest. 1) Our SharePoint Connector replicates the user’s desktop experience with SharePoint at the MFP, allowing navigation through sites, subsites, document libraries, etc. This leads to high user adoption and a reduction in errors because the workflow process is unchanged.  2) The Connector features dynamic connectivity to a live environment, meaning that a user is working with a live environment vs. a static image of the application. So in that environment, if new folders or other destinations are added to the SharePoint environment, these are automatically available to the user during the capture process.  3) From an IT perspective, our SharePoint connectivity requires no changes to the SharePoint environment and there are no modifications or additions necessary to the MOSS server.

We’ll be back next week with the final questions from last week’s webinar (view a recording here).

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

AIIM Webinar Q&A -- Part 2

I’m back again with more Q&A from last week’s AIIM Webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Environments”. In part one of this series; I covered questions primarily dealing with the process for ensuring proper indexing of documents in a distributed environment. Today, I’m going to address a couple of questions around the topic of MFPs, or multifunction peripherals.

The first question is around the operating environments of MFPs:

How soon do you foresee having a large number of Web services enabled MFPs in the market?

Well, today approximately 9 million (laser) MFPs are put into the market each year and a growing number of those will have a Web services operating environment. A few vendors, such as Xerox, Sharp and Toshiba, are shipping devices with these environments today. But even with that being the case, the main challenges for the ISV community remains that while each of these are Web services based, they still remain different -- and proprietary -- development environments.  The ideal for the ISV community would be a single, “standard” Web services based development environment. Unfortunately, that is not the development landscape available from the MFP vendors today.  What is available are document imaging platforms like eCopy’s, which works on all of the major MFP and scanner brands and provides a single development environment (SDK) from which ISVs and end users can connect to a variety of MFPs.

Today’s second question is about whether MFPs are appropriate for processing back files, and asks, “this can’t really be done on an MFP?”

Agreed, that is not what MFPs are designed to do.  MFPs are great capture environments for low-volume document scanning by office workers.  Back file scanning is task that is best suited for high-speed, high volume scan operations with a dedicated scanning professional. One thing to think about however, is if “one-off” documents enter the organization that would need to be added to an archive. In those cases, the ability to have an office worker scan that document to the archive at a later date using an MFP can be beneficial. So, it is not so much that it can not be done on an MFP, but there are certainly processes that are better suited for other scanning processes.

I’ll be back later this week with some questions around scanning documents into SharePoint.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management