- Market leader in document imaging and capture for Microsoft SharePoint
- Solutions for SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and all versions of Windows SharePoint Services
- Decades of industry experience in enterprise content management
- Thousands of customers already achieving
results with SharePoint
for ECM - Launch partner for Office SharePoint Server 2007
Imaging with SharePoint
Products and Technologies
By: Chris Caplinger
This is part one of a three part series of articles discussing SharePoint–based imaging and workflow technologies. Each brief will discuss the “What is”, the “Why” and the “Required Parts List”. The goal is to provide the reader basic business and technical information to access if their company can leverage of these types of solutions and the business benefits they offer.
What is Imaging?
So what do I mean by Imaging? When I’m talking about Imaging I’m talking about Document Imaging, not about photos of your Grandmother, although I’m sure she takes a nice picture. Document Images are scanned images of documents such as Insurance Claims, Invoices, Medical Records, Receipts and whatever else a business may be putting in file cabinets today.
Why would you want to scan and store images of your documents? The ROI is usually obvious, but typically companies spend:
- $20 in labor to file a document,
- $120 in labor to find a misfiled document
- $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
The Gartner Group has said a typical organization of 1000 people wastes over $11 million per year through manual document handling and management.
Imaging and SharePoint
Since the release of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, savvy users have realized that by using SharePoint Products and Technologies, documents can not only be collaborated on but stored as historical data within Document Libraries. Unfortunately for the previous version, the technology was based on an Exchange type Web Storage System that was proprietary and not easily scalable.
In 2003, Microsoft released Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Now based on SQL Server, the ability to store historical documents became not only possible but almost natural. Instantly Microsoft had a product that had a story in the Document Imaging marketplace. Users almost immediately started shoving documents, images, forms and anything else they could find into SharePoint Document Libraries.
Some of the benefits to storing these Document Images in SharePoint Document Libraries are metadata storage, custom views, check-in/check-out, version history, basic workflow, and in the case of SharePoint Portal Server, full text indexing from OCR information.
Most Microsoft Office 2003 products obviously have out of the box functionality for Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, and yes they have TWAIN scanner support, but I doubt anyone really uses Word to scan and store these images. That leaves companies to either build custom integrations with legacy products or to purchase solutions developed by ISVs (Independent Software Vendors).
The Summary of the Parts
To keep this article brief I’m going to quickly summarize the parts of what most people would consider the core requirements of a Document Imaging Solution;
APPLICATION CORE REQUIREMENTS
Low Volume Image Capture
- Scan documents into a TIFF file.
- TWAIN and ISIS Compliant
- Flexible release options – release to a library based on
data
entered during indexing
High Volume Image Capture (Batch Scanning)
- Image Cleanup
- Validation/data lookup
- Barcode recognition
- Scalable Indexing
- Flexible release options – release to a library based on
data entered during indexing - Simple configuration – configuring index values should
use information
from the repository to determine name, data type, and size
limitations to eliminate errors in manual configuration
Document Retrieval
- Logical search operators (- < > =) and wildcard searches
- Sorting capabilities
- Limit result sets
- Configurable within Site template
- Thin Client viewer capability
- Audit Trails
Workflow
- Parallel processing – ability to have work completed by
different people at the same time and later rejoin the
process to complete the entire work item - Notification – Flexibility in notification to meet all demands required by an organization
- Escalation
- Dashboard view for management
- Audit trails and access to completed items for historical purposes
- Design, test, simulate, and deploy within the same tool
- Robust reporting
Chris Caplinger is the CTO of KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold partner and provider of SharePoint-based Imaging and Workflow solutions. www.knowledgelake.com
About KnowledgeLake
KnowledgeLake, Inc., headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is the market
leader in developing document imaging and capture products Microsoft
SharePoint based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. Built
on the Microsoft .NET platform, KnowledgeLake enables organizations of
any size to leverage SharePoint for solving today’s complex document
problems. KnowledgeLake document imaging and capture products extend
the native capabilities of SharePoint with a powerful suite of
applications that allow users to capture large quantities of mission
critical documents and transform them into easily consumable business
information. The founders of KnowledgeLake have decades of experience
architecting, selling and implementing ECM products and solutions. To
find out more, visit the KnowledgeLake website at:
www.knowledgelake.com
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. For more information: public.relations@knowledgelake.com 314-898-0500