- 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
Why Use SharePoint Products and Technologies for Document Imaging?
By: Chris Caplinger
This is part two of a three part series of articles discussing SharePoint-based imaging and workflow technologies. The first part of this series can be found here. This article is focused on why you would want to use a SharePoint Document Library as the repository for your electronic document images.
Simplicity
Arguably one of the top reasons to use document libraries is simplicity. I’ve been around enterprise image technologies for quite a few years and I’ve never seen a faster and easier way to get a document repository going than by using Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Chances are if you’re reading this article you already have a WSS server up and could easily add a document library to one of its sites.
Adding to the simplicity is the browser interface. Administration of most legacy document imaging systems are still client-server based, even though there may be a way to use the system through a browser, not many of them offer the ease of use of WSS.
Imaging for Free
Windows SharePoint Services is free. Okay maybe free is a small stretch but the fact that you can download WSS free of charge and if you are already hosting SQL Server 2000 based web applications on a Windows 2003 server, then you will need to spend zero in licensing fees. Add on this the fact that you can download a free product that integrates SharePoint with almost any TIF viewer/editor such as Microsoft Office Document Imaging, and you have a reasonable imaging system for virtually nothing.
There are some other tools that you may need to fill out your document imaging needs, and I will cover some of these in part three, but for the most part you probably have almost everything you need for document imaging already implemented.
Not exactly imaging, but nonetheless required by many implementations of document imaging is workflow. Out of the box workflow capabilities are limited, but you can implement basic Meta data routing workflows without buying any additional software.
Scalability and Performance
Another reason Windows SharePoint Services makes sense as a document imaging platform is scalability. The ability to scale SQL Servers and web farms to very large numbers makes SharePoint an obvious choice over vendors using proprietary databases, or vendors that don’t support server clustering and/or web server farms.
There are currently Windows SharePoint Services implementations with over 25,000 unique users. There are also document libraries with almost four million images and growing daily. Both of these situations have been accomplished with relatively small hardware footprints, and when architected properly, uptime is almost 100%.
Another feature that makes WSS a very scalable product is the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). There are APIs for developing code directly on the server that have been used for many WSS based document imaging systems to upload documents via shared network drive and web services. There are the FrontPage Remote Procedural Calls which allow smart client applications to talk directly to document libraries for retrieving, interacting and saving documents. You also develop applications that communicate with the out-of-the-box web services provide by WSS.
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