Scan paper with virtually any scanner or digital copier.
Automatic indexing of documents that are in HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or other electronic format, so you do not have to print and then scan these documents. You should be able to just provide a list of folders to monitor, to make these documents searchable.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so you can find documents by content, that is, by words or phrases in the documents.
Browser-based search so you can easily find documents of interest. This also makes installation easy, since there is no installation needed on PC's that will be used for searching.
Once you find a document of interest, you need image thumbnails, with an indicator to show which pages contain a search word, so you can go directly to pages containing search words.
Once you find the page of interest, you need the search words highlighted on both scanned images and electronic files, with each search word highlighted in a different color, so you instantly see what you are looking for.
The ability to make notes on images, similar to how you might put a "sticky" note on a paper document.
Intranet, Internet and CD-ROM searching, so you can quickly find your information wherever you are: in the office or on the road.
Scalable workflow to allow documents to flow from one workstation to another for scanning, OCR, and indexing, so you can process 10 documents per day, or 10,000 documents per day.
User-defined index cards, so you can optionally add index fields to your documents, such as date, source, and customer name.
Automatic coding capability, so a common set of data fields can be automatically added to all documents scanned or virtually scanned, without having a clerk key in the index fields for each document.
Search features should include:
Search all index fields and the actual text of documents with one search statement. For example, enter John Smith and search the author, source, title, and other fields as well as the OCR'ed text of document.
Field specific search, e.g., find all documents with John Smith anywhere in just the Author field.
When searching a specific field, you should be able to see a pick list of valid entries. For example, for a Document Type field, you should be able to see a list of valid document types, and choose an item from this list, before searching.
Browser implementation of Boolean search capability (AND, OR, and NOT operators) including range searching of numeric and date fields, to make the power of Boolean logic available even to novices.
Full-text search with relevancy-ranked retrieval, to find documents by content.
Range searching of date and number fields.
Fuzzy searching to find documents, even if the words being searched are misspelled due to OCR errors. For example, a search for "John Smith" should also find "John Smlth".
Concept searching to allow you to retrieve documents based on concepts. For example, a search for "GPS" would also retrieve documents containing only the phrase "Global Positioning System".
Word rooting. For example, a search for deduction would also find documents containing deducted, deducts, deducting, etc.
Electronic Date and Bates stamp options, including:
Specify electronic stamp position.
Specify stamp font, font size and stamp font color.
Scan features should include:
Color scanning, with images compressed into JPEG and stored in either TIFF or Acrobat PDF format.
Black and white scanning, with the images compressed into Group IV, and stored in TIFF or Acrobat PDF format.
Automatically separate documents by using barcodes as document delimiters.
Use barcode as an index field to describe and help retrieve the document.
Use barcode value to look up data to populate index fields. For example, use barcode value to read invoice data from your invoicing system, so you do not have to redundantly enter this information, if you are scanning invoices.
Image clean-up processing, including de-skew, speckle removal, and removal of holes from 3-ring binders.
Optionally discard blank-pages if you are scanning both sides of the paper.
Scan documents using multiple scanners concurrently.
Append images to existing documents.
Virtual scan program to automatically import images every n minutes from a digital copier.
Virtual Scan which can invoke image filters, such as deskew, speckle removal, and discarding of blank pages.
Virtual Scan which can read multiple barcodes in a hierarchical fashion. For example, you could scan a barcode
encoding a client number once, and scan a bunch of different documents for that client,
putting in perhaps a document-type barcode for each document, without repeating the client (upper level)
barcode.
Optional automated operation, where the only steps required are scanning and searching. In this scenario, you could search the OCR'ed text to find the document. And, if you use barcodes as index values, you could search on the bar-coded index values.
After scanning, you should be able to delete pages in a Proofing Editor.
Security and encryption to keep your confidential documents confidential.
Instead of outputting scanned documents to individual TIFF or PDF files, to further increase security, you should be able to lock images into BLOB (binary large object) files.
Royalty-free CD-ROM publishing so you can distribute your information on CD-ROM to business partners, clients or employees without paying royalties for the search engine.
Browser search so you can easily search your full-text databases from other applications, using XML Web Services.
Document access audit module. This is a searchable database which lets you see each time a document has been viewed, and by whom. This is important to comply with a growing body of laws and regulations concerning confidentiality of information you have about your clients and customers, including medical records (HIPAA), and financial records. This can also help you monitor access to proprietary company documents and intellectual property.
These are the features that have been most requested in the ongoing 19 year conversation we have had with our clients and with professionals like you. These are the features we suggest you consider when you look at document imaging products.
Naturally, these are also the features we have in our product, SearchExpress Document Imaging.
If you want to see how easy it is to search your documents with SearchExpress, you can click here for a short Flash Shockwave "movie".
If you want to see how easy it is to scan and index your documents with SearchExpress, you can click here for a Shockwave "movie".
Now that you have seen the features you should look for in a document imaging product, click here to see the benefits you can expect from implementing document imaging.
For more information on SearchExpress Document Imaging, please call us at (205) 933-5494. Or, e-mail us at eti@searchexpress.com.
© 2003 Executive Technologies, Inc.
