Document Capture News & Articles

With the growing importance of compliance and eDiscovery issues for many companies, it might be time to consider deploying a records management system. Chances are that your company already uses some kind of document management system. The question is, will your document management system also support records management?

At the core of this question is what is the differences between document management and records management. Let's examine six differences.

The only better marketing tool than price cutting in the current climate is software upgrades. Snowbound Software has done just that with their document viewer software with functions they have hugely simplified and to which they have added a FileNet P8 connector.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) partners with CAPSYS to bring online document capture for businesses working in the cloud.

EMC (news, site) has introduced a new designer to its Captiva InputAccel intelligent capture solution that aims to make building document capture processes a lot faster and easier.

A new reseller agreement between US-based eFileCabinet (news, site) and Belgium-based Aries Filing Systems will see the Utah document management software vendor moving into Europe. The deal will see Aries offering eFileCabinet software to its extensive European client base.

As it stands, that customer base is made up over 6000 companies in the private sector as well as a substantial foothold in the government sector, and will also give eFileCabinet access to markets in both Africa and the Middle East, which Aries is currently targeting.

eFileCabinet document management software and its online backup service, Concentsus, give users feature-rich solutions for document capture and management. With the launch of v4.0 of its DMS last February it added substantial security features for a range of industries (as these regulations can frequently be industry specific).

The agreement with Aries is not its first international reseller agreement since the company announced in November 2008 that it was going to take its VAR program abroad.

In April this year it entered a reseller partnership with Panama based Grupo Instrucontrol, which effectively moved eFileCabinet into in 17 Latin American countries including Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Panama.

That international expansion is central plank of its commercial strategy was underlined by the appointment of Craig Jensen as Vice President of Worldwide Sales in February and the appointment last year of a new CEO and president -- Matt Peterson -- who committed the company to cultivating new strategic partnerships. Interesting to see who will be next.

Another partnership, this time between document management software vendor Datacap and enterprise content management and business process management developer FileVision (news, site) will see the two companies market their respective software solutions as a package.

The SharePoint Las Vegas conference is serious business. There have been and will be some serious announcements made over the course of it. However, there has been and will be announcements that just make you ask “How cool is that?!”

One of those is the beta launch of Capturx Forms for SharePoint from Adapx that will make automatic data ingestion into SharePoint 2010 as simple as signing you name. That’s because this is exactly what it does. It enables users to upload information into SharePoint as it is (manually) written using an electronic pen, via Bluetooth and a cell phone.

It's Monday, the SharePoint Conference 2009 is now getting ready to head into full swing and the partner announcements are starting to emerge.

EMC (news, site) swings out of the gate first with four SharePoint offerings, one of which is not really new, but interesting just the same.

Mix eCopy's (news, site) server offerings with Nuance's multifunction printer (MFP) capabilities and you get a US$ 54 million acquisition. You also get network scanning solutions that connect a range of MFPs to business applications and content management systems. 

Said Nuance after purchasing eCopy with common stock: "Nuance and eCopy share a vision of connecting MFP devices to a wide range of applications in an easy and productive way."

Part of said vision is expected to yield: 

• Premier Desktop and Server Products: Scanning solutions that maximize gains in productivity and cost savings and provide MFP partners with an ability to deliver valuable solutions to more customers.
• Strong OEM Channels: Combining Nuance and eCopy's respective partners ( including Brother; Canon; HP; Konica Minolta; Océ; Ricoh; Sharp; Toshiba; Xerox and others) will serve to enhance these vendor partnerships worldwide and deliver greater value to all OEM and channel partners overall.
• Expanded Reach for Desktop Solutions: eCopy already has an extensive list of channel partners. By giving such an opportunity  for Nuance, there is much room for Nuance PDF Converter Professional, OmniPage and PaperPort to grow.
  

“The MFP industry is poised to benefit greatly from our mutual focus on delivering integrated solutions that solve real business problems for customers,” said Edward Schmid, eCopy president and CEO. “The combination of eCopy and Nuance creates an organization that can drive the expansion of this opportunity, and is an important advancement for our MFP partners and customers. We are pleased to join the Nuance team and help fulfill our objective of putting paper to work.”

What happens when we make a comment about it being a while since we've heard from Laserfiche (news, site)? They suddenly burst with new news. In this case the new news, following shortly after the announcement of WebLink 8, consists of a document imaging and capture tool.

Quick Fields 8 works on the front-end of Laserfiche's ECM product suite, allowing each department to customize capture and image processing for their own forms, documents, and data.

A branch of the Ricoh tree called IKON Office Solutions, Inc. recently established a reseller relationship with Omtool, provider of document capture and handling solutions.

The partnership is expected to turn the heads of law firms as it adds Omtool’s AccuRoute, a document scanning and distribution software tool, to IKON’s legal doc management portfolio. AccuRoute is designed to streamline the capture to archive process of both paper and electronic documents into information management systems.

“IKON is pleased to add the Omtool product to our suite of solutions to enable law firms to improve their document workflow and increase efficiency,” said Mark Davey, IKON’s Vice President, Legal Enterprise Solutions. “With the current economic conditions that law firms are facing, everyone is being asked to do more. Having the right tools available is more critical than ever.”

If this strikes a chord, you should hang around booth #400 at ILTA’s 2009 Annual Conference next week where both companies will be presenting. Check out our events list here for more information.

If you’ve been following us closely, you know that in spite of the economic downturn many techie areas of business have seen substantial growth. Among them is document capture software, which saw a market value increase of 7.7% (1.9bn) in 2008 according to a new study by Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA).

With competition intense in the document management industry, maybe DocuLex’s (news, site) announcement that it has just released an upgrade to its Office Capture solution is a taste of one of the things to come in the future.

Not that the launch of version 4 of this product is breaking known boundaries in document capture technology, or anything like that, it is more its size and where its going to fit into a given enterprise that may be the real point of interest.

Only six weeks after receiving one of BERTL’s Best Awards 2009 for its KYOcapture document management product, Kyocera Mita America has announced the upgrade to version 5.0.

KYOcapture comes in two versions, the use of which will depend on the size of the users business. KYOCapture Express is a simplified document capture workflow solution designed for small to medium sized business, while KYOcapture Workflow a comprehensive document capture workflow solution for enterprises.

KYOcapture is said to be scalabe, flexibile and capable of streamlining document capture and workflow activities through a new, customizable interface.

Amongst the other new features are:

• Improved bi-directional search functionality
• SSL encryption and user authentication
• Easy connectivity with other DMS
• Long-term after sales contracts

The new version works in conjunction with Kyocera’s black and white, and color MFPs. It should also allow users ingest just about any document you can think of and direct it into virtually any document management system.

But then don’t they all do that? What’s more, in this case, there is no pricing available that might push the perspective buyer in their direction, rather than in the direction of one their gazillion competitors.

If we sound less than enthusiastic about it, its probably because Kyocera is not really selling itself very well. It's not that we don’t believe there might be something about v5.0 that’s special, they are just not saying what it is. And saying you have won a 2009 BERTL's Best Award is not enough to sell it. To give the product a try, download a trial version of KYOcapture 5.0 here.

A new AIIM (news, site) survey for the EMC Corporation (news, site) that has just been released probably provides few surprises concluding that investment in document capture technologies is ultimately going to save companies money.

However, in all such surveys there are always one or two points that really make you stand back and go “Wow’! I wouldn’t have thought that at all!”

And this one is no exception. In this particular case the ‘Wow factor' comes from the revelation that while most organizations have already invested in capture technologies, two-thirds were only scanning 50% of possible documents.