Document Imaging News & Articles

A busy week in the document management space. The big event this week was the announcement by Cisco that it will buy Versly, while QuickOffice is still upgrading TouchPad capabilities. Adobe offers PDF functionality for iPad, and Work upgraded its Office 365 offering. DocSTAR and Kyocera integrated for better cloud document management.

Acquisition fever continues apace, this time with the announcement by Kofax (news, site) that it is to buy Atalasoft (news, site) in a deal that will see see it add to Atalasoft’s SDK and offer it for use with its capture and transformation modules software by the end of the year.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (news, site) continues to consolidate its position in their imaging and voice recognition technologies space, this time with the announcement that it is to buy Equitrac for US$ 157 million in a cash deal that is expected to close in September -- and put an end to speculation that Apple might be looking to buy Nuance in turn. The company is strongest in the healthcare sector where they provide document scanning, document management, OCR and forms processing solutions.

What if there was a known winning formula for implementing and executing records management? A recent report by Océ Business Services, who surveyed approximately 372 records managers and executives responsible for document management processes on how their organizations are using records management to drive success indicates there is one. Here's a look.

There was some surprise last May when document workflow and print management vendor Lexmark bought ECM vendor Perceptive (news, site). Only six months later the two have released Interact, a jointly developed Embedded Solutions Framework (eSF) application, which slots into some of Lexmark’s (news, site) multifunction products (MFP).

Nuance Communications (news, site) has been adding to its eCopy ShareScan Suite in slow increments over the years. In April it added some new functionality in v4.35 and eCopy SDK. This week it released v5.0 that builds on that providing just about everything needed to automate paper-to-digital scanning.

After all the criticism over the slow pace of development of its Business ByDesign Suite, SAP has finally released it with starter packs for SMB deployment. Also, new and cheap scanners can send documents directly into Google Docs.

A new partnership between UK-based Oracle consultancy Mokum and document management software vendor Version One (news, site) means that Oracle Financials clients will be able to access Version One directly from their Oracle (news, site) system.

Another acquisition in the electronic medical records (EMR) market, with the buy-out of document imaging and management services Bowman Enterprises by document life cycle solutions provider Diversified Information Technologies.

The financial details of the deal weren't released but last year Diversified's revenue was in the region of US$ 40 million, while Bowman's was close to US$ 6.5.The Bowman management team will be joining Diversified although how it will affect the rest of the company was not explained.

This is the second such acquisition by Diversified in the recent times. In October last year it acquired Active Data Services, a document imaging, print and electronic presentment provider headquartered in Raleigh, NC.

Diversified CEO Scott Byers said that the buy-out was part of the company’s plans to extend its footprint in the EMR market where he sees considerable potential for expansion. This indicates that we might be seeing similar moves from the Pennsylvania-based company.

Founded in 1982, Diversified provides document management software for complete document and information lifecycle, including records management solutions for physical and electronic records storage.

Currently targeting Fortune 1000 companies in the financial, insurance, health care and government sectors it has grown to 18 U.S. and three international locations.

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.

The latest upgrade to Atalasoft’s (news, site) Vizit SP adds badly needed search abilities to the integrated document viewer that will enable users search, find and preview SharePoint documents from the Vizit SP 2.0 user interface.

PSIGEN Software (news, site) continues it development of PSI:Capture with the release of v3.6, which, like previous upgrades, adds a couple of more small improvements that should make things a bit easier for all concerned.

This time they have focused on improving the abilities of v3.6 to archive fax images automatically as well as additional enhancements to their Advanced Data Extraction (ADE) software. And again, they have also spruced-up their SharePoint migration abilities.

Earlier this summer, PSIGEN Software (news, site)  and Atalasoft (news, site) announced that they were coming together to provide an image capture solution for SharePoint. There was a lot of cheering at the time as they said the combination of advanced capture and viewing technology would provide an affordable, feature rich option to a market with few alternatives.

Since then not a lot has been said about it -- until yesterday at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas when the companies jointly announced the release of the SharePoint Document Management bundle consisting of Atalasoft’s Vizit SP and PSIGEN’s PSI:Capture.

DotImage 8.0, the newest iteration of the imaging toolkit for .NET developers, was kicked out by Atalasoft (news, site) last week. The updated version comes with nifty additions like Silverlight controls, barcode writing capabilities and support for TWAIN 2.0.

California-based Psigen Software (news, site) has just announced that it has added an Advanced Data Extraction module to its document management system DMS PSI: Capture as part of v3.5.2.

This new addition will give Capture the ability to parse, scan and extract information from all kinds of documents without any end-user intervention.

While Psigen says that this will be part of v3.5.2 of their DMS, it doesn’t say whether it is this feature that bumps it up a point from v3.5.1, or whether there are other elements combined that will do that.

While the question may be academic, it is of some interest as the rate with which Psigen is developing this product is noteworthy in a market that is bursting with new solutions and new releases.

Psigen itself has been flirting outrageously with SharePoint and has made no secret of its designs on the Microsoft beauty.

In June, for example, it underwent a SharePoint makeover by thoughtfully offering a SharePoint Lookup Provider (SLP) which provides integration with the SharePoint Database and seemingly allows for a jazzed up automation process when scanning and capturing documents destined for Document Libraries.

However, it is also playing the field like any other 14-year-old (company) would be expected to and in July offered FileBound, a similar solution and services.

It's hard to know where all of this is going to end up, but in an industry sector where only the fittest will survive, its practically certain Psigen is already checking out the talent for its next conquest.