ImageSource, Inc.
As part of the ECM industry, it is important to understand what compound documents are and how they affect you. Compound documents have been an issue in ECM software from the beginning of time. According to wiseGEEK, Compound documents are document files that contain several different types of data as well as text. A compound document may include graphics, spreadsheets, images, or any other non-text data. The additional data may be embedded into the document or be linked data that is resident within the application. You may be asking what that means for you? We all know that basic ECM is scan/store/retrieve, but what happens when you add electronic documents in PDF or MS Word?
Small businesses that offer tech support will turn out better results than a big tech support company offering global support. Having worked in tech support and worked with providers of various sizes, I have come to the opinion that small departments offer more meaningful support, better customer service and have superior knowledge.
Having chosen my career path towards project management, I am not as strong in desktop support as many others. However, I can work my way through just about anything but it might just take a little longer. I thought I would share my experience over the past week in attempting desktop support for myself.
Are you tired of separator sheets? Tired of wasted paper and countless hours of flipping through pages and inserting a barcode sheet at the start of a new document just to take it out after the batch is scanned or leave it in the batch and have more paper to store? Why not have the computer do the work for you? That’s the idea behind the Project Planner module in KTM. There is a standard separation functionality built into KTM that works very well on structured and semi-structured documents but when you have more complex separation rules the Project Planner component of KTM is what you need.
I recently was asked to help with a client’s KTM (Kofax Transformation Modules) project, because they were not pleased with the percentages of valid and/or correct extraction fields. My first question was, “Are you using subclasses?” The answer was, “No.” Subclassifying your top forms is an easy way to greatly improve your extraction results.
What I mean by that is instead of trying to use a single locator to find data from all of your documents with a “one size fits all” approach, you can use subclasses to first classify the document and then tune your locators specific to that form to look in a precise location for the information. For example, let’s say you need to find a “Case Number” off of all of your forms. Some forms might have the word “Case Number” above the text you need to extract. Others might have the word “Number” to the left of the data. Another might not have any text around the data to key off of at all. It’s difficult to add enough rules in one locator to catch all the possible scenarios. Furthermore, there are times when adding rules to help find data on one form will actually give you negative results from another. Subclasses can help by allowing you to create a specific locator to zero in on the information that you are looking for.Continue reading
