SimpleIndex Standard Workstation

Description

SimpleIndex Standard turns a stack of paper, or a pile of files already sitting on disk, into named and indexed documents your existing systems can find. You set up the job once. After that it is one button, or one command line, for whoever is scanning.

A job reads its index values from the document itself. Barcodes, using the DTK and Atalasoft engines that come included. Zone OCR, where you draw a box and the text inside it becomes a field. Full-page OCR across the whole sheet. Or straight text parsing out of a PDF or an Office file, which needs no OCR at all because the text is already in the file. Those values then drive what the software does next: what each file is called, where a new document starts in a continuous scan, which folder it lands in, and what gets written to your database.

Which OCR engine reads the page, and why that decides your edition

Zone OCR is only as good as the engine reading the zone. Standard ships two engines, Tesseract and SimpleOCR. On a clean scan they are good enough to produce a searchable PDF, where the text layer sits behind the image and Windows search or your document system can find the document by its contents. They are not good enough to trust with a value you are going to file by or post to a database, because a single misread character in an invoice number puts the document somewhere nobody will look for it again.

So the honest split is this. If you index by barcode, Standard is the right answer and it stays the right answer at any volume. If you are reading printed text off the page and it has to be correct, you want the ABBYY FineReader, cloud recognition and language model engines, and those are in Professional.

What is included

• TWAIN scanner support, with a one-button scan and index interface
• Barcode recognition, DTK and Atalasoft engines
• Zone OCR and full-page OCR, Tesseract and SimpleOCR engines
• Text parsing straight out of PDF and Microsoft Office files, no OCR needed when the text is already there
• Document separation and classification, including required-documents auditing
• File naming rules, and format rules that check a value looks the way it should before it is accepted
• Read and write against your own database over ODBC or OLE DB, including autofill, where scanning one barcode pulls the rest of the record in
• Index output to a database, comma-delimited text, or XML
• Image output to searchable PDF, TIFF, or JPEG
• Electronic imprinting and Bates stamping
• Cropping and redaction, to take confidential parts off an image before it is filed
• Blank page detection and removal, despeckle, deskew, auto-rotate
• Command line triggering, so another application can start a job
• The Workflow Manager, which chains jobs and steps together and is included with every SimpleIndex license
• Separate user and administrator logins, so operators cannot change the job configuration

What Standard does not do

• It is not a document management system. There is no check-in and check-out, no retention policy, no permissions model, no approval routing. SimpleIndex feeds the system that does those things.
• It does not run unattended. Someone starts the job. Watching a folder and processing whatever arrives with nobody logged in is the Server processing add-on, which attaches to Standard and does not require moving up to Professional.
• It is Windows only. There is no macOS or Linux build. Windows running in a virtual machine is fine.
• It is not zero configuration. A barcode job can be running the same afternoon. Anything that reads text off varied layouts takes a few sessions to tune.
• Poor originals stay poor. OCR accuracy is bounded by scan quality. Faded thermal paper, third-generation photocopies and handwriting over printed text need a person to review them whatever engine reads them.
• Cloud storage is reached through a synced folder. If your Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive folder syncs down to Windows, SimpleIndex reads it like any other folder. There is no direct connection to the service.

What you are buying

$600 is a perpetual SimpleIndex Standard workstation license at $500, plus a first year of support and updates (maintenance, on your invoice) at $100. The two are sold together, so that is the price of a new license. After the first year, support and updates renew at $100 a year and renewing is optional. If you let it lapse, your installed version keeps running for as long as you have a Windows machine to run it on. You are simply on your own for new versions and covered support until you renew, which you can do at any time.

There is no subscription requirement and no per-page fee on anything included in Standard, at any volume.

Requirements

• Operating system: Windows 11 or Windows 10
• Server operating system: Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022 or 2025
• .NET: .NET Framework 4.8
• Processor: 64-bit CPU, 2 GHz Intel Pentium or higher
• Memory: 8 GB of RAM
• Disk space: 465 MB installer, 1 GB total for all components
• Scanner: a TWAIN or WIA scanner driver
• Internet: web access for online activation

Deciding between Standard and Professional

The difference is which engine reads the page, and a few sources and destinations Professional adds. See the full edition comparison.