Planning Your Job

If you have not yet decided on a plan for how to organize your scanned images for later retrieval, you should take some time to consider the possible options. There are various ways to store your document images for later retrieval once they have been scanned with SimpleIndex:

Designing Your Imaging Solution[edit | edit source]

Use SimpleSearch to search and view documents.

Use folders & filenames to organize your files and SimpleView to browse, view, and edit them.

Use enterprise document management software for security, regulatory compliance, web viewing, workflow, and other features.

Use a database or spreadsheet such as MS Access or Excel to import the index data and provide links to the stored document images. Clicking the links can open the image in a free viewer like Adobe Reader or Windows' built-in image viewer.

Integrate SimpleIndex directly with your custom application using the Command Line Interface.

Use tools like Google Desktop, Window Search, and SharePoint to find documents scanned to Windows folders. SimpleIndex sets document properties automatically, which these programs use to index files and rank search results.

Distributed Capture implementations will also be discussed in this chapter.

Automating Document Capture[edit | edit source]

Once you have decided the best way to organize, store and retrieve your documents, the next part of the planning stage is to find the most efficient way to scan these documents and associate them with the correct index field values. Creating an efficient scanning and indexing process will save you countless hours of labor over the life of your project.

The two main methods for automating indexing are barcode recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Barcode recognition is faster and more accurate, but your documents must contain a barcode on the document or a cover page for this to work. OCR is able to read printed data directly from the page, which means most documents can be processed as-is. However there are many conditions that can affect the practicality of OCR that is discussed in this section.

If your index data already exists in another database, SimpleIndex has two features that can make use of this data to automate processing. The Index Autofill feature lets you enter one key field that is used in a database lookup to retrieve matching values and fill in the remaining index fields automatically. SimpleIndex also has the ability to pre-set index values using the Command Line Interface and have a scanned document receive these indexes automatically.