Automate the capture of your paper and electronic documents
Depending on your business, the documents you work with may be paper or may be digital documents created on a computer. In order to be easily shared with others in your organization, both types must be stored on a shared server. For paper, a scanner is first used to convert the paper to a digital format. Once converted – or if the file was already in electronic form – it is stored to the server and indexed so that users can quickly find, retrieve, and view the file when needed. Now imagine that you need to do this operation many times each day for all of the documents you receive. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to automate these steps so that the task can be accomplished quickly and easily?
Capture Tasks use predefined steps
This is precisely what Optix Capture Tasks do – they act as a automated on-ramp for your documents – enabling you to predefine each step of the process to make it as fast and painless as possible. A Task Item palette holds all of the capture steps you have defined. These can include:
Select from a variety of built-in steps or easily define your own.
Scanning – Defines how your document will be scanned – page size, color, etc.
Destination – Where your document should be sent – to a server database, workflow, work queue, printer, email, or sent elsewhere using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
Message – Add user-displayed prompts or informational messages.
Data – Define a powerful metadata extraction step to OCR/Barcode recognize scanned documents or extract tags such as camera settings from digital images. These can then be mapped to fields in an Optix indexing or workflow screen.
Script – Create a Visual Basic (PC) or AppleScript (Mac) script to perform special operations or interact with other applications. Also used to perform optional add-on workstation operations such as Form Recognition.
Capture Tasks recognize many different Patch Cards
Create a new Capture Task by dragging predefined steps from the Capture Task palette and dropping them into your new task. Most tasks require only 2 to 6 steps to completely automate the process, and the task is immediately ready for use. Drop existing desktop files onto your task to skip all the scanning steps and go straight to metadata extraction and indexing, or click Run to input the document from a scanner. The status of each step performed is clearly shown in the Task status log area. If you need input a lot of documents, pile them into the scanner and separate them with barcoded Patch Cards. Once you have defined a step or a new task you can easily share it with your co-workers on both Mac and PC using built-in workstation utilities.