Office Document Imaging Makes Your Paper Documents Ready To Fly

Ready to fly the Internet, we mean, not as paper planes popular in some offices.

Consider it. Office Document Imaging converts your paper documents into digital images, which can be sent to the other end of the world in seconds. Any text in the image would be readable by humans at the other end. The information on a paper document you received in your US office thus becomes available for your executive who is, say, in China looking for business opportunities.

Your executive might even be traveling across the country when the person sees the mail on his or her Blackberry. The communication might contain details of the latest response from the Chinese client the person is traveling to meet.

Office Document Imaging in Essence

Office document imaging involves scanning paper documents into digital images. The images are then saved in such formats as JPEG or TIFF. Human viewers can read any text in the document. So if you just want to send a communication, you can simply send the image to your recipient.

On the other hand, if you want to edit the text in the scanned image, you have to perform another operation after scanning. This operation involves making the text recognizable to machines like your computer, and is done using technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).

Making Office Documents Searchable

The conversion of the document image text into machine-readable characters also makes the document index-capable. Indexing involves associating the words in the document, or in the document tags, with the document. Such association makes it possible to retrieve the document using the associated words.

You search for documents containing significant "theme" words that uniquely identify the content you are searching for. In response, the machine displays the particular document or a list of documents containing those theme words.

When your document repository contains thousands of documents, the above kind of search facility becomes highly important for efficient workflow.

Office Document Imaging and Office Workflow

You can scan a paper form into a digital form, convert it into an editable document using OCR, and send it to multiple respondents. The recipients can then fill out the form and send it back to you. (In the reverse direction, you can receive online forms and send them back duly completed.)

Compare the above scenario with one where you receive a paper form in the mail days after it was sent, open the envelope, spread out the multiple pages, fill them up, arrange the filled up sheets, put them into an envelope, seal and stamp it, and arrange to have it posted!

Character recognition conversions enable you to remove any personal material from a document you have received and forward it to another concerned person. You can also add more material, say some images, before forwarding it.

You can add your comments to a scanned and character-recognized document and then send it onwards for further review. In this way, people can collaborate on a task or project, with recorded comments that can be reviewed by others.

Document imaging of paper documents also helps archive paper documents without keeping the paper. Once the office document image has been transferred to reliable media like a WORM disk or microfilm, you can shred the original paper document and send it for recycling. You save on filing cabinets and file room space (and help recycle paper) in this manner.

Conclusion

Office document imaging makes paper documents available online. Paper documents are scanned and "character recognized" and sent over the Internet to concerned persons. The digital text can also be indexed and stored in your content repositories, making it possible to retrieve it later when needed, from anywhere in your enterprise. Office document imaging streamlines many workflow routines that are common in offices.