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What things should be considered
when selecting an imaging system?
Selecting
the right document imaging system can be an exciting task. There
are many aspects to consider to make sure it fits your organization's
needs. Using the expertise gathered from over twelve years of creating
document imaging solutions for our customers, we've assembled a
list of things to look for, including some essentials and some nice
extras.
Retrieval
Once documents
have been entered and indexed within an imaging system, rapid retrieval
is a must. Users need to be able to use common sense tools to find
any document within the system based on the most logical method. In
some cases, this means using text, in other cases it would be based
on the document folder or index field information. Whatever the method,
document retrieval must be simple and user-friendly.
Retrieval
is where a powerful indexing system pays off. Users who are familar
with a document's text should be able to use that information to
find what they want. Some systems can only find pages based on "key
words" found on the page. This method is not always helpful because
the person who selected the key words is probably often not the
person searching for the document. To be truly useful, a document
imaging system must be able to use full-text retrieval.
Simlarly,
using the document name and folder view to find a document is also
nice, but not always the best method. Once an imaging system contains
thousands or millions of pages, folder trees become more complicated
and document names become less unique. To assist searches, an imaging
system needs to combine different criteria into one comprehensive
search.
The
same is true for index field information. A full-featured imaging
system will have user-definable template fields. Index field searches
will allow a user to comb through millions of records in seconds
to find the document necessary. Having the flexibility to combine
template searches along with text and document names offers users
the greatest control of their documents. A good imaging system makes
retrieval of relevant documents fast, easy and efficient.
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