Taking up the chore of scanning paper documents into SharePoint is not as simple as it may seem. I had a call with a prospect the other day that oversimplified the task, and had the mindset “we buy a scanner and click go”. I would argue that the most important piece of capturing documents and sending them to SharePoint is planning how you will search for them. So, in your planning, ask the following:
- What columns are necessary and how will I gather the index data from documents?
- Is full text OCR possible?
- What fields can be gleaned during the capture process and which can be populated later?
In the planning process, it is absolutely imperative to plan for the utmost in search flexibility, and I almost always encourage OCR to a searchable PDF. Why? Full-text search is the insurance policy. Say you have an audit or a legal issue, and you are looking for that needle in a haystack, which doesn’t happen to be a column. Take the planning process seriously, as once the capture process begins, it is almost impossible to change all your existing documents.
