So, when I look at all the customers I have worked with, and examine the feature sets that are most applied in a SharePoint environment, there are two that stand out: Routing Sheets and Advanced Data Extraction. I would say 90% of all my customers use these features in some way to make the process automated and efficient. So, what are they? How do they work? Outlines below:
Routing Sheets
I have mentioned these quite a bit on the BLOG, and they lend themselves nicely to distributed scanning from MFPs/Copiers, Faxs, network scanners, etc. A routing sheet is a combo of barcodes and/or checkboxes that can allow the end users to index prior to the scan. The information can then be translated into metadata. This feature requires Optical Mark Recognition, or OMR. So make sure your scanning product supports OMR. Below are some samples:
Advanced Data Extraction (ADE)
Many of the solutions out there today support what is called Zoning, or the ability to pick information from a specific area on a page and enter it as metadata. ADE takes that to a whole new level and provides the ability to match patterns and extract information. So if a customer needs an order number that is 6 digits, and always starts with a 7, the extraction engine can search the whole page and extract. This is a huge time saver, and allows the utmost in automation and verification of data.
