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Slide 1: SoftSpot Kodak Scanners and Ademero Content Central: Overview M. David Stone, Senior Contributing Writer Like most scanner and MFP manufacturers, Kodak knows that having a solution to a problem is a stronger selling point than simply having a spiffy piece of hardware. It’s not surprising, then, that the company has been working to emphasize that its scanners work with software solutions. A case in point: the recent announcement of Kodak scanners being certified to work with Ademero Content Central, a document management program with workflow features added. Content Central works with all of Kodak’s desktop scanners, according to Kodak, including both its workgroup and departmental scanners, some of which are inexpensive enough to use as personal document scanners. We decided to take a look at the program in combination with Kodak’s ScanMate i1120 Scanner, which costs $375 street, and is an appropriate choice for anyone who needs to conveniently scan documents from his or her desk. Other certified scanners include the i30, i40, and all of the models in the i1200, i1300, and i1400 series. support for Content Central and its interaction with the scanner comes primarily from Ademero (which says it offers support 24 hours per day, all year long). Kodak handles support for the hardware itself. There are actually two versions of Content Central. One is nominally meant for workgroups, at $299 per seat, with a maximum of nine seats. The other is the Enterprise Edition, meant for 10 or more users at a per seat price that varies with the number of seats. Ademero says the program is scalable for anything from a single practitioner office on up to a large enterprise. As shipped, with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, the database is limited to roughly 700,000 pages, but you can also use Content Central with the full version of SQL Server 2005 or higher, which is limited only by disk size. According to Ademero, most people buy the Enterprise Edition, since the price includes one year of support and upgrades. Support contracts for either version -- including the Enterprise Edition after the first year -- are on a yearly basis, at 20 percent of the initial cost per year. Aside from the first year of support, the two versions differ in two important ways. The Enterprise Edition adds workflow features and uses a different optical character recognition (OCR) engine. Ademero says the Enterprise version’s OCR is faster, more accurate, and more flexible, with a zonal OCR feature that the Workgroup Edition lacks. Both versions of the program are included in the same piece of software, so you can upgrade from Workgroup to Enterprise Editions simply by entering the appropriate keys. I used the Enterprise version in my tests. Basic installation for both the scanner and software is easy. For the scanner, you simply run the automated installation routine from the supplied CD and plug in the USB cable. You can also optionally install the programs that come bundled with the scanner -- PaperPort 11.1 (for document management on an individual PC), OmniPage Pro 15.2 (for OCR on an individual PC), and BizCard 5 (for scanning and managing business cards). I tested the scanner using both Windows XP and Windows Vista. According to Kodak, the drivers and programs also work with Windows 2000. Kodak says you can buy the scanner, software, or both directly from Ademero or through a Kodak dealer. In either case, ©BERTL, Inc. 363 Route 46 West, Suite 100, Fairfield, NJ 07004 USA, All rights reserved. Copying, distributing, or storing of this copyrighted material is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. To order additional copies or to buy a reprint license, telephone BERTL (1) 973 882 0200. The publishers accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions contained in this publication. www.bertl.com
Slide 2: SoftSpot You can ask to receive Content Central on a CD when you buy it, or download the program from the Ademero Web site. Either way, it comes with its own automated installation routine. Anyone can download it to install and run as a demo. To turn the demo into a working version, you enter the appropriate key. Content Central runs as a server application on a computer running Windows XP Professional or, preferably, Windows Server 2003, with IIS installed. In most installations, your document database will go on the same computer, although you can keep the database on any shared drive on your network. One of the nicer touches for Content Central is that you connect to it from a browser, which means you don’t need client software on other computers. Simply enter the server address in your browser (or use a shortcut) to go to the sign on screen. Then type your user name and password to load the program. Administrators can define users within Content Central or take advantage of users already defined in Active Directory. Once the program’s installed, setting it up is straightforward. Reasonably self-explanatory, menu-driven choices let you create a hierarchy of catalogs and folders, create fields for searching for documents (by client or project for example), and set options. Even so, you’ll almost certainly want to take advantage of Ademero to walk you through the steps. The hard part of the setup is deciding how you want to organize the documents and coming up with the best choice of options for searching for documents. In going through the process with Ademero support, there were any number of times when I realized it would have been smarter to do something differently earlier in the setup. According to Ademero, however, the design process is usually handled in two steps, precisely to address this issue. The first step is a proof of concept -- a kind of rough draft. Normally done before buying the program, it gives you a chance to see how the program works, and gives Ademero support staff a chance to get familiar with your needs. The second step is the actual installation, at which point you should be past the kind of false starts I ran into. Once you’ve set up the catalogs and folders, you can move files you already have on disk into the Content Central database, and let users start scanning new documents directly into the database. As an administrator, you can also create workflows and set Content Central to use them automatically. The program can watch multiple folders, for example, and attach workflows to documents scanned to those folders. Similarly, you can use the zonal OCR feature to recognize documents, so the program can assign them to workflows based on the document type. You can also create Qcards, which include barcodes. Users can print the QCards, stack multiple documents together with the appropriate QCard on top of each document, then scan the stack. The barcodes will tell the program how to route each document. As a user, in addition to scanning documents directly into the database, you can find documents by searching through the full text, through key words in defined fields, or by browsing through the folders. Once you’ve found the file you’re looking for, the program gives you options to E-mail the file, Download it (which lets you either open or save the file), Zip and Save the file, and (if the administrator has allowed it) delete the file or assign it to a workflow. Users can also check files out, work on them, and check them in later. If you need to see an earlier version of a document, however, that’s not a problem. Content Central maintains all versions of each document and gives you the choice of searching for all versions or just the newest one. I ran into a couple of minor issues with the way the Kodak driver interacts with Content Central, but the key word is “minor.” In some scans, for example, black text on a white background showed up as white on black. There’s a simple workaround to avoid the problem, however, and Ademero says the issue will soon be fixed in any case. Overall, the combination of the Kodak scanner and Content Central is well worth a look for essentially any size business that scans paper files to disk and needs a document management solution ©BERTL, Inc. 363 Route 46 West, Suite 100, Fairfield, NJ 07004 USA, All rights reserved. Copying, distributing, or storing of this copyrighted material is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. To order additional copies or to buy a reprint license, telephone BERTL (1) 973 882 0200. The publishers accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions contained in this publication. www.bertl.com