May 2006

Datacap Wins AIIM "Best Of Show" Award

SOA Taskmaster Web Service Wins Forms Processing Category

Datacap debuted its latest innovation, Taskmaster Web Service, at the annual AIIM Expo in Philadelphia. On May 21, AIIM E-DOC, AIIM's magazine that covers ECM technologies, awarded Taskmaster Web Service a coveted "Best Of Show" in the Forms Processing category.

Taskmaster Web Service is a flexible new method to deliver capture capabilities, including image processing, recognition, validation, and export formatting, hosted in a SOA-enabled Web Service, making interoperability and integration with other capture systems convenient and simple.

"We are delighted that Taskmaster Web Service has been selected for the prestigious AIIM Best of Show Award," said Scott Blau, CEO of Datacap. "This award confirms that the industry-wide trend toward SOA-enabling solutions will extend into document capture. It also recognizes Datacap's continued innovation and leadership."

The Best of Show Award is presented to the Enterprise Content Management hardware and software technologies on exhibit at the AIIM 2006 Conference and Exhibition that demonstrate exceptional capabilities and quality, and show evidence of significant ROI (Return on Investment) potential. A panel of 22 industry experts evaluated the products.

What is Taskmaster Web Service?

Capture "Superstore" Available On Demand

Taskmaster Web Service decouples the document capture processing functions, or "engines," such as image processing, OCR, ICR, validations, and release formatting, from the capture platform. This means that users can now take advantage a wide selection of best-of-breed capture engines. Furthermore, not only users of Datacap Taskmaster, but users of Kofax Ascent Capture, FileNet Capture, as well as internally-developed capture solutions can now extend their solutions cost effectively.

Like Taskmaster, with its reusable rules, Taskmaster Web Service is an open, procedural rules environment. This means that capture processing can be added via standard Microsoft VBScript actions. Once loaded into the Service, new recognition engines or specialized export capabilities, for example, are then available to all clients accessing the Service.

A practical use of the Web Service is a distributed capture application with centralized recognition. Each remote location can run autonomously from the others, while still sharing the recognition resources made available in a centralized Service.

"Datacap continually leverages key technology developments to provide maximum flexibility to organizations looking to increase data-entry and document-indexing efficiency and accuracy," said Datacap CEO Scott Blau. "Taskmaster Web Service brings a whole new level of flexibility. Users can take advantage of Datacap's procedural rules engine to control document identification, field recognition, data validation, and export formatting - all without any programming."

Simplified rules administration - without programming - means less administrative overhead for a capture application. Centralized, Web-service based processing also makes it easier to monitor multiple capture applications efficiently sharing the same resources. As user needs change, organizations can add the capture pieces they need via the Web Service. Taskmaster Web Service integrates with third party capture platforms and can easily provide added capabilities, saving organizations the expense and effort of replacing their existing capture investment.

An early adopter of the Taskmaster Web Service has built an application that sends fax images to the Service to capture addressee information with advanced recognition. The fax management application was developed independently as a Microsoft .NET executable. The functionality for natural handwriting recognition was added with only a few lines of code to call the Web Service and interpret the results.

Availability

Taskmaster Web Service is available immediately. For pricing and system requirements, contact Datacap at sales@datacap.com.

Advanced Document Classification

Integration with Taskmaster Web Service

Datacap has partnered with Content Analyst Company (www.contentanalyst.com) to offer advanced document classification and search capabilities. By combining Datacap's expertise in document capture and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) with Content Analyst's advanced search and classification technologies, the companies will help users reduce the effort required to sort and prep documents for capture.

The companies previewed the integration at the recent AIIM Conference and Expo in Philadelphia. Hosted in the newly released Datacap Taskmaster Web Service, attendees saw a batch of scanned resumes automatically separated into individual documents and then classified by job category - without the use of separators or operator intervention. Taskmaster Web Service won the "Best of Show" Award in the document capture category.

Content Analyst's technologies are based on advanced search capabilities similar to those used by Google and other Internet search engines. When hosted in Taskmaster Web Service they can be used both to match specific document types and to build a user's search repository for context sensitive searches. Datacap and Content Analyst Company plan to offer these capabilities in the near future.

AIIM "Cycle Faster" Program Raises $20,000 for LAF

Datacap, Sponsors, AIIM attendees, Friends and Families Worked Together to Benefit Cancer Research

Big thanks to all who participated, donated or supported Datacap's "Cycle Faster" program. Datacap organized a long list of ECM industry sponsors at the 2006 AIIM Exposition in Philadelphia (May 16-18), and, together, we raised nearly $20,000 from pledges and sponsor donations for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The program featured a Bikeathon on May 15 in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and cycling Time Trials in the Datacap booth throughout the AIIM Exposition at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

"Cycle Faster" Sponsors

Industry sponsors joining Datacap and the AIIM Conference Expo included Bowe Bell + Howell, Stellent, Fujitsu, FileNet, Kodak, Panasonic, ABBYY, Canon, Captaris, DocuWare, EMC Captiva, Hyland OnBase, Kofax, Oce, Parascript, Snowbound, and Soluziona. Cycling equipment and support was provided by Bicycle Therapy, a popular bike shop in Philadelphia (www.bicycletherapy.com).

Cycle Faster Bikeathon - Drenched in Fun 

On Monday, May 15, at 5 PM, the Cycle Faster Bikeathon departed from Philadelphia's Art Museum and followed the Schuylkill River up to the Falls Bridge and doubled back along the river to the Art Museum. A passing rain shower and a vibrant rainbow added to the excitement as AIIM attendees and exhibitors ran or cycled the scenic course. Participants included representatives from Canon, DocuWare, Snowbound, Kodak, Stellent, Bowe Bell + Howell, Oce, Panasonic and EMC Captiva, as well as AIIM attendees. Afterwards, the celebration continued at the Bishop's Collar pub, just off the park, where Datacapers, sponsors and "Cycle Faster" supporters mingled and marveled at a beautiful spring night in Philadelphia.

Cycle Faster Time Trials

The cycling took on a competitive spirit in the Datacap booth through the AIIM Expo as sponsors and attendees took a turn on a Litespeed racing bike attached to a virtual trainer for a challenging one-mile ride. As the show progressed, the competition grew furious as racer's dug down deep to try and shave seconds off each new record.

Here's the final results: The Best Men's time was posted by Ian Goodwin (2:15:3), racing for Bowe Bell + Howell. The Best Women's performance was set by Betsy Kinkead for Stellent (2:47:9).  Best Overall Team score was posted by the riders from FileNet.

As a way of thanking all those who made pledges, rode in the bikeathon or time trials, or visited the Datacap booth, Datacap held a drawing to win a sleek Felt F-4C road bike, named "Best Bike in 2006" by Bicycle Magazine. The winner of the bike is Fred B. from GlaxoSmithKline.

See Photos or Donate

The "Cycle Faster" program remains open for donations through June 9. If you'd like to see some highlights from the events, or make a donation to the Lance Armstroing Foundation, visit http://cyclefaster.datacap.com.

Last Call: Datacap - Fujitsu - IOMA Survey on Accounts Payable

Help Datacap Complete the first in-depth look at Scanning and Capture for Accounts Payable

If you're in AP, then we hope you'll take a few minutes to complete a survey designed to reveal trends in scanning and capture for Accounts Payable.  Sponsored by Datacap, Fujitsu and IOMA (Institute of Management Administration), the survey addresses the growing interest in of invoice data capture and digital archiving.

All those who participate will be entered into a drawing for a Fujitsu ScanSnap and will receive a free copy of the Survey Report, which will be published in early June.

Complete the survey.

Save The Date for Datacap's First Annual User Conference

Join Us in Tarrytown, NY September 25 and 26

Datacap is hosting the first annual User Conference on September 25 and 26 at the historic Tarrytown House in Tarrytown New York, near our corporate headquarters. More details will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, save the date. 

If you'd like to make a presentation, suggest an idea for a session or help shape the agenda with an idea for a session or event, contact us at marketing@datacap.com.