#ephesoft

Kodak Alaris Wins Award for Innovative Property Management Solution from Ephesoft

24th November, 2021: Ephesoft, Inc., a leader in intelligent document processing (IDP), automation and data enrichment solutions, presented Kodak Alaris with an award for the Most Innovative Property Management Solution. The accolade was bestowed during Ephesoft’s Hackathon event, where partners were invited to come up with a creative use case for Ephesoft Transact IDP platform. After six weeks,…

Last year Nuxeo had a guest blogger from Ephesoft write about the new rules of advanced capture and enterprise content management. 

For decades, the original concept of document capture was, quite simply, scan to archive:a pre-processing step in which documents were scanned, some key index fields extracted, and then ingested as a record in case they were needed for future reference. More recently, an emphasis has been placed on scan to process: capturing documents earlier in their lifecycle and enabling electronic workflow processes that improve business efficiency while reducing paper handling and errors. Today’s legacy document capture vendors still typically operate under these old concepts.

In contrast, advanced document capture systems have advanced, in tandem with advanced Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems, to the stage where they can now serve as an invaluable contributor to an organization’s business strategy. This new third stage of maturity, scan to insight, recognizes the enormous amount of intelligence that can be harvested from the unstructured content and the cadence of transactions that documents represent.

Unlike legacy document capture tools that limit their focus on simply finding a document again when it’s needed or accelerating individual business processes, advanced document capture and ECM team up to utilize data gleaned from documents can be used for business analysis and informed executive decision making.

Under the new scan to insight model, your organization realizes all the long-standing benefits of archiving and process automation, plus the vital new ability to analyze all of the information formerly trapped in a non-structured format. Instead of capturing a few indexing fields simply to find the document or perform a transaction, advanced capture can be used to extract relevance and meaning from all of the text within a document set. Moreover, the actual history and cadence of transactional documents (how and when they are submitted; actions performed upon them; approvals and database lookups) can also be ingested by Enterprise Content Management platforms for further analysis.

We are finding that more and more organizations are looking at advanced capture technologies as a key component of effective ECM. In fact, many of Ephesoft’s larger implementations have the document classification and data extraction functionalities embedded in the organization’s Content Management platform, including several implementations with the Nuxeo Platform. For these companies, capture is not merely a front end attachment for a content repository, documents are ingested throughout workflow processes, reflecting the fact that not all needed and available documents are created or available at the inception of a business process.

For example, with a mortgage approval process, a loan originator may obtain a credit application, w-2, and tax records from the potential borrow to kick off the process. Later on appraisals, property inspections, good faith estimates and similar supporting documents are often required. Rather than wait for all corresponding documentation to be collected and batch captured, a lender can bring documents into an already active workflow. The added benefit is that by capturing all of the information contained in these documents (either at the point the document is introduced into the content management system, or later on after the workflow is complete) the organization has a wealth of additional data to use for decision making, including potential customer/prospect marketing, portfolio health analysis, investment decisions, compliance and fraud detection.

It seems to be an accepted standard that less than 20% of corporate information is in a structured format. Even less (a 2012 IDC study estimates less than 0.5%) of available information is subject to analysis. By integrating advanced capture technology with advanced Enterprise Content Management, companies can dramatically increase the available pool of data—and in many cases data only available to them, representing valuable intellectual property—for improving process cycle times and making better business decisions.

Our partner, Nuxeo, blogs about how document capture can be a critically important part of any system that uses a content repository. They also mention how another partner of Netlocity’s, Ephesoft, offers an excellent solution for document capture, data extraction, and built-in support for exporting documents via CMIS. 

What is Ephesoft?

Ephesoft (in this case the Enterprise Edition) offers “intelligent document capture”. It provides the ability to scan physical and electronic documents, automatically process them for arbitrary content (ICR, OCR, images, etc.), and export/report on the results.

What is CMIS?

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is an open standard that allows different content repositories to interoperate. Specifically, CMIS defines an abstraction layer for document management using web protocols.

To be clear, the support for CMIS in Ephesoft means that it can export content to anyrepository that properly supports CMIS with no special tooling or integration. Nuxeo happens to have excellent CMIS support so this kind of integration is really easy.

If you would like to find out more about connecting content management applications using CMIS, watch our webinar where CMIS visionary Jeff Potts and I discuss CMIS and its value.

Ok, how does it work?

Here’s a short rundown on how to capture documents directly in Nuxeo using Ephesoft and CMIS. Note that in this example Ephesoft is running on Windows so any file paths are in Windows format.

Set up Ephesoft

You can find a complete tutorial to setting up document capture here:

http://www.ephesoft.com/wiki/index.php?title=Tutorial

I will just summarize the basic steps and follow with some helpful tips:

Create a “batch class”.

Define a “document type”.

Define the “index fields”.

Define the “key value extraction” for those fields.

Tip: I recommend using the Advanced Extraction in most cases, as opposed to the Key-Value Extraction, because it’s more explicit and intuitive.  With Advanced Extraction you visually define the explicit capture area with the label (green) and the field (red) like so:

Here’s a helpful video about how to setup Advanced Extraction:

http://wiki.ephesoft.com/advanced-key-value-extraction

Tip: Ephesoft uses “confidence” scores to determine if a document matches a particular Document Type, and if the fields match or not.  If something does not match, user intervention is generally required.  Confidence scores are not a percentage but an index that is capped at 40. For basic testing and development it’s perfectly acceptable to set the confidence score to 0 to avoid any human intervention.

Tip: If you’re accessing the Ephesoft UI from somewhere other than the host you may find that document images to not show up. To fix this you need to modify the file “C:\Ephesoft\Application\WEB-INF\classes\META-INF\dcma-batch\dcma-batch.properties”. Set the property “batch.base_http_url” to match the IP address or hostname of the Ephesoft server.

Set up Nuxeo

You need to create a folderish document into which Ephesoft will export the documents.

You may need to create a new document type in Nuxeo to support the information coming from Ephesoft. This depends on whether or not you want to reuse an existing document type – in this case beware of any events/automation for that document type – or create a new one to decouple the documents coming from Ephesoft from any existing content. In the latter case this gives you complete control over what happens after the documents arrive, without affecting any existing business logic.

For security reasons you may want to create a user specifically for Ephesoft to use, with appropriate permissions so the user doesn’t have full access to the whole repository.

Integrate Nuxeo

To integrate Nuxeo and Ephesoft via CMIS you only need to complete two steps:

Configure the CMIS plug-in.

Configure the field mapping.

Configure CMIS plug-in

Use the Ephesoft Admin Client to perform these steps.

From the “Batch Class Management” tab, open your batch class.

Select the “Module” tab.

Double-click “CMIS-Export”.

Then click the Edit button to make the necessary changes. Here is an example:

Configure the following options:

Cmis Root Folder Name – this is the folder you created in Nuxeo to receive the documents. The path should be relative to the repository name.

Cmis Upload File Extension – can be “pdf” or “tiff”.

Cmis Server URL – Use the format “http://server:port/nuxeo/atom/cmis”.

Cmis Server User Name – Nuxeo username that has write access to the “Cmis Root Folder Name”.

Cmis Server User Password – password for the Nuxeo user.

Cmis Server Repository Id – the name of the Nuxeo repository, usually “default”.

Cmis Server Switch ON/OFF – make sure this is set to “ON”.

Do not enter a leading slash.

Do not enter a trailing slash.

Click “OK” the save the edit, and be sure to click “Apply” to permanently commit the changes. Finally click “Validate” and then “Deploy Workflow” any time you make plug-in changes.

Configure Field Mapping

Locate the file “C:\Ephesoft\SharedFolders\BC4\cmis-plugin-mapping\DLF-Attribute-mapping.properties”. Here you must define the mapping between your Ephesoft document type and the corresponding Nuxeo document type. Ephesoft values are on the left, Nuxeo on the right.

Try it out!

When you configured your batch class, you defined a folder where Ephesoft will expect to find documents to import (the “UNC Folder” property). Drop a PDF or TIFF in this folder and Ephesoft will work its magic. After a few minutes you’ll end up with a document in Nuxeo at the path you configured. Easy peasy!

Tip: If something doesn’t work, open the “Batch Instance Management” tab in the Ephesoft Admin client, locate the failing batch, click the “>>” button and then the “Troubleshoot” button.

This allows you to download a copy of all the logs and involved documents for that batch. Generally the Application Log contains the most useful information.

Tip: A failing batch can be restarted using the “Restart” button; this restarts the failing step, not the entire batch! If the CMIS export isn’t working, you can easily make changes and retry just the export.

Read more Nuxeo blogs here!

Netlocity will now offer Ephesoft products on GSA Schedule

La Plata, MD – Netlocity VA Inc., a Maryland-headquartered document management solutions provider, has announced a GSA partnership with Ephesoft Inc., an industry leader in providing Smart Capture™ advanced document solutions.

In 2011, Netlocity was awarded a GSA Schedule 70 Contract. Since then, Netlocity has successfully grown sales with federal agencies. The GSA award allows federal government agencies to easily work with pre-approved vendors, because they know vendors have to adhere to the regulations stipulated by GSA.

“Ephesoft is one of the fastest growing intelligent document capture software platforms on the market and is leading the industry in technology advancements and delivery to the cloud, “said Craig Hennessee, President of Netlocity. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to offer federal agencies additional document solutions while also strategically ensuring that new processes and business continues to be cost-effective and as efficient as possible.”

By combining proven technologies with industry expertise and best practices, Ephesoft creates a wide range of sector and departmental solutions that help organizations manage vital content and information and fuel greater operational efficiencies. Netlocity’s expertise with federal government agency sector offers a path for increased sales of Ephesoft software products.

About Ephesoft Ephesoft is headquartered in Laguna Hills, California with additional offices in Dallas, Tampa and St. Louis. Episoft’s global operations for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) territory is in Reading, England. Ephesoft’s focus on efficiency and reliability has developed the next generation of intelligent document capture in a simple and cost-effective application. By using open standards and web-based software, Ephesoft offers extreme flexibility and accessibility for a wide range of customers. Ephesoft’s superior classification technology allows businesses and organizations to automate and streamline mailroom processing and other document-based business processes. Ephesoft software captures and extracts data from unstructured documents with ease, adding another layer of efficiency and cost-savings for its customers.

Ephesoft Sponsors 100th Annual Mortgage Banking Show

Laguna Hills, CA (PRWEB) September 28, 2013

Ephesoft Inc., the leader in providing advanced cloud-ready capture solutions, announced today that it will again sponsor the annual MBA Convention and Expo…

As some of you might already know, we held a party on the 21st of February to celebrate our Platinum Partner status with Alfresco (an open source platform for social content management) and Ephesoft (an advanced open source cloud-ready capture solutions). 

Here is the video from the party.

And here are the pictures! :)

We would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone that came and hope to see all of you again at our next event.

What you might not know about Zaizi

This party was a special event for Zaizi, as it was our way of saying thank you to our clients, partners and most importantly, to thank our dedicated staff. It has been an exciting few years since Zaizi started in 2006. From the start, Zaizi’s vision was to provide enterprise standard open source technologies for organizations of all sizes.

We strive to ensure they gain more value from their applications, systems and databases. This was even further motivated by the fact the Coalition Program for Government stated in their mission statement that

We will create a level playing field for open-source software and enable large ICT projects to be split into small £100m components… The days of the mega IT contract are over, we will need you to rethink the way you approach projects, making them smaller, off the shelf and open source where possible.

- Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, 2nd December 2010.

The open source business model that works

As we’ve known Alfresco for a while now, we are proud to be associated with them, as they understand why system integrators like Zaizi, is important to the open source business model, as mentioned by Matt Asay back in 2008 in this article.

We also have offices across the globe, allowing us to keep costs low for our clients where needed whilst maintaining the quality of our delivery.  

We are technically literate. And we are not salesman

Our partnership with Alfresco and Ephesoft at Platinum level are a good testament to how a team of techy guys who are skilled engineers, can also succeed in this business. In fact we feel it is exactly for this reason that we have achieved our successes to date. Long gone are the days where a snazzy sales pitch would seal the deal.

As Don Tapscott (New York Times Best Selling Author and world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impact of technology and advises business and government leaders around the world, who I've interviewed a few years ago) once said, organizations in the socially connected web era, are becoming 'naked' and "you do well for doing good" (see video below) and its changing corporate & procurement behavior, as the collective community and audience spread good opinions as well as bad.

Through years of experience of being a system integrator to many types of organizations, we know customers don’t want to talk to a salesman. They want to talk to people who understand the facilitation and technical challenges of owning their own codes and stretching its capabilities to the max. And this is what Zaizi does best.

New website

One of the most amazing fact about Zaizi is, it has grown without the presence of a website!  However, we just recently setup our website and now we already have 13 blog posts, namely one our most popular blog post about gamification in Alfresco, disqus integration in Liferay blogs, adding a diff tool to Alfresco Share interface, working with Alfresco from Adobe Creative Suite, chat integration for Alfresco Share andHow to integrate Alfresco and Liferay? - Step1 Installation and configuration.

Vibrant social media communities & new ways to keep up-to-date with Zaizi

We’ve also setup some vibrant social media communities through two of our main engagement platforms, on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Don’t miss out on stuff that we are working on even before they hit the Alfresco Add-ons market and Liferay Marketplace by following these our communities online.

You can also sign up to our newsletter to get all our news delivered straight to your mailbox.

Zaizi in the coming months

After the excitement of becoming platinum partners for two open source services, we are looking to expand our team across the globe and setting up R&D Zaizi Labs to develop useful tools and solutions for our customers.

We will also be running online webinars in the near future. One in particular is our Alfresco webinar, “Implementing Alfresco as a Content Platform”. This webinar will  demonstrate how a Alfresco has been developed and used as an enterprise content application framework. You can sign up for it here.