Recap From Recent Webcast – “Why Captiva Over the Competition?”

Why Captiva over the competition?  Well there are lots good reasons (both technical and business) which I covered in a recent online Webcast. If you missed the Webcast, here’s the link to where you can listen to the recording.

Webcast: Why Captiva Over the Competition?

Enterprise capture defined

One of the areas I talked about in the Webcast is this notion of enterprise capture and how we define it. In a nutshell enterprise capture is about using a common document capture platform to capture documents for use by different departments, people, and processes.  Use of the software often spans across the entire enterprise supporting centralized mailroom/back office capture and distributed capture (front office, mobile workers, many devices).

There are a several key elements that make up a “true” enterprise capture product. Key elements would include:

• Scalability – High volume processing of forms and documents. The ability to scale and handle large volumes of pages. One thing to keep in mind is what volume a single server can handle. Anyone can claim supporting high volume environments by simply adding more servers. But is that really the best approach? If one vendor can handle X volume with 2 servers, but the other vendor requires 5 servers (this is all hypothetical), wouldn’t my support and maintenance cost be more if in fact I had to use 5 servers? I’d probably opt for the vendor who can do the same workload but with less servers.
• Speed (it’s blazing fast) – Time is money. And in some cases documents being captured are time sensitive. So the more effective I can breakdown and distribute the work, the better off I will likely be.
• Flexibility– Providing lots of flexibility so that capture is well-integrated into your processes and systems, and the process flows meet  your business needs.  Nothing is more painful than finding out later that the software really can’t do what you need it to do and being forced to add unnecessary steps to a capture process.
• Intelligent capture – Intelligent document classification and data extraction. This is very important! Some of the biggest savings will come from eliminating manually classifying documents and keying data. Manual document sorting and keying data  is very slow.
• Integration – Open architecture, with modern SDKs (.NET, Web services) for building custom modules and integrating with other systems is very important.
• Architecture that supports the full spectrum of capturing documents (distributed, centralized, scanners, MFPs, and other digital devices)
• Modular / services oriented – if you take a closer look at some vendors who claim to have an enterprise capture offering, you are likely to find that it is not in fact modular. Rather all the functionality gets delivered in one application.

These are just a few key points to consider when evaluating an enterprise capture product. Keep in mind enterprise capture is not just associated with high volume implementations.  Sometimes we get caught up on this notion that unless a company is doing very high volumes, than enterprise capture is not for them. This is really not the case. There are many requirements that are part of the evaluation and selection process, that go beyond what your document volumes will be.

Independent competitive report shows how Captiva is better

The other topic of discussion during the Webcast is  a new independent study that is out which shows how Captiva is better than another competitor in the market.  The vendor (Wipro) performed a series of lab based test looking at all key areas – setup, production, management, and design. Captiva scored better in all areas than the competitor. The recorded Webcast will give you a good overview of the highlights from the report.

Enterprise capture made easy

This is really about delivering the best of both worlds. We’ve taken the flexibility and powerful capabilities of Captiva InputAccel, and added a simple drag-and-drop capture process design application to make it easy to set up and deploy a capture process with the new InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer application.  You can read more about this new application in one of my earlier post.

So there you have it…enterprise capture defined, the key enterprise capture technical requirements, how Captiva is the better choice according to the latest independent competitive report, and now enterprise capture made easy with the new InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer.

-Bill-

2010 Brings a New Name and New Look

So if you have followed me over the past year, I started this blog back in late 2008.  I have to say last year was a bit of an experiment on my part. I started the blog since I wanted to experience how blogging could provide another effective source for communicating with customers, partners, and employees. What I did learn is that people like honest opinions.  Nothing I wrote about last was really all that controversial, but picking the right topics like writing about the Kofax partner survey poll, really get people talking.  What was great is I didn’t have to make it up. Someone else started the poll and I simply reported on it!

The challenge that I had in trying to frequently update my blog was time.  There is just not enough of it. But 2010 I plan to set aside a certain amount of time each week to the blog. With that said, I’m very committed to this blog and plan to push harder than ever to write about interesting topics in my area of expertise – document capture, process improvement, etc.

But one of my first order of business for this year was a new look and name.  The old blog theme did really do it for me, so I’ve changed the appearance a bit (but the content will be as good as ever). I also changed the name of my blog. “Bill’s Blog” is really not all that exciting and doesn’t mean all that much. So I’ve changed the name of my blog to “InformationCrunch”.  The topics I will write about will continue to have an angle around how companies can better capture, process, and mange the information in their company, so InformationCrunch seems to be a “better fit” to what I generally write about.  Then again, I guess anything is better than Bill’s Blog 🙂

Latest Forester Report Names EMC Documentum as Leader in Enterprise Content Management Market

The latest Forester Wave report is out, and Forrester Research has positioned the EMC Documentum ECM suite a Leader in the enterprise content management (ECM) market.

The report states that “EMC continues to build on its ECM suite leadership, with a broad range of capabilities and strengths in document management, document imaging and capture and records management.  The vendor continues to make significant advances with focus on development and deployment acceleration, integration enhancements to third-party applications and UI improvements.”

You can download a free copy of report from www.emc.com/forresterecm.

Videos Highlighting New Captiva InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer

Back in December I wrote about the new EMC Captiva graphical capture design tool and how it delivers the power of enterprise capture made easy.

If you have taken a look at this announcement, I wanted to point a couple videos that are available for viewing. The first one is a demo that shows the InputAccel CaptureFlow Designer application in action.

The second video is a quick video talking about the benefits and various use cases where partners and customers will find this new application very useful.

As I noted in the earlier posting, the new application will enable system integrators, value-added resellers, IT developers, and power users to build document capture processes in just a few hours, at a substantially lower cost, without any coding.  And it is part of the Captiva InputAccel product at no additional cost.

Key Findings from New Document Capture Survey by AIIM

A new survey from AIIM is now available on EMC.com.  The report survey polled 882 information and records management professionals, IT staff and line of business executives, looking at the issues and potential benefits of  different document capture approaches, and considers the potential Return on Investment (ROI) across various  application areas. A free copy of the report is available at: http://www.emc.com/CaptureStrategies

Some of the findings included:

• Centralized in-house scanning and mailroom scanning are set for considerable growth compared to outsourced scanning and capture.
• Knowledge management in the form of improved searchability of business documents is the highest driver for scanning, closely followed by compliance and business process improvement.
• Forty-six percent of users report ROI within 12 months with two-thirds seeing returns within 18 months.

It  is safe to say that companies continue to find document capture one of the safest ECM (Enterprise Content Management) investments.

What do you think? Has your company invested in document capture? Are the benefits what you had anticipated?

-Bill-