Is Alfresco + Plugins Right for Me?

[peter-l]

Hello folks,

I've been researching this for the past few days and was hoping to have some real world advice around my requirements and if Alfresco + some plugins are for me?

Basically I want to create a file share per user where they can scan documents in TIFF/JPG/PDF these will then get picked up and compared against predefined document templates (I think this is called Zonal OCR ?) Once it knows what sort of document it is it will OCR certain fields and save it as a PDF and tag keywords into the PDF that were picked up at the OCR stage.  From there the filename will be generated based on OCR fields eg <letter date> - <company> - <sender> - <type of letter>.pdf i.e. "2013-01-01 - Big Bank - Bloggs - Joe Andrew - Invoice.pdf"  From here it will be put into folders based on company and indexed by a search server (Alfresco or not).

I know the latter part of my query is what Alfresco seems to do best the document management aspect of it, indexing, searching etc, but I am unclear if it also performs the OCR aspect out of the box or does it need plugins.

In short im looking for a Kofax Capture / Abbyy Flexicapture open source solution with form/zonal templates and OCR.

Can anyone give me any advice please?

Many Thanks,
Peter

[mitpatoliya]

AFIK OCR is something which is not available in Alfresco.
But you can easily integrate third party OCR tool like (Kofex) with alfresco.

[peter-l]

Thanks, thats what I was starting to think.  Though im struggling to find an opensource alternative to FlexiCapture/Kofax as they are too expensive (needs Form Based Template Recognition and OCR)

[heiko_robert]

Hi Peter,
my experience is that you will not be happy with the quality of open source OCR products. We integrated a product for < 3000€ which works on PDFs (allready OCRed) with zonal extraction support and nice admin GUI-tools: http://www.pdfprinter.at/de/pdftools-pdfprinter/pdftools-pdfprinter-pdfmdx.html
For OCR support in Alfresco you can use the AutoOCR-Engine: http://www.ecm-market.de/alfresco-module.html?___store=english&manufacturer=70

[ivo_c_costa]

Hi Peter,

I did this same search a few years ago an no opensource ocr was available that matched the capabilities from Kofax or Abbyy. I ended up learning about Abbyy and got everything to work really nicelly.

I did find a work in progress opensource project named OCRopus. It was still in early stages but it did offer layout analisys. Not sure how is it doing these days. Take a look at it, and if you try it please send me some feedback (I haven't had the time to look at it again for a while now)

Regards,
Ivo Costa

[jpotts]

Peter,

I cannot vouch for the quality or service level these guys offer, but I came across them at a conference and thought I'd throw it out there:
http://www.ocr-it.com/

They offer OCR-as-a-service. That might be an interesting alternative to on-premise or open source OCR. Seems like it would be easy enough to write a little action that calls their API.

Just a thought,

Jeff

[rroic]

Hi Peter.

This is a very common use case for Alfesco, a classical document management and indexing project. While executing some rules is an added value, it is easily done with Alfresco.

OCR is not included in Alfresco and probably should never be, since it is a science of its own. Most other ECM venders also use 3rd party systems or have acquired OCR/FEC companies.

From the two you mentioned, I guess Abbyy will be much cheaper for the same features. But, as I said, OCR is a science which depends on your requirements, your language, state of your forms, tolerance for mistakes (use case scenario), etc.

I do not know any details from your case, but my first hint would be Abbyy recognition server, which easily fits the mentioned scenario through Alfresco rules. You can even get by with super affordable Abbyy product that just listen on hot folders, which would in fact be Alfresco CMIS folders. There are many ways…

Keep in mind that most Abbyy components are Windows only, as is the case for Kofax.

Good luck!