using Alfresco to manage scanned images

[mbrando]

Hi,

I'm looking for a image management solution for a client. Basically they are scanning contracts and invoices. They only OCR a small amount of information form each document for purposes of searching e.g. invoice number, contract number, date, customer contact info… etc. They currently use a home grown system that can correlate the image file generated by the scanner with the OCR data in a customer DB. That way they can search, find an image then print it or view the it.

Can Alfresco be used to manage scan images like this? They manage a few archives for different business units. Some business units have have over 500,000 scans manged. Can Alfresco use different databases for different business units or would be just create  new install for each one?

I saw something here about OCR:
http://www.alfresco.com/products/solutions/ecm/im/

Does it seem reasonable to replace our current OCR with this? Can it do regions only when scanning same type documents?

Thank you,
Mike

[mrogers]

It sounds like a fairly straight forward use of alfresco document management.    You can associate the images with meta data about the image, do workflow, search, manage permissions for each business unit etc.        There's also a host of other features that may be useful such as version control, image transformation, thumbnailing, tagging etc.    And there's also an image management module you should take a look at.

And as you have seen on the wiki there are OCR plug ins if and when you need them.

You can have a several separate instances of Alfresco for  unit or one big one,  Alfresco will comfortably handle a few million documents so I'd start with a single instance.

[mbrando]

Hi,

Thank You. I think this is worth doing a beta install to investigate this further.

Thanks,
Mike

[jerarquiadp]

Hi…

i don't find documentation in the wiki about OCR plug ins…can you say me where is it?

Thank you….goodbye