Activant Adds Document Imaging

July 1, 2007
Ever since businesses began using computers, the dream of the paperless office has been held up as a goal, but that goal seems to keep receding. This

Ever since businesses began using computers, the dream of the paperless office has been held up as a goal, but that goal seems to keep receding. This hasn't stopped software vendors from trying to push further in that direction.

Distributors using Activant Prophet 21 as their enterprise software solution can now take advantage of a complementary product that could eliminate the rows of filing cabinets that crowd most distributors' offices.

DocMan, a document imaging solution, allows users to store documents digitally, reducing the time and aggravation of traditional paper filing. Designed to act like an electronic filing cabinet, DocMan organizes files into cabinets, folders, documents and pages, with features that enable users to create custom indices with searchable keywords. A document called up with a keyword search can be reproduced in whatever form it was originally received, whether paper, fax or e-mail attachment.

DocMan also helps distributors store internally created documents electronically. Computer output to laser disk (COLD) functionality allows Prophet 21 to communicate with a distributor's imaging server as if it were a printer. COLD stores pick tickets, invoices, etc., and indexes them according to user-defined templates, virtually eliminating the need for manual intervention. An optical character recognition (OCR) module converts bit-mapped images into text documents. OCR can streamline the process of filing mailed or handwritten documents, as it batch captures and indexes them according to your templates.

DocMan's annotation capabilities — including underscoring, single line text, electronic “sticky notes,” and the ability to block out confidential information — help distributors maintain control over their documents.

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