What things should be considered when selecting an imaging system?

Selecting the right document imaging system can be an exciting task. There are many aspects to consider to make sure it fits your organization's needs. Using the expertise gathered from over twelve years of creating document imaging solutions for our customers, we've assembled a list of things to look for, including some essentials and some nice extras.

Retrieval

Once documents have been entered and indexed within an imaging system, rapid retrieval is a must. Users need to be able to use common sense tools to find any document within the system based on the most logical method. In some cases, this means using text, in other cases it would be based on the document folder or index field information. Whatever the method, document retrieval must be simple and user-friendly.

Retrieval is where a powerful indexing system pays off. Users who are familar with a document's text should be able to use that information to find what they want. Some systems can only find pages based on "key words" found on the page. This method is not always helpful because the person who selected the key words is probably often not the person searching for the document. To be truly useful, a document imaging system must be able to use full-text retrieval.

Similarly, using the document name and folder view to find a document is also nice, but not always the best method. Once an imaging system contains thousands or millions of pages, folder trees become more complicated and document names become less unique. To assist searches, an imaging system needs to combine different criteria into one comprehensive search.

The same is true for index field information. A full-featured imaging system will have user-definable template fields. Index field searches will allow a user to comb through millions of records in seconds to find the document necessary. Having the flexibility to combine template searches along with text and document names offers users the greatest control of their documents. A good imaging system makes retrieval of relevant documents fast, easy and efficient.