Developers building document management systems, enhancing off-the-shelf software, or looking to avoid unnecessary licensing fees choose Atalasoft for their imaging needs. The company provides innovative image-viewing, annotating and processing technology that improves the way people work with documents over the Web. Its products power more than a thousand document management enterprise content management and electronic medical record applications used by millions of end users worldwide.

“We work very hard to ensure adding imaging and PDF support is extremely easy for our customers,” said Lou Franco, vice president of DotImage Product Strategy at Atalasoft. “DotImage is the only comprehensive imaging toolkit built for .NET that offers unlimited deployments, so you don’t have to track the number of clients and servers you are deploying to.”

Atalasoft’s DotImage .NET imaging SDKs can be used to view, capture and annotate images and PDFs. It is the only full-featured .NET imaging SDK that is royalty-free for desktop applications. With the exception of GlyphReader and ISIS, all add-ons are also royalty-free for desktop applications. Server deployments require only a per-server license; unlimited server deployments are available to ISVs for a fixed annual fee.

“Our customers like DotImage because it integrates with .NET and Visual Studio,” said Franco. “We have licensing models that don’t make them track runtimes, and when a developer calls for support, they talk to an engineer who knows a lot about .NET and our products.”

DotImage is available in three editions: Photo, Photo Pro and Document Imaging. Franco explained that Atalasoft decided to offer DotImage Photo at no charge as of September 2010 so that all developers could have access to basic imaging format support, more than a hundred imaging processing commands, plus Windows Forms controls for viewing images in desktop applications. The SDK is free and there are no licensing costs associated with the deployments; paid support contracts are available.
DotImage Photo Pro and DotImage Document Imaging provide additional formats like RAW, TIFF and PDF. They also offer more advanced processing options, ASP.NET Web controls, Silverlight controls, and annotation controls for the desktop and the Web. Specifically, DotImage Photo Pro offers all the features of DotImage Photo plus advanced raster image processing for the photographic and pre-press industries.

DotImage Document Imaging delivers all the capabilities of DotImage Photo Pro and provides additional features for capturing, processing, viewing and marking up documents. DotImage Document Imaging is ideal for developers who want to convert image formats to PDF, manipulate the pages of a PDF, or read or write PDF metadata or bookmarks. Developers can use the controls to provide thumbnail views of document pages, add standards-compliant annotation authoring and editing capabilities to their applications, and more.

Using the PDF Reader add-on, it is possible to convert a PDF to an image or view and annotate a PDF using any of Atalasoft’s controls. DotImage Document Imaging also supports PDF/A and encrypted PDF. With Atalasoft’s Searchable PDF add-on to OCR, developers can create a two-layer PDF with the original image and recognized text.
Atalasoft also offers add-ons for TWAIN and ISIS scanning, barcode reading and writing, OCR/ICR, and advanced formats like JPEG2000, JBIG2 and DWG.

DotImage has always been targeted to .NET. Its assemblies work in Azure, SharePoint and all .NET GUI frameworks, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Forms. Thanks to its close relationship with Microsoft, Atalasoft was able to offer support for Visual Studio and .NET 4.0 concurrently with Microsoft’s releases. Atalasoft was also the first to market with a .NET imaging SDK, AJAX Document/Imaging viewers, and Silverlight annotations.

“If you want to create a document or imaging management system in Visual Studio, DotImage can help,” said Franco. “You can incorporate images and PDFs, process them, view and annotate them, read text or barcode from them, and capture images from scanners.”

Envōc, a custom software developer and application hosting company, recently completed an AJAX Web viewing project for the Louisiana State Land Office using DotImage Document Imaging. The goal was to get millions of records from the Louisiana Purchase off of FileNet, which Envōc successfully accomplished while saving its clients thousands of dollars per year.

What’s Next
Atalasoft plans to release DotImage 10.0 in Q2 2011. Although Franco declined to provide details, he said the new release will be more tightly integrated with .NET, and viewing components are currently being updated so they will be easier to use. Customers can also look forward to significant enhancements across the DotImage product line. Atalasoft will also release some “major’ new add-ons later this year.

In the meantime, developers are creating compelling imaging applications that save time and money, such as medical x-ray Web image viewers, enterprise resource planning systems, custom healthcare imaging/scanning solutions, document management systems, healthcare medical records management software, and professional digital photography applications.

For more information about Atalasoft and its solutions, visit www.atalasoft.com.