Despite its intention to sell off its document imaging business, Kodak plans to continue to advance the software while buyers are being sought and vetted, according to Rod Hughes, director of global alliances for document imaging at Kodak.
In the Sept. 12 SPTechReport, it was reported that Kodak was releasing Info Activate, software for enabling workflows within document importing. This week, Hughes indicated that a dot release of the software is on the way, with additional features such as barcode reading, drag-and-drop OCR, and downstream indexing. “There will be continued evolution of the product through the next year,” he said. “We’re being told to drive the business as if everything going on around us isn’t.”
Hughes also said Kodak is releasing a beta version of Kodak Capture Office software, which he described as a light version of Info Activate for Microsoft’s Marketplace. “The overarching strategic goal is to make it easier to work with paper-in-origin documents in SharePoint. For the end user, it’s one-button simple to bring a document into SharePoint, whether office faxes, e-documents, MFPs or from our scanner.”
He explained that the user would click a tile in the style formerly known as Metro, labeled, for example, as order processing or a vacation request. The site administrator sets up the tiles to control such things as file size, color/black and white, and where the document goes once it’s imported to SharePoint. Then, it is automatically OCR’d as it goes into SharePoint, he said.
“This eliminates the need for training on how to get documents into SharePoint, though there is no semantic understanding of the document in this tool,” Hughes said. Users must associate metadata with the document, which is done via drop-down lists after the tile is clicked. Any text from the document can be dragged to populate the metadata fields, he noted.
The release, Hughes said, is “just the first step in a committed path forward with Microsoft SharePoint,” though he admitted that once the document imaging business is sold, Kodak will no longer have any product that directly works with SharePoint.
The document imaging group at Kodak has been a stable, profitable business since the company introduced copying checks onto film and microfilm in the 1930s, Hughes said. And, he pointed out, Kodak is renowned for quality. “Among any industry people who need a reliable device to sign lots of paper, it’s a Kodak device,” he claimed.
