Last week a few delegates from Parascript attended the 2014 SharePoint Conference. Our primary goal was to meet potential partners and get the lay of the land to see how we might participate with the conference and the Microsoft SharePoint ecosystem in the future.

A few impressions:

• The sense I received was that many of the prior shortcomings of SharePoint (siloed information, databases, etc) have been or are being addressed. I was exposed to more than one reseller / integrator that indicated that some of the largest criticisms of SharePoint have been overcome, and that their companies were were thriving as organizations continue to adopt or improve their SharePoint infrastructure.
• Document capture, while not nearly as sexy as social collaboration, information governance, managed services and big data, still plays an important part in onboarding and enabling critical business information to SharePoint.
• There’s a lot of ways document capture can support SharePoint and growing governance and content management requirements, especially in the area of document conformance and meta-tagging of unstructured information. Better up-front preparation of data makes for better utilization of the information once in a repository.

How does Parascript support SharePoint? 

Our flagship document / form capture and recognition software, FormXtra, utilizes a Microsoft .NET API. It is a transition we made with the major version release of FormXtra 5 in 2012. This alignment modernized our API, greatly increased the number of API calls that are possible, and enables publishing to Sharepoint libraries.

Specifically, how does FormXtra integrate with SharePoint?

Here’s a few ways FormXtra can work with SharePoint:

• Use existing or create new SharePoint document libraries or lists all from within Form Definition Studio.
• Automatically route documents to specific libraries or lists based upon document type, barcodes, optical marks, and key metadata extracted from the document.
• Locate and convert handwritten information (ICR, constrained or unconstrained) into searchable metadata tags.

So do SharePoint and Document Capture align?

Obviously document capture is not needed to utilize SharePoint. But if your organization has a number of paper-heavy processes, it may make sense to look at which information is making it to SharePoint and whether or not it is adequate, incomplete, or partial (including lacking a meta-tag scheme). Could you do more and would it be cost effective?

Learn more about FormXtra: