SharePoint Archiving Journal

ABBYY announced Recognition Server 2.0, the next generation of its OCR and PDF conversion solution. Its compatibility with service-oriented architecture (SOA) through a Web Service interface, combined with seamless output to Microsoft SharePoint and document input from Microsoft Exchange Server, all enhance the product’s ability to provide automated OCR services accessible from more platforms, remote environments, hardware interfaces and applications than ever before.

ABBYY Recognition Server 2.0 delivers high performance OCR that runs on a server, requires no desktop installation and is centrally managed. Designed for processing large volumes of documents, ABBYY Recognition Server easily scales by using additional computers and CPUs in a network. As a result, economies of scale in document processing have become a reality — organizations can increase total throughput and efficiency of document conversion with virtually no limit. Because processing takes place as an automated background process, customers can also schedule OCR tasks performed on office workstations for night hours or weekends.

“Today’s businesses must balance the immediate need to digitize their data accurately and efficiently, against the growing need to create enterprise-wide services that are accessible from multiple points, interoperable with many systems and easily maintained,” explained Andrey Isaev, technology products department director for ABBYY. “ABBYY Recognition Server is designed for easy integration with a variety of platforms and applications – from networked MFPs, to Web-based applications, e-mail or SharePoint servers.”

Recognition Server 2.0 offers a Web Service Application Programming Interface (API) that provides easier communication between Recognition Server and other applications and services via XML-formatted messages transferred over HTTP. With accessibility via Web services, Recognition Server 2.0 provides lower-cost implementation and maintenance, easier system upgrades and wide accessibility to the OCR service from any platform and any location.

ABBYY Recognition Server 2.0 seamlessly complements Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by enhancing it with OCR functionality and automated document input directly to native SharePoint workflows. This new functionality allows SharePoint Server to be more efficiently used not only for collaborative work but also for document archiving and records management purposes.

With the added support for Microsoft Exchange Server, the system can monitor an e-mail mailbox and automatically process image-based attachments, making it easy to send files for processing from a variety of locations. This function also enables easier integration with network scanners and MFPs which have “Scan to Email” functionality.

For document conversion projects in which 100 percent accuracy is crucial, ABBYY Recognition Server 2.0 offers a Verification Station which allows users to check and verify recognition results. New ABBYY Recognition Server also provides separation of documents scanned in a batch by using blank pages, bar code pages and other methods.

With the added support for Thai, one of the most difficult languages for recognition, the new version can recognize 191 languages. Its format support has also been extended to allow images to be saved as PDF/A–1b and PDF/A–1a, widely recognized standards for long-term document preservation, as well as to the Microsoft Office 2007 XML formats DOCX and XLSX.