Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Open Source Imaging Solution

You can extend the value of your ECM investment by implementing imaging and automated forms processing solutions, as per your organizational requirements. Increasingly, electronic document images have the same legal status as a paper document.

Alfresco integrates with various image capturing systems to provide flexible and intelligent form processing. This results in greater control and management of crucial information and documents, within and outside the firewall. These joint solutions enable you to include forms and the captured data as content types that can be version controlled, repurposed, and integrated into workflows, and managed by the ECM environment. This simplifies compliance with enhanced archiving, and audit capabilities. You can also reduce costs of printing, storing, and distributing paper forms.

You can implement various solutions by leveraging the Alfresco's content management and business process management features. Some are listed below for your reference:

  • Order fulfillment
  • Claims processing
  • Underwriting
  • Loan origination
  • Contracts management
  • Accounts payable managing checks and invoices

More information about the solution is covered in Chapter 13, Implementing Imaging and Forms processing of the recent Alfresco book.

This chapter helps you to implement an end-to-end solution by collecting the paper documents, and forms; transforming them into accurate, retrievable information; and delivered into an organization's business applications. The information then, is full-text searchable, and goes through the various approval workflows, based on the organization's defined business process management.

By the end of this chapter you will have learned how to:

  • Connect scanner to network drive, and map it to the Alfresco's space
  • Specify a business rule to automatically extract metadata from the scanned document
  • Define and execute a workflow process for scanned documents
  • Bulk upload scanned documents into the Alfresco repository
  • Integrate OCR utilities into Alfresco
  • Integrate and use Kofax Ascent Capture
  • Integrate Alfresco with eCopy-enabled scanners

It is nice to know that we have an open source based, Enterprise Quality, Feature Rich and Highly Scalable imaging solution available at cheaper price.

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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Alfresco Top Brass on UK National Radio

John Powell and John Newton, the founders of Alfresco, discussed open source in general -- and their project in particular -- on BBC's Radio 4 yesterday evening.

NEW WAVE COMPUTING

Peter Day talks to some of the rising stars of the new revolution and finds out how the computer industry is changing yet again.

The world’s biggest computer companies are being threatened by a host of new start-ups powered by open-source software, strings of inexpensive computers,and ‘mash-up’ websites which combine information in innovative ways.

Other projects discussed: Zimbra, Platial, Open-Xchange, ActiveGrid.

You can read more about the program, and listen to it (until Thursday) on the BBC web site here.

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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

3 Ways for Alfresco ECM and BPM to work together

Ishmael Ghalimi at IT|Redux posts about methods for integrating ECM systems with BPM systems, and cites three main ways in which they can usefully work together.

1. Use the CMS features to manage document life cycles that form part of process instances. You could manage document lifecycle in the BPMS, but a CMS will be simpler, more elegant, more flexible.

2. Use a CMS to store the process model artifacts. Programmers might say CVS is better, but for the business managers who see these artifacts as documents and want them treated as such (and pay the bills), a CMS is better.

3. Use a BPMS process design tool to take care of advanced processes involving CMS documents.

Ishmael cites Intalio as already working on the first two with Alfresco, but doesn't mention the 3rd. Perhaps Alfresco's built in workflow tools already negate number 3!

Source

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Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation on PacktPub.com First Alfresco book, worldwide service, 10% discount.

Book Out Now! Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation

The very first copy of Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation arrived in the Packt office yesterday. We are now shipping copies to everybody who pre-ordered.

From now on, orders will be shipped within a day or two of being placed. So buy your copy now.

There is also a PDF ebook version available, which is cheaper and available for download immediately after ordering.

Buy on PacktPub.com worldwide service, 10% discount.

Here are some blurry pictures of me holding the proof copy.