Every IT project is initiated due to some kind of problem or inadequacy in the business processes. Sometimes the problem is perceived by users themselves, who then seek the help of an IT company. Other times, the IT industry sees the opportunity of improving certain non-computerized processes in their labs, offering the solution as a finished product to the market and it is more often than not that the truly innovative products are launched to the market much sooner than IT users become aware that they are in need of such a technological solution.
The story of Enterprise Content Management solutions is more or less that relating to this last scenario. People became so accustomed to their “paper” offices often completely unaware of possibilities modern ECM technologies can offer in digital business process management. In this case however, our client, Land Registry Department of the Municipal Court in Zagreb, did know exactly what they want. And it’s no wonder considering the amount of cellulosed material stuffing the offices of Land-Registry. In collaboration with LR Department employees, we have designed a solution based on the ECM and Front End Capture technologies, or in other words provided digitalization of paper material with a purpose of considerably reducing or completely resolving the specified problems.
Essentially, the solution is based on Alfresco ECM system. Alfresco is responsible for storage, search and management of documents throughout their entire lifecycle, from “birth”, through archiving or distribution, to ultimately their “destruction”. Alfresco is superb in performing its job on mid-size metric systems, but can also be perfectly scaled with a really large number of documents, making it an easy-pick for this project. With the first couple tens of thousands of documents already in the system, we can argumentatively write that Alfresco is more than capable of dealing with this initial “influx” of documents proving to be an excellent choice indeed.
Besides Alfresco, Kofax front end capture system has also been integrated into the system, this being an enterprise level system for document digitalization using scanning technologies. Kofax comes with an out-of-the-box integration with Alfresco’s ECM, and can additionally be integrated with various scanners for documents of different formats. Since Alfresco and Kofax make such a great team, we can now safely say how our pick prove to be perfectly scaled for this project’s requirements, which, apart precise and quality document digitalization, demanded quick delivery of the entire solution. Thanks to the open source technologies (Alfresco comes as an open source solution) and familiar modules, the entire project was completed in total of three months, from contracting to acceptance testing.
