Some News Updates From the Past Week.

Been a little slow on the blog posts, as I've been working on other things, and it's been a bit slow for earth-shattering news, but there have been several interesting stories that have moved in our industry.

Here's a peek at a few of them:

• Oce Business Services has opened a new document conversion service bureau facility in Salt Lake City. We're supposed to talk tomorrow to get some more details for an article in next week's issue of DIR, but we do know that it's set up to run 24/7 and handle up to 10 million pages per month. Also, one of the services being offered is invoice capture. This comes on the heels on a Digital Mail service OBS has launched for its mailroom customers.  Ironically, digital mailroom and invoice capture were two of the specialties of the Document Technologies business that Oce sold to Captaris in late 2007, which was later bought by Open Text.
• Including maintenance and professional services Kofax signed a $2.7 million deal with a U.K.-based public health services organization.  "The organization, an existing customer, will use additional Kofax software to capture, extract and perfect data from hundreds of millions of medical forms and related documents received annually. The resulting data will then be exported to the organization’s mainstream data processing applications for adjudication and payment." So, it sounds like an insurance application to us.
• Open Text has launched some mobile ECM stuff. This makes perfect sense, as everyone seems to be now using their Smart Phones for everything - especially the up and coming generation. I think Open Text is taking the right approach in the release when it suggests that smart phones are taking the place of laptops. One of the applications being addressed is invoice processing, which I assume means the approval process - a concept originally introduced by Cardiff. It's something Mark Seamans showed to me a couple years back. Made sense, but was a little ahead of its time then, especially coming from Cardiff, which I'm not sure had the install base to support that feature. Open Text, through its SAP partnership, certainly has some Global 2000 organizations that could take advantage of it.
• Finally, Maryland-based service bureau and SI QAI got together with recognition engine specialist A2iA to come up with a capture application for reading cursive on H1N1 forms. Here's the case study.

That's all for now.

Ralph