Datacap's Capture Portal

Check out Scott Blau’s new white paper on a “universal capture portal.” (I couldn’t get it to display all the way in Firefox, but it worked fine in IE). It makes a lot of good points about the next generation of the digital mailroom, a topic we have covered here before. However, whereas previously, we came at it from the perspective of a traditional mailroom outsourcing provider (Oce Business Services), Datacap (which Blau founded) is coming at it from the perspective of a capture software vendor. Datacap pretty much wants to capture everything, from paper to any type of e-mail and process them through similar workflows. While I love the concept, I’m not sure converting everything to TIFF files for data capture, which seems to be what is suggested, is the answer. Basically, by converting to TIFF, you are taking a smart file, like an Office document, making it dumb, and then applying OCR to make it smart again. Not sure that’s the most efficient way to go about it….Nonetheless, it’s a very good white paper that presents some interesting ideas and challenges current workflows, which often involve printing e-mails and then scanning them – which is an even “dumber” way to go about converting files to usable data.