Capture in an Enterprise

There are things that one need to know, understand and configure while setting up a Capture network in an Enterprise.

Things, like how different installations of ODC will have a common set of configurations, how different users will be coordinating among the various batches that will get created, how various tools will play a part in an Enterprise wide setup, how many capture workstations, how many Distributed Capture servers, how batches will flow from Import to Recognize to Commit, or how documents will be scanned and batches will be created, indexed and committed in an automated fashion.

Things that one has to understand and put it down on paper.

Following points can help you in defining the architecture for Capture Setup in an Enterprise.

• Go through all the tools details to understand each one’s working and plan the setup accordingly.
• Plan for a shared drive, accessible by the ODC workstations, Import Server, Recognition Server, Commit Server, ODDC Server and Scanner simultaneously
• Plan for a shared database , and an enterprise one, and not the default MS Access
• Plan for batch prefixes and owners(users) for those batches
• Plan for batch statuses and appropriate error handling of these batches, like renaming the batches to ERR_<original name>
• Test out your macros for the desired customization before releasing them in production
• Understand macro debugging, and utilize the debugging options at the fullest
• If you have configured an end to end auto processing logic for documents to be checked-in, keep a watch on the logs for any issues.
• Try to optimize the check-in process of UCM, usually the ODC processing happens pretty fast, but the document check-in takes 10x time of the ODC logic, like recognizing or import
• While importing, keep documents in their native format , and not convert them to images, if you dont have any image specific processing needs
• Let the batch get committed through a dedicated commit server, as Ive said earlier, commit takes most of the time in the process.

More on the ODDC setup coming up next.