Review

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 02 - March/April 2009

Kodak has confidently thrown down the gauntlet to competitors with the new release of its Capture Pro software offering, optimised for what the company describes as 'mixed scanner environments'.

This release is a radical re-working of an already successful product, aimed at opening up opportunities within the market for far more than just hardware sales. Kodak's clear intention is to make it easier for resellers to manage complex capture projects and tasks, and this valueadded approach is already garnering significant interest not just among channel partners but also in bureaux, financial services organisations and government and healthcare departments.

Significantly, Kodak Capture Pro offers benefits not only to users of Kodak scanners: it can also be used with, among others, Canon, Panasonic and HP devices, making it highly attractive to services companies with a diverse range of hardware in use for different types of job.

Offering a single common capture interface for all users on all their scanners can bring numerous benefits: eliminate the need to deal with multiple vendors; minimise the learning curve for users and administrators; allow sharing of batch settings between users/departments; maximise your hardware investment.

This highly featured batch capture product has been almost entirely rewritten and extended to offer a raft of additional functionality aimed at addressing the specific requirements of end users. Despite being rich in features, it is remarkably easy to use and intuitive, with straightforward workflows that reflect common working practices. Capture Pro includes a number of 'canned' applications which make it easy to use straight out of the box, including common requirements such as scan to PDF, scan to email and others, along with basic indexing functionality that can handle OCR and barcodes.

Also included with the software is the ability to connect to specific batch output formats and third party systems (third party connections include Global 360, EMC, FileNet, Captaris and many others), including the ubiquitous MS SharePoint. Kodak clearly see SharePoint as a growth area for capture generally, and indeed it does seem to be serving as a 'foot in the door' in many organisations for the concept of Content Management itself; so the simple integration offered by Kodak Capture Pro could help make it easier for user departments to 'get on board' with SharePoint. There is also an API available - at no additional charge - so that developers can create their own custom outputs relatively easily, again offering benefits to the channel community.

The software itself boasts an impressively intuitive user interface, exploiting Windows-style interactions throughout such as toolbars, floating icons etc. The CD also includes a very comprehensive tutorial for new and advanced users - another attractive value-add for the reseller community. Kodak also offers resellers a Certified Training Programme for Capture Pro. Existing users will find a raft of enhancements and additions including:

• Ability to import & export job setups - making for easier deployment;
• Virtually unlimited index fields (including 'hidden' index fields);
• Zonal OCR for indexing;
• 2D barcode support;
• PDF/A output;
• Automatically merge front and back, or split large documents for more efficient processing.
• Simultaneously output to more than one format (e.g. b/w TIF for OCR and colour PDF/A for archiving)
• Improved automatic blank page removal

Automatic blank page removal is a good example of the improvements made throughout the product: most tools for this task work on the size of the image (i.e. if it's below a certain size, it is assumed to be blank), but Kodak Capture Pro is more sophisticated, analysing the actual content of the image to reduce the likelihood of false positives.

The thinking behind this and many of the other enhancements is simple: to maximise scanner - and operator - productivity by reducing the labour required post-scanning. It does this by automating as many of the checking processes as possible without stopping the scanner: in centralised/production scanning environments it is crucial to keep the scanners running as much as possible. In addition the ability to share settings among users makes it easy to select optimum settings for specific job types.

Clearly, one of the reasons this software will appeal to end users and resellers alike is that it has been developed based on extensive in-depth knowledge of the markets and applications they are working with in their business. Kodak is to be praised for dedicating so much R&D effort to making a product that reflects the way end user organisations will want to use it, rather than trying to force customers to modify their practices and processes to fit the way their capture systems works!

Pricing follows a throughput-based volume licensing model, as opposed to the 'click charge' approach of Kofax and others: an innovation which Kodak argues offers superior ROI. The product cost varies according to the hardware configurations in use, promising significant economies of scale for enterprise/corporate users as well as service bureaux. Support is via Kodak's Annual Software Upgrade Assurance which offers guaranteed upgrades as well as technical support.

Compatible with virtually every make and model of scanner on the market, Kodak Capture Pro stands out not only for its versatility and power, but also for its common-sense approach to licensing and on-going costs - it is hard to envisage a capture situation in which it doesn't make sense to consider Capture Pro.

VERDITCT: Kodak's high level of confidence in this new release of its flagship batch capture software is entirely understandable: Capture Pro's superior ROI and massively improved functionality look certain to make it highly attractive to the channel and end users alike

Review