Review

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 03 - May/June 2009

Studies by IDC have suggested that knowledge workers typically spend between 3 and 4 hours each week on task that could be defined as recreating and/or reformatting content in documents -

£3,000 plus per annum. Anyone who has spent what feels like an age copying and pasting blocks of text from a PDF file into an Office document will sympathise. And it is this often unquantified cost that Nuance is aiming to address with its latest OmniPage release, version 17.

The basic functionality of OmniPage is well established, so Nuance has focused on improving those aspects of the software that will deliver most benefit to users: primarily, a remarkable claim of a 40 percent improvement in recognition accuracy. The improvement is largely down to a new technology from Nuance which they call Hyper Binary Conversion. This is a technique for precisely discerning the different elements of a scanned image: text, background, graphics and 'noise' on the image.

OmniPage effectively separates the text from all these other potential 'interferences' prior to the conversion process, making for a superior recognition experience. Certainly from our tests it is fair to say that the days of OCR packages delivering far less than they promise are long gone - OmniPage 17 Professional correctly converted almost everything we threw at it, from office documents to magazine pages, with only a few unusual fonts causing the very occasional 'glitch'. OmniPage offers additional productivity enhancements for users that will add to the already compelling arguments: documents can be processed directly into common office formats such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and perhaps most significantly for DM readers, MS SharePoint. It will even process scans into a format readable by the Amazon 'Kindle' e-book reader. An OmniPage toolbar in MS Office allows simple oneclick conversion from paper or PDF into editable formats. Files can be formatted as searchable PDF or XPS documents for storage in SharePoint, again via much-improved and highly intuitive interfaces. Other new connectors allow batch scanning of documents directly into OpenText Hummingbird and Interwoven iManage content management environments.

Another key innovation for business use is the improved Workflow functionality. This allows users to take a regular multiple step conversion process and save it as a 'single click' Workflow which can then be selected from a custom menu. An example might be a batch file containing a multi-page PDF which needs to be converted to Word, emailed to a colleague, and archived within SharePoint. More creative users might create Workflows to handle images from mobile phone cameras - even relatively low-megapixel cameras are now supported, and Nuance's 3DCapture technology is better than ever at compensating for the vagaries of photographed documents, whether the natural curve of a magazine or book page, or the unavoidable distortion when photographing a page from above.

As with previous releases, Nuance continues to deliver real and measurable productivity improvements by a combination of accuracy enhancements and added - genuinely useful - features and functions. More info: www.nuance.co.uk

VERDICT: Some of the innovations in OmniPage 17 might initially appear to be aimed at non-business users (e-book and mobile phone image processing, for instance). However, there is no denying that the huge improvements in recognition accuracy, along with smooth integration with Microsoft and other environments, combine to make this a serious business tool.

Review