The need for businesses to capture and store information is constantly increasing. This trend is a result of many factors — from the need to comply with federal regulations to a growing awareness that streamlining workflow and managing assets more efficiently can yield significant ROI. Many document and image formats exist to facilitate the processing and storage of this information. Companies often need to manage both standard formats, such as PDF, Word, and TIFF as well as proprietary formats, developed to fulfill industry-specific needs, like ABIC, AFP, and DICOM.
In a typical workflow process, personnel responsible for reviewing or accessing documents are required to have the creator application installed on their workstation. While this can be an effective solution, it is not the most secure, the fastest, or the most cost-efficient. Companies following this approach are dependent on many different applications and incur the additional costs of purchasing software, upgrading existing users, training users on multiple applications, and maintaining individual workstations. Infrastructure becomes exponentially more complex and more expensive in order to support the variety of applications and multitude of document formats.
Traditionally companies addressed these challenges with document and/or image conversion to a standard, portable format. A conversion solution can be effectively automated to process and standardize archived documents. However, the extra step of conversion can add time to an already lengthy process, biting into ROI.
An alternative, that is becoming more prevalent due to the growth of content repositories, is the use of a document or image viewer with built-in support for multiple formats. Viewers are flexible solutions that can act as stand-alone applications or be integrated into larger solutions or applications. They are generally available as client-based or web-based solutions.
Managing multiple document or image formats does not have to be a complicated, time-consuming, or costly process. Companies have the potential to greatly increase their productivity by making an informed decision on whether a conversion or viewing solution best fits their needs.
Some important questions to consider when deciding between these two solutions:
- Why do you need to convert documents and images? Would a universal viewer be a more appropriate choice?
- How many, and what types of document or image formats do you need to support?
- Would faster access to documents improve process throughput and profitability?
- How many users do you need to support?
- Would access to documents and images over the Web (such as through a web viewer) be beneficial to your users?
-George
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