Overview

The UnForm document archiving and management component provides a suite of archiving functions which are seamlessly added to UnForm's library of commands and tools for document enhancement and delivery.

Existing UnForm integrators and designers familiar with UnForm's unique text filter technology will find it simple, intuitive and hassle-free to add archiving commands and arguments into UnForm's rule-file oriented flow of processing. Or rule-files can be bypassed altogether to archive non-UnForm-generated documents using the familiar command-argument interface to the UnForm client software. And UnForm's separate Image Manager component can add scanned image files to the archive and match them with existing documents previously stored using manual ID matching or barcode/OCR-based image ID capture.

With an internal web server and a browser-based document retrieval interface, UnForm makes it easy to browse, search, list, view, administer, and secure archive libraries. Libraries can scale up to a theoretical capacity of 4-billion documents. Context-sensitive help links include sample page images, and help guide the user or administrator through the browse, search and administration functions. Sample archives are included and are referenced in the help pages. They can aid in the design of a logical custom archiving library and identification structure suited to the needs of sophisticated end-users.

Flexible pre-defined and user-defined document index structures are designed to make document identification and retrieval practical, fast and easy. Pre-defined index structures exist for a two-segment type-ID index, and a date-time index. A user-defined up to ten-segment pipe-delimited category key structure is also provided for indexing. The browser-based document retrieval interface provides an intuitively sensible drill-down browse function through the levels of the multi-segmented indexes.

Libraries are file-system-based locations. A three-tiered library-document-image hierarchy is employed which allows multiple versions of a document, e.g. text and pdf, to be stored together, uniquely identified by a Sub-ID index, and further allows multiple text or non-text image or data files to be attached as sub-documents to a parent. When archiving from an UnForm job, both text and pdf versions are stored automatically.

Subject to access-rights, document and images being listed and/or viewed in the browser interface can have properties modified by users to update document status, correct indexes, and maintain associated notes and keywords at a document level. Files on the network can be browsed and added as sub-documents from within the browser.

Security is managed by library and by user and/or group. All documents are encrypted and compressed when stored in the library. To access documents, a user login is required, and each login can be granted read, write, or delete access to a given library, or can be allowed to access the library based on the library's default access profile.

Groups may be defined by the administrator.  Users can be assigned to one or more groups, and library access can be granted to a group rather than individual users.  If a user is granted specific rights to a library, those rights are used.  Otherwise, the list of groups that the user is a member of is scanned and all rights offered to each of those groups are granted to the user.  If a user is assigned to one or more groups, default library permissions are not applied.

A user can also be assigned an Entity ID.  This classifies the user as an external user.  External users are given very limited access in the web browser.  They can only browse records by document type and ID, or by date.  Access is limited to documents that have a matching Entity ID value.

The browser-based, multi-library search function creates disk-based query-lists of documents which can be further manipulated independent of other documents in the library. The query lists can be the basis for what are known as bulk actions, which include copying to new or existing libraries, transferring to new or existing libraries, and exporting to HTML. The HTML export produces a completely self-contained, pure-HTML directory structure suitable for loading on other storage media, such as a CD/DVD, a zip file, a web site directory, etc.

Imagine, for example, exporting all of a customer's invoices from a date range to a zip archive and emailing it to them. Another example would be to off-load old documents to external storage, then purging them to free up disk space.

The separate Image Manager client provides image management and uploading into a library. Images can be scanned or imported from the PC's file system. Both barcode recognition and OCR recognition assist in automating document identification. Using VBScript, a developer can automate the interpretation of such data and use database access or other coding logic to generate document property and indexing information.