Advancements in technology have enabled integration of physical and virtual elements. In this blog post, we aim to explore OCR, one such technology that has tremendous potential in the business world.
What is Optical Character Recognition?
Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is a technology that can distinguish text in digital images or documents. OCR can read scanned text and convert it into readable and editable characters.
What are the requirements for Optical Character Recognition? Firstly, you’ll need an OCR scanner to scan text on physical documents. Secondly, you’ll need a software that can interpret these texts into machine-readable characters which can be selected and edited.
Almost every scanner comes with its own software to interpret the text, but this enables only basic uses of OCR.
A document management solution or DMS, however, opens up so many more possibilities. What’s great about DMS is that it can integrate with your hardware without hassle to help you access many more features that come with electronic document management.
OCR’s Role in Document Management Solutions
OCR is tremendously helpful with its integration into electronic document management. It interprets the text within scanned physical documents, enabling a multitude of useful actions, most notably ‘full text search’.
Let us explain. Since businesses see an influx of physical documents every day, it’s impossible to keep track of the data they contain. When you need to retrieve a very specific document, it might not always be convenient to sort through an entire directory based on an umbrella tag.
Instead, if there are certain details in the document’s content that can easily narrow down your search, a DMS with full text search feature can help you locate your desired document in a jiffy. In our DMS, ShareDocs Enterpriser, we call this feature ‘Robust Search’ simply because of how convenient and intuitive OCR’s search functionality can be.
As OCR develops as a technology, more integrations are bound to become available. Future-proofing your business is an excellent investment, and what better way to execute it than in the form of a solid DMS! If you’re considering the idea of implementing a DMS, feel free to talk to us here, or have a look at our blog for more info.