In 2005, I was installing Worldox for a law firm in Gulfport, Mississippi. Installation, training, and roll out went fairly smoothly, however about a week later I started getting calls that the text search feature was not working. I checked everything and it was set up correctly, so I remoted into their PC and asked someone to show me. They were attempting to do a text search on a PDF file, and nothing was coming up. This was because none of their documents were setup to have Optical Character Recognition or (OCR). When you scan a document on your computer, it comes out as a picture, even if you save it as a PDF. You need to then run a program that will look at the picture and find all the words in it. This also allows you to easily convert the picture to Word.
Going forward, we set up all the scanning software to OCR the documents after they were scanned. While this added processing time to the scanners, it did allow the PDF’ to be text searchable. The problem was what to do with all the PDFs that were not OCR’ed. There were a couple of programs at the time that OCRed a Folder at a time, but this firm had thousands of folders with unOCRed documents in them and we could not find a program that would go into all the sub folders. The firm ended up hiring someone to un-OCR all the documents by hand.
A couple of years later a Worldox Re-seller called Trumpet released a product called Symphony OCR. You install Symphony on a computer at your office and goes through your entire network, finds any PDF that is not OCR’ed and OCR’s it in the background.
As it goes through the process it tells you how many un-OCRed PDFs you have and how long it will take to OCR the rest.
Depending on the size of your documents it can take a couple of months to get through the backlog, but then all those documents are now searchable. The other big advantage is you can shut off the OCR function on your scanning software and have Trumpet do this in the background. This will save users a least a minute for every group of documents they scan in. Symphony OCR is so valuable I have sold it till virtually every Worldox Install that I have done.