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LaserFiche® Frequently Asked Questions
1. Generalidades
Q. Como o LaserFiche organiza os documentos? A. O LaserFiche usa
TRES formas para organizar os documentos: Hierarchical Folder
Browser, Full-text Search, and Templates (index cards or database key fields).
You can use 1, 2, or all 3 methods to organize and find your documents.
Q. Is LaserFiche Y2K compliant? A. Yes, LaserFiche versions 4.2 and later are completely Y2K compliant
and ready.
Q. Can I annotate documents? Use sticky notes or highlighting? A. Yes. LaserFiche supports sticky notes, stamps (including custom user-defined
stamps and signatures), highlighting (of images and/or text) and redaction
or blackout (of images or text). All annotations except sticky notes can
be printed, and security can be used to determine which users can see annotations
or see through redacted (blacked out) areas.
Q. Is LaserFiche Web-enabled? Can I use a browser to access my documents? A. Yes, with LaserFiche WebLink. See the FAQ section on WebLink.
Q. How many pages can LaserFiche store? A. LF 4.3 can store up to 100 million pages per database, subject to server speed, memory, and available storage space. LF 4.1/4.2 can store about 20 million pages per database. If you need to store more than 100 million pages, LaserFiche 4.3 Enterprise Edition servers support up to 12 separate databases per server, each of which can store 100 million pages. Q. How many folders can I have per database? A. You can have up to 5 million folders nested up to 600 levels deep.
Q. What database does LaserFiche use? A. LaserFiche versions 4.3 and later use a relational database system
running the Pervasive.SQL 7 database engine from Pervasive Software. LaserFiche
versions 4.1 and 4.2 use the Btrieve 6.15 database engine. For more information
on both products, visit http://www.pervasive.com.
Q. What image format does LaserFiche use to store images? A: Black and white images are stored as standard TIFF files using CCITT
Group 4 (two-dimensional) compression. This is the most common black and
white image format in the document imaging industry. Grayscale and color
images are stored as TIFF files with JPEG compression.
Q. Does LaserFiche store the image or the text? A. BOTH! LaserFiche typically stores the images and also generates text—using
OCR—and saves both. The OCRed text is used to find any word or phrase on
any page, instantly, and you can view the images, the text or both, side-by-side.
Q. Does LaserFiche run on the Internet or web? A. Our NT product uses TCP/IP so it can be accessed over
any IP network, including the Internet. Using LaserFiche WebLink, part
or all of your LaserFiche database can be published instantly to an intranet
or to the Internet. Through WebLink, anyone with a web browser can search
and view LaserFiche documents. Click on weblink
to learn more about WebLink.
2. Configuration, Company, Licensing
& Sales
Q. What desktop operating systems are supported? A. The LaserFiche 4.2/4.3 Standalone/Client is a Windows application
that runs on Windows 95/98/NT. By using WebLink, anyone with a web browser,
on any platform, can access your LaserFiche documents.
Q. How is LaserFiche licensed? A. LaserFiche Standalone is licensed by workstation/CPU. LaserFiche
for networks (NLM/NT/LAN) is licensed by concurrent user at the server
and by client license at the workstation. We have standard client/server
license packs for 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 concurrent users. Additional
clients are available, and larger server licenses are available on a custom
basis. LaserFiche WebLink access is controlled by the LaserFiche server
license; it does not have licenses of its own because user connections
through WebLink use LaserFiche Server licenses.
Q. Can the LaserFiche software be run from a CD-ROM? A. Yes. Using LaserFiche Plus, you can publish CD’s with
one or more LaserFiche databases and a royalty-free, run-time LaserFiche
viewer. The viewer runs from the CD, allowing anyone to view and search
the documents in that LaserFiche database. For more information on LaserFiche
Plus, click on http://www.laserfiche.com/products/plus/.
Contact your LaserFiche reseller for pricing.
Q. How is LaserFiche sold? A. LaserFiche network software is primarily sold through a network of
resellers worldwide. We also do a small amount of direct full-system sales
to cities and school districts in California.
A. Yes, there are LaserFiche dealers in many countries outside the US
including Canada, the UK, Brazil, Latin America and Asia.
Q. Is LaserFiche available in different languages? A. Yes. LaserFiche is currently available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
LaserFiche can also perform OCR in seven additional non-English European
languages. We expect to have LaserFiche in French very soon.
Supported Scanners and Scanner Software Interfaces Q. What scanners can be used with LaserFiche? A. LaserFiche supports over 150 scanners including scanners from Ricoh,
Fujitsu, Panasonic, Bell & Howell, Canon, Hewlett Packard, Avision,
Mitsubishi, Visionshape, Kodak, BancTec, and many other manufacturers.
For a more extensive list, click on http://www.laserfiche.com/PRODUCTS/scanlist.html.
Q. What scanner interfaces (hardware and software) work with LaserFiche? A. LaserFiche supports the ISIS scanner drivers from Pixel Translations,
as well as any scanners supported by Kofax Image Controls (http://www.kofax.com).
These scanners attach to an Adaptec SCSI card or to Kofax Image processing
board (except for the Avision parallel port scanners). For more information
on which scanners are supported by Kofax, click on http://www.kofax.com/cguide/cguide.htm.
Q. Does LaserFiche Scan Checks? A. Yes, LaserFiche can scan checks using various scanners that support
check-sized paper. If you would also like to read the magnetically encoded
MICR numbers at the bottom of the check, LaserFiche can support that using
the Visionshape Check Scanners, such as the BUIC-1500 and the CS500.
Q. Does LaserFiche support Large Format Scanning? A. Yes, LaserFiche now supports the CONTEX/Ideal family of large format scanners. For a complete list of supported scanners, please visit the LaserFiche web site.
Q. Does LaserFiche support scanners with the Kofax Virtual ReScan (VRS) capability? A. Yes, if you have LaserFiche 4.3 or later.
Q. Which SCSI card should I use with my SCSI scanner? A. When using Pixel ISIS scanning and drivers, LaserFiche supports only
Adaptec SCSI cards We recommend the Adaptec AHA-2940x PCI series or
the AHA-1542Cx ISA series of SCSI cards. Some other Adaptec SCSI cards
may work, but these are the only officially supported cards for ISIS SCSI
scanning. The Kofax Adrenaline SCSI board is also supported by LaserFiche
for some high-end SCSI scanners. If you are using TWAIN, any SCSI card
supported by your TWAIN driver is acceptable.
Q. Which Kofax card should I use for my video-interface scanner? A. If you have a video-interface scanner, you must use a Kofax image
processing board. You should use a Kofax Adrenaline 1700v or 850v board.
LaserFiche 4.2/4.3 will also support the older Kofax KF-7300, KF-9210,
KF-9250 or KF-9275 cards if they have at least 3mb of RAM on board. Some
duplex video scanners may require TWO Kofax KF cards. Note that the Kofax
KF-series boards are being discontinued, so if you are buying a video interface
scanner, we recommend that you purchase a Kofax Adrenaline board.
Q. What image resolutions are supported by LaserFiche? A. LaserFiche can scan at various resolutions from 50 dpi to 600 dpi
(or more) depending on your scanner. Depending on the purpose and the contents
of the page we generally recommend black and white scanning at 200, 240
or 300 dpi.
Q. How quickly does LaserFiche scan? A. VERY QUICKLY, depending on your scanner, PC, paper size and scanning
resolution. With the right hardware and scanner, LaserFiche can scan up
to 120 pages per minute simplex or about 200 images per minute duplex at
200 dpi.
Q. What is the largest page size page LaserFiche can handle? A. LaserFiche currently has direct support for standard document imaging
scanners up to 11.5"x17" in size (double-letter), and we can also scan
documents up to "E" or A0 size using the line of large-format document
scanners from Ideal (including models from Contex, Oce, and Vidar). LF
can also import, display and print images up to approximately "E" size
(or 36"x44") at 300 dpi.
Q. Does LaserFiche scan grayscale or color files? A. LaserFiche can scan in grayscale, as well as in color, as well as
in black and white.
Q: Can the scanning software display scanned pages during the scanning process? A. Yes, LaserFiche can display each page as it is being scanned.
Q. Does LF support duplex scanning? A. YES, in two different ways! First, LF can support most duplex scanners
(scan both sides of the page simultaneously). Second, with a simplex scanner,
LF can scan all the front sides, scan all the back sides, and then automatically
collate the pages into the correct order.
Q. Is it possible to view images and text side by side? A. Yes, the view screen can be configured to show text alongside the
scanned image. The font type and size of the text file can be altered to
suit individuals needs. Additionally, complete multi-page documents may
be viewed as thumbnails allowing the user to simply click on the desired
page.
Q. Can I open and display more than one document at a time? A. Yes, in LF 4.2 you can open up to 15 documents simultaneously. In
the latest release of LaserFiche, the number of documents you can have
open simultaneously is limited only by the amount of free memory available.
Q. How can I fax my LaserFiche documents from my PC? A. LaserFiche can fax documents using nearly any fax software (single
user or network) which includes a Windows printer driver and supports faxing
of raster images.
Q. Does LaserFiche support e-mail? A. YES, LaserFiche offers MAPI e-mail support with the LaserFiche MAPI
Plug-In. For more information, click on http://www.laserfiche.com/products/emailplugin.html.
5. Recognition: OCR, Bar Codes,
Zone OCR
Q. What is OCR? Does LaserFiche include OCR? A. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, which is how a computer
converts words in a scanned image (which cannot be directly indexed or
searched by a computer) to text (which can be indexed and searched by a
computer). OCR is usually necessary in order to use Full-Text Indexing.
OCR engines can generally only recognize typed or laser-printed text, not
handwriting. LaserFiche includes a professional-quality OCR engine (but
not with the read-only LF Viewer or the CD viewer software).
Q. How accurate is LaserFiche OCR? A. VERY! LaserFiche uses the latest in OCR technology. Accuracy on a
freshly laser-printed page is typically better than 99.6%. Accuracy on
faxed, dirty, or degraded documents will of course be lower, but LaserFiche
now supports image clean-up technology from TMS/Sequoia and from Kofax
that can improve OCR accuracy by de-skewing and cleaning up dirty documents.
Q. Can LF perform Zone OCR (OCR on just one portion of each page)? A. Yes. The LaserFiche Zone OCR Plug-In can OCR just one zone of a page
and automatically put that data into one of the LaserFiche template fields.
Q. Can more than one LaserFiche workstation OCR and index simultaneously? A. Yes, this is a significant benefit as it permits batch processing
of images and an element of parallel processing. Additionally, OCR and
indexing can be performed on workstations other than those that performed
the scanning.
Q. Can LF OCR foreign languages? A. YES. LF can currently OCR in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French,
Italian and German.
Q. How many levels of folders can I have? A. Up to 600 nested levels of folders.
Q. Can LF recognize Bar Codes? A. YES. The LF Bar Code Plug-In can recognize bar codes located anywhere
on the first page of each document, or on a separator sheet between documents.
LaserFiche can use bar codes to automatically separate documents that were
scanned as a batch and to fill in template fields automatically with data
from an external database. It can also automatically route documents to
the correct folder based on the bar code. For more information, click on
http://www.laserfiche.com/products/barcodeplugin.html.
Q. What Bar Code formats can LaserFiche recognize? A. The Bar Code Plug-in can recognize the 7 most common bar code formats—Code
39, Code 128, Interleaved 2of5, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, and EAN-13.
A. Yes, full-text search results are ranked in order of relevance. The
documents with the greatest number of search hits are listed first; those
with the fewest hits are listed last.
Q. What exactly is meant by the term "fuzzy logic" searching? A. Fuzzy logic searching allows you to find documents even if the word(s)
you are looking for is/are not spelled exactly as you typed it in (non-exact
matches). This could be due to OCR error, user error, or misspelling. LaserFiche
includes fuzzy-logic text search to make sure you find the documents you
want, even if the OCR wasn’t perfect.
Q. What is a wildcard search? A. Wildcard searches find words when you are not sure what one or more
of the letters in the word are. LaserFiche includes full support for single
and multi-character wildcard searches. For example, searching in LaserFiche
for "C?T" (single-character wildcard search) will find "cat," "cut,"
and "cot." Searching for "CAT*" (multi-character trailing wildcard
search) will find "catalog," "catch," "category,"
"cattle," etc. Searching for "*TION" (multi-character leading wildcard
search) will find "vacation," "occupation," "exclamation,"
etc.
Q. What is proximity searching? A. Proximity searching is a powerful technique for refining searches
for words that have relevance when close to each other in a document. For
example, the search for "failure" and "generator" can be made more relevant
if restricted to only the occurrences of the words within 5 words of each
other. In this example the phrase "failure of the primary generator" or
"generator failure" would be found but isolated instances of these words
in the same document would be ignored. Proximity searches can be used in
conjunction with Boolean searches.
Q. Can LaserFiche perform Boolean searches? Complex or nested Boolean searches? A. YES. LaserFiche can do simple and complex AND, OR, and NOT Boolean
searches. It can also perform nested Boolean, wildcard, and word-proximity
searches, plus fuzzy-logic searches and template keyfield searches. You
can even combine various types of searches together.
Q. What if the OCR makes a mistake? Can I still find my word? A. YES! With LaserFiche’s fuzzy-logic search, you can still find words
even if they are misspelled or have OCR errors. You can control the level
of fuzzyness allowed in the search.
Q. Do search times increase significantly as databases grow in size? A. No, the database size has little effect on search time as the underlying
database technology is optimized for large volumes of data. For example,
if you increased the size of your database ten times from 100,000 pages
to one million pages, the time required to find a particular unique word
would NOT increase ten-fold. Instead search time would increase by a factor
of perhaps 1.2 (e.g. from 4.0 seconds to 4.7 seconds for a non-fuzzy unique
word search).
7. Storage for LaserFiche
Q. How much storage do I need? A. Scanned documents typically require about one gigabyte for every
17,000 pages (assuming letter or A4 sized paper, 300 dpi resolution, black
and white scanning). This includes space for the text generated by OCR.
After compression, a typical image requires 50 KB, though it ranges from
16 KB up to 150 KB, depending on the paper size, resolution, and complexity
of the page. OCRed text typically requires 2 KB of space per page. One
CD-ROM (650 MB) typically holds from 10,000 to 12,000 pages.
Q. Can LaserFiche support optical media and Jukebox systems? A. LaserFiche inherently supports removable volumes and supports many
jukeboxes (both MO and CD-ROM) and CD tower systems. LaserFiche permits
databases to be spread across different locations and different media types,
allowing for great flexibility in storage.
Q. What is the difference between a CD-ROM jukebox/changer and a CD tower? A. In a CD jukebox/changer, there are more slots and disks than there
are drives. Robotic mechanisms automatically place the correct disk into
one of the drives when the disk is needed. In a CD tower, many CD-ROM drives
are stacked together in a single unit, and every disk is always sitting
in a drive. CD towers provide faster data access but typically cost more
per disk and do not hold as many disks. CD jukeboxes/changers cost less
per disk and can hold up to 500 CD’s, but provide slower performance because
swapping disks in and out of the drives is time-consuming.
8. LaserFiche Servers
Q. What are the practical benefits of a "client-server" architecture? A. LaserFiche fits this model precisely as elements of the application
that are best suited to running on the server run as either a Novell NLMs
(NetWare Loadable Modules) or an NT Service. This means that searches run
as fast as possible in a true multi-tasking environment. Other elements
suited to a PC workstation such as image de-compression and manipulation
run on the client end under Windows. In the case of LaserFiche client/server,
all database elements such as indexing and searching are performed on the
server. Searching and indexing are faster because no data is transferred
over the network. Similarly, if the server is a high-performance system
with fast CPU and disks then all users benefit regardless of what system
is sitting on their desktop.
Q. What versions of Novell NetWare are supported? A. LaserFiche NLM versions 4.2/4.3 run on NetWare 4.10, 4.11, 4.2 or
NetWare 5.
Q. What version of Windows NT server should I use for LaserFiche NT? A. Use Windows NT 4.0 (Server or Workstation) with NT Service Pack 3
or higher.
Q. What network protocols are supported by LaserFiche NT? A. LaserFiche NT supports TCP/IP and uses Windows Sockets (Winsock)
as the communication interface. LaserFiche for NT does not support the
IPX/SPX or NETBEUI protocols.
9. LaserFiche WebLink(TM) –Publish Documents to the Net! ============================================= Q. What is WebLink? A. LaserFiche WebLink is a Web gateway that publishes your LaserFiche
documents to an intranet or to the Internet, instantly! Any user on any
platform (Windows, Mac, Unix, etc.) with a web browser can now search,
browse, view and print your LaserFiche documents. For a live example of
WebLink in action, go to http://atlantis.laserfiche.com.
Q. Do I need to know HTML to use WebLink? A. No. No HMTL or special technical knowledge is necessary to use WebLink
Some very basic knowledge of your web server is needed to install WebLink.
Knowledge of HTML is only necessary if you wish to customize the WebLink
pages.
Q. Can different WebLink users be given different levels of access to my database? A. Yes. Starting with WebLink 4.3, you can require WebLink users to
enter a name and password in order to access the LaserFiche database. The
access is controlled at the database level by LaserFiche Security.
Q. Can WebLink connect to more than one LaserFiche database? A. Yes. WebLink Enterprise Edition can connect to up to 12 LaserFiche
databases. The normal WebLink can only connect to one LF database at a
time.
Q. Can I configure WebLink to have the look and feel of our own web site? A. Yes. You can customize any of the WebLink screens (main page, search
page, browsing page, search results screen, etc.) in any way you want.
You can include your company name, customize the graphics, or add links
that trigger pre-defined searches or browse a specific folder.
10. LaserFiche
Plus: Distribute LF CD’s, Royalty Free
A. From 10,000 to 12,000 pages per CD, assuming pages are scanned letter-size (or A4), in black and white, at 300 dpi and all pages are OCRed. If you scan smaller pages, use a lower resolution, or do not OCR, you can fit more documents per CD. If you scan larger pages, use a higher resolution, or scan in color/grayscale, you can fit fewer documents per CD. |