(PDF Version, 458 kb)
According to Sandra M. Powers, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, The College of Charleston was spending 40 hours a week filing papers and losing as much as an additional 8 hours per week searching for lost or misplaced documents. These files took up 14 file cabinets of 5 drawers each and were growing at a rate of 2 file cabinets per year. In an effort to reduce cost and improve margin of error, the decision was made to invest in a paperless document management system. To meet the college’s needs, the choice was an off the shelf system for between $200,000 and $1 million dollars or to develop the system in-house. The decision was made to develop in-house using Microsoft .NET while leveraging a 3rd party imaging toolkit.
On the selection of an imaging toolkit, William Morgenweck of College of Charleston said, “We started with two other imaging toolkits, but both were difficult to deploy and not integrated with .NET. We made the switch to Atalasoft’s DotImage. The DotImage viewer control is very clear and clean. One of the best things for us is the way DotImage works multipage images with the workspace viewer. End users expect to be able to insert pages and delete pages or just clean them up. With some of the other products it took hundreds of lines of code. A royal nightmare. Printing images in DotImage is also dream; a few lines of code and you're done.”
Native .NET Imaging
Atalasoft DotImage offers royalty free imaging for scanning, cleaning up, archiving, and viewing document images. With the help of Microsoft .NET and Atalasoft, a single developer was able to create a full document management solution called FRED (Friendly, Reliable, Electronic Data). With over 200 daily users, and 20,000 documents a day DotImage was a key player in making FRED a success. The process now takes a single person 2 hours a day to scan all documents, and all paper is shredded within a day.
FRED uses DotImage Twain Add-On to scan documents from a Fujitsu Document Scanner allowing the application to scan an entire job of many pages with a single button click. The images are then automatically despeckled, deskewed, and thresholded when necessary before being archived in a SQL database. The DotImage Viewer control is used to display the images directly from the database with mouse tools that give instant access to zooming, panning, and magnification. For sending these images via email, the images are attached as PDF images with the DotImage PDF Encoder.
“The Graduate School Office feels very strongly that this system has gone beyond being merely useful and has entered the realm of being necessary. It has allowed us a safe and long-lasting method for archiving student and other records which may need to be accessed in a timely manner. Our ability to view these imaged documents quickly has saved much in terms of valuable staff time which would otherwise be spent going through paper documents in storage cabinets” said Laura Hines, Director of Graduate Services. “Archival purposes aside, we are very excited about the "real-time" use this system will have for us in terms of our being able to electronically transfer admissions files to program committees, and other important documents to our faculty and staff.”
