Software

OCR IFilter for SharePoint & Windows Search

Searching for information is a vital part of any office workflow. As the organization grows, documents scatter across departments, file folders and ECM systems, and searches take more and more valuable time. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server has powerful search capabilities in SharePoint document libraries and folders; Windows Search is helpful in finding files on desktop computers.

ABBYY Recognition Server IFilter is a powerful add-on to these enterprise search engines that enables them with capability to search through full content of image documents. Normally enterprise search engines can index full text only in document file formats like HTML, RTF, DOC, XLS etc. In reality, a lot of important information is contained in image files, such as JPEGs, or highly popular PDFs and TIFFs, and remains invisible for conventional search engines. Scanned and photographed documents, invoices, letters, contracts – all these documents can be retrieved only using the file name, but not using the actual content of the document. To extend full-text search over image documents and leave no important knowledge undiscovered, OCR functionality is a must.

ABBYY Recognition Server with its OCR IFilter component is exactly the right solution. It "unlocks" the content of image documents by means of OCR and makes it available for indexing by SharePoint Server and Windows Search. With ABBYY Recognition Server IFilter, the document search in the organization becomes truly encompassing.

How it works

ABBYY Recognition Server is integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows Search as described below:

1. ABBYY Recognition Server is installed on a server computer (which may be separate from the SharePoint hosting machine). A special component, ABBYY Recognition Server IFilter, is installed on top of the SharePoint Server and/or user desktops to provide communication between the search system and the Recognition Server. The IFilter is a light component which consumes almost no computer resources and does not affect the response time of the SharePoint Server;

2. Microsoft SharePoint (or Windows Search) crawler traverses the libraries (or computer folders) searching for new documents that need to be indexed.  Each ABBYY IFilter receives image documents from the corresponding crawler and passes them to ABBYY Recognition Server;

3. ABBYY Recognition Server automatically performs high-quality OCR on the images and sends the recognized text back to the IFilter;

4. Microsoft enterprise search engine accepts the document contents from ABBYY OCR IFilter and builds an index. The image then becomes discoverable via full-text search.

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With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server:

With Windows Search:

Solution Benefits:

• “Unlocks” images in SharePoint Servers and on user desktop computers. A single installation of ABBYY Recognition Server will unlock OCR images from all computers and SharePoint Servers in the corporate network.

• Supports various image formats. A single ABBYY IFilter will take care of images in all kinds of image formats from JPEG to TIFF, PDF and DjVu.

• Recognizes documents in all languages. ABBYY Recognition Server is based on the award-winning ABBYY OCR technology which supports more than 190 languages, can process multi-lingual documents and provides superior quality ensuring that no documents are left out from search.

• Powerful OCR on a dedicated server. ABBYY Recognition Server can be installed on a dedicated server computer so that the resource-intensive OCR module is separated from the SharePoint Server and desktop computers and does not affect their productivity and work. In case of a large image backlog, ABBYY Recognition Server can be easily scaled up by plugging additional OCR stations that will share the workload automatically.

• Takes care of all kinds of OCR tasks. ABBYY Recognition Server usage is not limited to integration with Microsoft Search. The product can also be used as a full-scale OCR and document conversion server for all kinds of tasks, from converting a scanned document to Word to creating searchable PDF archives.