A recent International Data Corp. study discovered companies using Netscape intranets achieved a 1,000% return on investment. They save paper and become more productive by finding information faster.
Imaging users are now using intranets to share images. This standardizes their communication protocols. Since just about everybody is familiar with browsers, minimal training is needed. Here's why intranet technology is perfect for imaging:
1. Cheap clients. Browsers are often free. Plug-ins usually sell for less than $60. These eliminate or drastically reduce the per-seat cost of imaging.
2. Platform ubiquity. Java-based intranet applications work on Mac, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows PCs. You don't need new workstations.
3. Expandability. Intranets are virtually limitless. The only limitations are those you put on them. These are generally imposed for security.
4. Easy installation. Once the backbone Web server is established, all you have to do to set up users is download a browser or install a small program.
5. Hypertext linking. This is a handy way to link and to retrieve related documents. Users can easily find what they're looking for with a search.
Use a "fax-to-glass" software solution such as Adobe's $900 Capture 2.0 to convert image files to a view-only format such as Portable Document Format (PDF). Capture can be integrated with scanning software. Fujitsu's 6100C scanner comes with Adobe Capture. It converts scanned pages to PDF on the fly. Although PDF is platform independent, users need a proprietary viewer (Acrobat Reader) to view and print the files. It's not as ubiquitous as Web pages readable by Netscape and Internet Explorer. You still have to put HTML tags on the files.
For production imaging over an intranet, there are at least five approaches you can take:
1. Put large image files on an NT Web/FTP server. Give users the passwords to go in and get them using FTP (NT 4.0 comes with an FTP server and a Web server). Software that compresses and transfers the files makes the transmission quicker and safer. Niwot Networks' (Boulder, CO 303-444-7765) $700+ Gigabyte Express software helps move large image files over Internet protocols. It runs on Macs, Windows 95 and NT. Its phone book remembers IP addresses. It preserves the resource board, finder flags and other elements that the Macintosh operating system adds to files. You don't have to deal with hqxing files any more.
"Our software compresses on the fly," says president Bill Gibson. "It makes more efficient use of the TCP/IP protocol." The software must be installed at both ends of the connection. Each user must have an IP address. Publishers use this software to send composed magazine page files to a printer for output instead of using couriers. It's used for medical and insurance images over an intranet or the Internet.
"We've got people moving 100 megabyte files," Gibson says. "60 megs is not unusual. We haven't found a file format we can't work with yet. Bits is bits for us."
Normally with T1 Internet access you can move three to four megabytes a minute through an NT machine. Gigabyte Express will speed that up to at least six megabytes a minute.
"Normally you leave your FTP site up all the time," says Gibson. "It's subject to people coming to pick at it, probe at it, hack on it. It's a fixed target. It's got susceptibility. You fire up our stuff when you want it. It's a peer-to-peer thing. The files don't hang around on the Internet where people can get to them. They go straight from the source to the destination without being reconstructed."
2. Buy an intranet imaging system with advanced features. One that lets you scan and edit images, convert them to JPEG or another intranet-friendly format, index them, store them and make them accessible through an intranet.
Acordex Imaging Systems (West Boxford, MA 978-352-5500) sells i3, a $40,000-$70,000 hardware and software solution that includes a 20-40 ppm Fujitsu or Panasonic scanner. The image capture part of the software converts paper to TIFF files. The storage component saves the files to a server, CDs or optical discs.
Their Java application that you put on the server is for occasional users. There's zero installation and training effort. Any Java-capable Web browser can retrieve the images. Users don't have to install or learn any new software. The java application sends information to the computer on demand.
Java's not the fastest language for image retrieval. The second option lets you retrieve faster and more often. It's a Web browser plug-in that costs $60 per seat. It requires a little installation. If it gets out of date, you upgrade it. It runs on your native operating system -- Macintosh, Windows or Unix.
The third option is a dedicated imaging application for people who call up high-resolution images all day. Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut uses this on a Mac Power PC to retrieve three images a second off their intranet. "There's nothing slow about HTTP if you use it as your native transport and call it directly from your application," says Kenneth Rohr, Acordex's president. "It only gets slow when you use it as a gateway and add layers on top of what's inherently a proprietary interface." The scan station uses either FTP or HTTP to send images to the server.
i3 has three components. A Web server responds to requests from the network. It's responsible for communications throughout the intranet. The second component is an asynchronous common gateway interface. This locates images and sends them to the client through the Web server and, if needed, passes image request data to the image server.
The third piece is the image server. This server manages hard disk cache. An automatic aging algorithm keeps the newest or most recently used images in the hard disk cache. The image server requests cartridges from the jukebox or the shelf. It purges, pre-loads and prints images under control of other programs.
In.vision Research (St. Petersburg, FL 813-822-7200) use Internet tools directly, without common gateway interfaces, ActiveX controls or browser plug-ins. They offer very traditional imaging using HTML and Java. Their $20,000 intranet server runs on NT and Unix computers. It comes with a SQL database, collaborative workflow, CD-ROM archival and imaging software.
They've developed a very simple way for people to customize their intranet imaging application. "The number one problem people have with intranets is the interface," says president Michael Boses.
In.vision offers RapidApp, a drag-and-drop utility that lets you easily create search screens and other intranet components. RapidApp has a split screen. Create icons, links, graphics etc. on the left side. On the right see what it looks like in a browser.
The Browse Capture component lets you scan straight into a Web browser. It supports ad-hoc and batch scanning off ISIS scanners. Users can view, zoom and pan image files without plug-ins. Convert TIFF files to GIF files on the fly. It measures the screen of computers it's sending images to and adjusts to their resolutions. It sends readable yet low-resolution images to your monitor first. As you zoom into an image, the resolution increases so you see finer details.
Retrieve images off the intranet with any browser. Users with Java-equipped browsers can annotate images on the browser. In.vision didn't put too many Java functions in the application because not all browsers have Java compilers. Java also has some limitations.
"Java can't see your hard drive," Boses points out. "If you want to check a document out, you have to use something other than Java."
The SQL database's structure is customizable. With Java you can view files as a Windows Explorer-like tree. The software is integrated with Verity Search 97 for full-text searches. It links to a database record rather than directly to the actual files. "That way you can store files to optical disc or RAID, you don't have to worry about the links," Boses says.
The workflow component only works in Microsoft Word. Create a file and put it in the workflow folder with a list of people it should go to. People add comments to a newsgroup-style database. A designated approver puts his or her comments in the database as well.
3. Use a production imaging system whose manufacturer has developed an Internet/intranet component.
ByteQuest Technologies (Ottawa, Canada 613-728-5977) offers the ByteQuest Web Gateway that provides Web browser access to images in their ByteQuest Document Imaging system for production imaging. The server software is $7,500 and the client software is $100 per seat. The Web gateway provides communication between an ISAPI-compliant Web server such as the Microsoft Internet Information Server, an ODBC database and the ByteQuest system.
Users retrieve images by filling out an HTML form within a Netscape browser. The search results are displayed in a list. The user clicks on the desired document. The image is displayed in a plug-in viewer.
"This approach lets you build logical filing structures of a wide variety of objects including Web objects," says product director Bassam Zarkout. "Say the filing structure of an organization is a visual tree. You have the human resources group of folders. You could open those folders and then open the folder of a particular employee. Within that folder you'll see listed the resumes and whatever other documents are placed in that folder.
"Some of that could be physical paper on a shelf and some of it could be images accessed through a network from a distant server. Some files could be Word documents or Web documents. All of them are logically grouped and organized in one structure." Regardless of where your files are physically or what types of files they are, they can be stored in a file structure that makes sense to you.
ByteQuest licenses Fulcrum's (Ottawa, Canada 613-238-1761) search engine. Another module, ByteFlow ST, is a high-end workflow engine with Staffware workflow. Instead of defining relationships between documents and "glueing" them together, ByteQuest lets you just define a folder. The files and documents in the folder have an automatic relationship to one another.
"We're conducting a project for a large offshore bank," Zarkout says. "They have investment files. They have a sophisticated fax server. They manage documents in a variety of environments. None of these environments contains all the documents related to the investment. The only place where all the documents related to the investor are stored is in the paper file.
"So although they have a fax server, they print faxes and put copies in the paper file. That's the only place where all the documents are available." Until they have ByteQuest in place and will have them in one electronic virtual folder.
FileNet's (Costa Mesa, CA 714-966-3400) $25,000 FileNet WebSeries Connector software lets Windows NT servers execute queries and retrieve documents from FileNet Image Management Services software. The FileNet WebSeries Viewer plug-in lets browsers view these documents.
Metafile (Rochester, MN 507-286-9232) has intranet-enabled its FOLDERS ($3,500 for five seats) image capture system as well as its COLD solution. Images and other documents are put into a central Metafile archive. End users use the proprietary MetaViewer to view TIFF images along with Word documents, spreadsheets and other types of documents over an intranet. They can scan images into the central archive, typically by saving to a drive letter.
"We can take images from any imaging application and easily migrate them and their indexes to our archive and make them available to thin clients on a WAN or intranet," says Nick Sprau, vice-president.
Mobius (New Rochelle, NY 914-637-7200) offers Document Direct for the Internet ($10,000+). "One of the key things our customers face when they look at intranets is the millions or billions of document images already in their warehouses," says president Mitch Gross.
"They want to put these out over an intranet and provide customers self-service to their information. These documents could be an hour old, a week old or even 10 years old. If they're 10 years old, they're in the warehouse in their original generic form. We needed to provide a dynamic way to make them Internet compatible."
Their answer was to dynamically put document images into HTML wrappers. They developed a Java and JavaScript facility that lets users navigate and retrieve documents from the document warehouse. As the user requests a document, the system converts the file to an intranet-ready format like JPEG, puts HTML tags on it and sends it over to the user.
The images can be retrieved through any Web browser. "Customers just want it to run in a generic browser so they don't have to worry about versioning of other ActiveX objects or plug-ins," Gross says. "They want ease of administration. They don't want phone calls where people say: ýI'm trying to view my mutual fund statement and I keep getting an error that says version incompatibility.' They want their customers to call and say: ýI looked at my statement and I want to invest another $20,000.'"
Users can choose to retrieve low-resolution versions of images to save storage space and time.
Optical Image Technology (State College, PA 814-238-0038) offers a $5,000 intranet access product called IntraVIEWER for their OptiIMAGE document imaging system. IntraVIEWER retrieves and workflows any object stored in Optech's SQL server, including scanned documents. IntraVIEWER runs on an intranet server. It works with standard Internet browsers.
OTG Software's (Bethesda, MD 301-897-1400) ($2,000 per seat) ApplicationExtender software lets you scan and process documents into images. It then converts the images to HTML documents that can be viewed with a Web browser.
4. Buy a toolkit to create an intranet-imaging application.
Imagination Software's (Silver Spring, MD 301-588-8411) Imagine toolkit ($800) has ActiveX controls that let you create imaging applications. ActiveX is Microsoft technology designed to work as an extension of the Microsoft operating system.
"The intranet caught up to our product more than we caught up to the intranet," says president Larry Klein. "Because we followed Microsoft's [ActiveX] technical specifications and because Microsoft transitioned their technical specifications into the Internet, we ended up perfect for the Internet. Our document imaging works well with Java, OpenText, PC Docs and Intertech because they're all built and designed and operate over the Internet/intranet."
Imagine deals with everything to do with document imaging including scanning, OCR, ICR, mark sense, barcode recognition, forms processing, image cleanup, faxing, annotations, displaying and printing.
"There's a whole domain of printing called RIP -- rapid image printing. This is essential for the intranet," says Klein. "Most image printing sends the entire uncompressed image across the network. We send the compressed image across the network. It's about 1/20 of the size. The toolkit uses any type of compression including TIFF."
To display images, you'd write a Java application referencing the Imagine ActiveX control for image display. With ActiveX controls, you could print, OCR, recognize forms and do a lot of other things in a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser.
LEAD Technology's (Charlotte, NC 704-332-5532) latest version of its $300-$1,500 imaging toolkit, LEADTOOLS 8.0, is an OCX/VBX toolkit for Visual Basic applications. It has an ActiveX control for image display and read and write support for more than 40 image file formats. These include GIF, JPEG and progressive JPEG.
SkyLine Tools' (North Hollywood, CA 818-766-3900) $200 to $600 royalty-free ImageLib Corporate Suite 3.0 lets developers create 16-bit and 32-bit imaging applications for Windows 3.1, 95 and NT platforms. It's compatible with Borland C++, Microsoft Visual C++ and Visual Basic. Programmers can write as many programs as they want without paying royalties. It works with TWAIN and ISIS scanners (Pixel Translations charges a royalty for ISIS applications) at up to 34 pages a minute. It has native BLOB support. This means it handles pictures and other binary large objects easily. It offers a gateway to Xerox's Textbridge OCR.
ImageLib offers seven different types of grayscale/antialiasing. It includes 40 image correction, manipulation and deformation tools and filters. Its zoom, pan and scroll feature lets users enlarge a document and scroll and pan around the enlarged image. A Thumbnail Manager lets users preview images before choosing them. Annotations are included and can be burned into the document or saved as a separate file. For intranets, the included ImageLib WebKit supports progressive JPEGs, progressive PNGs, interlaced PNGs and interlaced, transparent or animated GIFs.
5. Provide a gateway between your imaging system and a Web server. Buy browser plug-ins that let users view TIFF files over an intranet.
Acordex's ViewTIFF displays document images in TIFF format in a Netscape Navigator window, frame or embedded region. ViewTIFF provides fast image zoom, scale to gray, rotation, panning, and high resolution printing. An optional Java applet helps ViewTIFF retrieve documentation from large image archives on the Internet or intranet. It works with 68K Macs and Power Macs.
Interactive Pictures' (Knoxville, TN 423-690-5600) IPIX viewer lets you navigate IPIX images in a 360-degree environment. Interactive Pictures can combine two photographs taken with fisheye lenses and wide-angle rectilinear lenses, provide distortion removal and perspective correction. IPIX images are used by realtors to show apartments, homes and commercial real estate over the Internet. Potential buyers (once they've downloaded the proprietary viewer from IPIX's Web site) can click into a photo and cyberstroll around the grounds. It works with Power Macs, 68K Macs and Windows 3.X, 95 and NT.
Live Pictures' (Scotts Valley, CA 408-438-9610) FlashPix Viewer presents high-resolution FlashPix images from a FlashPix server quickly, even on 28.8Kbps modems. Since only the image data needed to view the current window is transferred, large image files can be transmitted efficiently. A high-quality FlashPix image takes no more time to display than a GIF or JPEG image. This is available for Power Macs, Windows 95 and Windows NT.
Imaging for Internet, a plug-in from Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA 415-857-1501) and Live Picture, lets you put photo-quality images on an intranet. It works with the FlashPix digital image file format, which stores multiple resolutions of a single image in one file. Using this plug-in, you can quickly and easily view, manipulate and print high-quality, high-resolution images directly from Web pages. Save images to your hard drive in other popular image formats. Using the gallery, a companion application, create an unlimited number of albums containing thumbnail images of FlashPix and other popular formats. Works with Windows 95 and NT.
TMSSequoia's (Stillwater, OK 405-377-0880) $60 ViewDirector plug-in is a DLL for developers and users that runs on Unix, Macintosh, Windows 95, NT and 3.1
Embed document imaging tags into HTML pages that activate the plug-in viewer and its viewing tools such as a flying magnifying glass, image rotation, zoom, display quality settings, printing marked selections, invert and color smoothing. Users get fast display of single or multi-page industry standard color or black/white images (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, CALS, PCX/DCX, etc.), including large image files commonly used in engineering fields.
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