December 1998
First Looks
Penny Lunt
Cardiff Software (San Marcos, CA 760-752-5200) has been a market leader in desktop forms processing for years with its Teleform Standard product ($1,495), which processes 100 to 2,000 pages a day. They also have a midrange product, Teleform Elite ($5,995), which handles 2,000 to 15,000 pages a day. Last month, the company unveiled a high-end system called Teleform Elite-Enterprise. This product, which starts at $10,985, processes 25,000 to 200,000+ pages a day. Cardiff also now has 6.0 versions of the other two products. Many of the features in Elite-Enterprise are included in Standard and Elite.
How does a desktop software company prove they're ready for big, production applications? Three ways. One, they've changed the underlying database for the product from BTREE to SQL, which is more robust and recovers better from disasters. Two, they've added a Microsoft Management Console-based Control Center. This lets you manage workflow, monitor how operators and engines are working and adjust settings from a central place. If a particular type of form were taking a long time to process, the administrator could change the preprocessing settings for that form to make it easier to read. The Control Center also alerts you when the system is becoming overloaded.
The third improvement is key from image capability, which Teleform didn't have at all before. This lets you handle all of those abused or sloppily filled in forms that no combination of OCR and ICR engines can accurately read. It lets you put open-ended questions on your forms rather than constrained boxes only. In addition to traditional key from image, where you present operators with edit boxes right next to the fields that need to be keyed in, this feature lets you create classifying boxes for the content. That can help you find and tabulate information.
All the Teleform 6.0 software programs have received an additional OCR engine. So their Tri-CR system now has four underlying character recognition engines from Caere, AEG, Kadmos and Advanced Technology. Kadmos and Advanced Technology are ICR engines. Another new feature is lexical checking, which looks for patterns to check things like dollar amounts. The form ID feature now uses a combination of a histogram and OCR to recognize forms.
Elite-Enterprise can harness scanners, a fax server or the Internet as a front end. The Teleform Reader reads and parses scanned images, faxed images and emails equally well. It sends all the data into the same database and the faxed and scanned images into an imaging system.
I played with Elite-Enterprise for a day and liked it. Teleform Designer is easy to use. It lets you scan in a form and trace your new form around it. Or you can create your own form, with the help of sample forms from Cardiff, which is what we did. In a couple of hours, I had designed a form and established how each field was to be read and processed.
The Teleform Reader worked efficiently. In my tests, it took an average of 30 seconds per form to read and OCR fields, check the lookup tables and process all the data as automatically as possible. Anything it couldn't read got sent to the Verifier.
The verifier is also clean and simple. First it presents the characters the Tri-CR software missed in a big row. If it's clear what a character is, you type in the character. If it's not clear, you hit the space key. All of those you pass up are then presented in field mode where it's easier to determine what the characters are. I found the field mode a little hard on the eyes because the field and edit box were small and I couldn't figure out how to make them bigger. Anything you can't read in field mode is presented in form mode, where you see the complete picture around the suspect character.
This appears to be a functional, user-friendly product for high-end forms applications that don't require processing millions of pages a day, with a great price. We'll keep you posted as we do more tests and talk to production users.
-- Penny Lunt
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