There's more than one way to add images to a software application. These are four of the routes you can take.
You can buy software developers' toolkits, collections of
subroutine libraries that developers use to create new programs. If you
have programmers on staff, they can build customized imaging applications
for other software programs your business uses. This gives you total
control over what imaging functions you get and how they work with your
other applications.
Software companies create new products with toolkits. Large
corporations with hundreds or thousands of users use them to develop
customized applications, which is cheaper than buying lots of seats of
packaged software.
Standalone imaging software can be used with business applications.
But typically the user has to exit the application they're using, open
and use the imaging program, and then go back to what they were doing. In
this scenario, the user has to be trained on two systems, and somebody
has to figure out how to link the documents and databases in the two
separate systems.
Image viewers are off-the-shelf software packages that let you view
images from other applications. They're generic and leave a lot of the
integration work to the user.
Image enabling software, the subject of this article, is software
designed to work with business applications such as accounting, human
resources and order processing. It can blend into the business
application. It waits in the background until you need to see an image.
Typically, you don't know it's there until you click on a toolbar button
or a hyperlinked list of documents to call up an image. Then the image
enabling software starts up.
