There are many reasons a company would need to keep records of their documents such as compliance or needing to refer back to them. Moving these documents into SharePoint rather than keeping boxes of paper documents, shipping them off to Iron Mountain or filing them away in the file room is a much easier way to storing them as well as being able to find information in them. The KnowledgeLake Product Suite provides a complete solution for getting paper documents into SharePoint, an interface to appropriately tag the files with metadata and the engine to Optical Character Recognize, OCR, the contents of the file. This means that users can then quickly find them later either by their metadata or the actual content of the documents.
Prior to 2014, using KnowledgeLake with SharePoint was restricted to on premise installs of both, which required maintaining infrastructure for both environments. Now, companies looking to use SharePoint as a full ECM product without being tied to an on premise instance of SharePoint have no further to look than SharePoint Online with KnowledgeLake’s Imaging for Office 365. The KnowledgeLake Product Suite is now fully compatible with Office 365 and offers a powerful solution for getting paper into SharePoint.
KnowledgeLake provides two apps for SharePoint that work together to provide end users with a complete solution for getting documents into SharePoint and then quickly finding them. The KnowledgeLake Imaging App provides management of Content Types such as setting as cascading lookups. This allows users to quickly add related metadata to the document when scanning it in.
The KnowledgeLake Search App allows administrators to create searches based on something like a Lease ID or Well Name that will pull in all related documents based on that identifier. These searches can then be made available to all users with the KnowledgeLake Connect Client.
The only downside to using KnowledgeLake Office 365 products is that if batch processing of scanned documents is still needed, a Capture Server machine will be necessary whether it is on premise or living in a virtual machine in Azure. Capture Server allows bulk documents to be scanned and then have the OCR process offloaded to a dedicated machine, reducing the workload performed by the scanning machine.