For those of you who may not have heard, Ephesoft 3.1 is now available and last week an in-depth demo of the new features was recorded.  You can view the Ephesoft feature demo here:

For those without the 1 hour and 18 minutes to spare, below are some of the highlights, and my thoughts of the demo.  All of the Ephesoft Features can be found in the product documentation found HERE

New Ephesoft Extraction Features

Fuzzy Key Field – This is a great new feature!  This allows for key value fields to still be recognized even if the key value you were looking for was marred in some manner and partially OCR’d.

Zone Extraction – It’s simplified zonal extraction, and it makes for a nice filter to fine tune your KV extraction.  Say for instance you have a health form with a section for applicant and applicant’s spouse, yet both sections have a SSN to be extracted.  Here you can set a zone in the Key field extraction to filter one from the other.

A Regular Expression Builder/Wizard and Library – With a great new tool, Ephesoft continues to make the development process simpler by taking the pain out of Regular Expressions.  This tool is available everywhere a regular expression is required. I applaud the effort!

Classification Features

New Test Classification Tools – Ephesoft has added more tools to provide easier ways for developers to test and control the Lucene search engine. Without having to run batches, and open up Luke, developers can see which files were used to determine classification and if they need to adjust confidence scores.  This is very handy and will make classification setup more efficient.

Advanced DA Switch – This feature adds an extra layer to classification to help determine alternative documents that may have been missed for document assembly in prior versions.

Regex Classification Switch – A great feature for having keywords help classify documents.  If there is a particular word like a form name to help classify the document, then this feature could be used.

Predefined Document Type – If you just have one document and want everything to be a document then you can set it here.

Set Unknown documents to a set type – Finally! Get ready to strip out some script coding! Now you can set a default type for unknown documents without scripting.

Fixed Form Extraction Features

Multiple Page Fixed Form Extractions – Have you ever wanted to set different RecoStar Form project files to different pages within in a document?  Well now you can!

Table Extraction Features – Ephesoft, from the beginning, has worked hard to make Table Extraction easy for developers and end users.  In this version Table Extraction has had a bit of a rework to make table extraction less complex.  Testing of a table extraction has also been added to help developer see results without having to run a batch. Confidence scores are now attached to each extraction rule to help with extraction. For users, a valid table check box is added to the User Index interface to help show a table was extracted.

Page Processing

Deskew Option – A deskew option has been added to the page process module.  YEA!!!

User Screens

New Home/Timeout Screen – This new “Home” page contains links to all of the different Ephesoft User Screens.  This screen will also be what users are returned to should the session time out.

New Warning for Timeouts – A new warning screen will appear for users before timeout to allow users a chance to leave a session open.

Web Scanner Enhancements – New client side PNG creation in the browser scanner.  No streaming of images to server until the batch is released.

Administrator Screen

Column sorting – Column sorting is now available within the Admin screens for sorting batches.

Color theming – A color them screen has been added for personalizing color theme.

Trouble Shoot button – A new tool to fetch all information on a failed batch.  This is an excellent feature for the admin tool.

System Configuration Screen – This is a new screen to show all of the plugins in the Ephesoft library, set Application information, and fetch license details, without digging through xml files.  This is a base screen now and is expected to be used more in future releases.

Email Import

Usage of Open Office for processing is now using Libre Office, and is being packaged with Ephesoft.  This is very important to note if you are currently using Open Office integrations.

Email Batch Processing – Ephesoft has added the ability to batch e-mails together. Batches can be picked up after a set number of e-mails or by time.  A neat little feature is the timer can be set that after a set amount of time after receiving the set number of e-mails then it will fetch again.  That was a small batch doesn’t get left waiting too long to fill a batch.

RecoStar TIFF Conversion – PDF to TIFF conversion can now be switched from GhostScript to RecoStar.  It has been found RecoStar can be more efficient than the GhostScript engine, but both are available to be used.  Changing to RecoStar should be considered!

Overall Improvements

RecoStar 7.0 upgrade

Application Level Scripting – A timer can be set to fire off a script after a specific task.  This could be used for a cleaning or monitoring task.  Developers have your way!

Tomcat memory improvements – Decrease possibility of Perm Gen issues.

GWT 2.5 upgrade

Single Sign On – added support for SSO.