Okay I'm just starting to research this problem to see if it is feasible to do with the equipment I have in place, so please bare with me.

Problem: We have documents that are in paper form. These come in all sorts of ways, faxes, mail, whatever. In the end these paper documents get sorted by which office they should be sent to, and then they are grouped together at the end of the day and sent to the correct office. Right now we use a ScanToEmail machine and email it to each office. In the past we have faxed it. Both those solutions have limitations (fax machines don't always work, and emails can get quite large and cumbersome to download)

Proposed Solution: I am considering haveing them enter each batch into a web form, which would then enter the batch into a database with info about where it should go and any comments, and assign it a number. Then I thought I could print a cover page containing the same info and a bar code. The pages would then all be grouped together behind the cover sheet. One cover sheet per batch. One batch per location to be sent to. Then all the batches could be grouped together and emailed to a special email address (via the ScanToEmail machine.) I would have a program that monitors that email, downloads the attatchment and scans if for barcodes. It would then split the document apart by page, and assign (or send) them to the correct locations.

The Good:
  1. Minimal amount of work to send each document. Simply filling in a couple of coverpage forms.
  2. Allows end users to access individual files in the batch, even though they are sent as a whole. (send a big file, user recieves a set of small ones)
The Bad:
  1. I don't know anything about scanning PDF files for bar codes

I'm sure there are more good and bad points. I'm just trying to figure out now, is this feasible? Is it more work than its worth? Has anyone tried something like this? Any help, ideas, questions about my flawed logic,or whatever are appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time and help!

p.s. i would be doing this in perl, hence the asking it here.

___________
Eric Hodges

In reply to Digital Document Capture by eric256

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