What are advantages and disadvantages of a Proprietary System and an Open Platform?

Choosing the right type of software is necessary for running a business as efficiently as possible in the global marketplace. Generally, you have one of two choices choosing a software platform for business purposes or even creating a website. One choice is proprietary software trademarked and likely requiring you to obtain or purchase a license while one choice is open-source software which is free software that you can download and pay no licensing fees to use. Using them has advantages and disadvantages. 

Advantages

With a proprietary-software system, you will be able to utilize the software company's customer service department for troubleshooting and setup purposes. Proprietary software may have more features that appeal to the business owner and is generally adjusted to meet a market need. 

Often, open-source software is cheaper or free. Additionally, it is widely distributed. Therefore, if you have any question, you can ask and gain help from a large number of users on the Internet via forums or other information sources. Often fast bug and security fixes are available for open-source software when problems arise

Expense

One of the big drawbacks of a proprietary-software package is expense. Proprietary-software users will generally charge a licensing fee to the software company that needs to take advantage of its product because the software company needs to sell its product to survive. This licensing fee can be fairly expensive, especially compared to open-source software. If open-source software requires any fees, they are usually required for the software itself not necessarily for ongoing licensing maintenance.

Developer

Compared to open-source software, proprietary software makes business owners too heavily dependent on the developer. It is another drawback of proprietary software. Only own programmers and developers understand the code that makes the software work. Generally, the licensee will not be able to turn to other business owners and users for help with the product.

Adaptability

Generally, proprietary software products make it difficult to adapt to changes in the marketplace. However, open-source software tends to be much quicker to adapt to these types of changes and often provides the business owner with more flexibility. Sometimes proprietary developers slowly offer fixes for any bugs that their software may have.

Source: smallbusiness

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iView: a web-based content management open platform product

Previously, I mentioned iCapture and iSign, two open platform products of inFORM Decisions. Now I give you some information about another open platform product of inFORM Decisions. It is iView.

What is iView?

iView is an affordable web based document indexing, archive and retrieval solution. It allows users to quickly store, search and access documents via a web browser from anywhere and anytime. iView can be implemented standalone, or work with other open platform products of inFORM Decisions.

With this open platform product, you can eliminate the cost and the time of storing, retrieving and sharing documents.

Here are some main features of iView. 

• Documents are captured, and then automatically converted into popular and standard PDF format 

• User-defined rules-based intelligent engine monitors for and immediately processes inbound spooled files and scanned documents tagged for Archive 

• User friendly web browser interface utilized to retrieve documents 

• Option available to store archived documents on any networked server via FTP 

• Scanning import function (iScan) indexes and stores scanned-in documents. Easy to configure, works with your existing scanner 

• Rapid deployment of enterprise documents to a self-service web portal 

• Intelligent DataQueue engines consume no processor time until a spool file becomes available to process 

• Archives under system profile or the user ID of the spool file owner 

• Searchable index can be multi-line. Users can add a column of data to the search database. This is helpful for spool files that contain multiple rows of important data 

For more info, see the company's website at www.informdecisions.com or call at 800-858-5544.


Source: inFORM Decisions

Tags: IBM iSeries, as400 scan, AP Automation, Document Automation, digital forms, Scanning to TIFF

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iCapture, an advanced document and data capture for iSeries, is available

iCapture is a major upgrade to iScan’s inFORM Decisions, a document capture software.

iCapture offers significantly expanded data-capture and search optimization capabilities, letting users experience a dramatic increase in document indexing intelligence functions and configuration options. What is more, the major upgrade minimizes the need for product customization and third-party utilities.

iCapture also features the advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and optical mark recognition (OMR) which allow data capture of nearly any type of scanned image into meaningful metadata text. Thanks to iCapture’s built-in intelligent character recognition (ICR) functions, hand-printed information can be reliably recognized for metadata.

Additionally, an advanced data extraction (ADE) engine within iCapture intelligently uses scripts or pattern-match logic to create or enhance data recognition accuracy when creating search metadata from a scanned document. In fact, ADE will eliminate the need to hand-key metadata information. As the result, document processing time will be reduced while accuracy will be increased.

Besides, iCapture can auto-extract complex data structures and information from even disparate documents to further enhance document archiving and searching capabilities because ADE is paired with iCapture’s advanced optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities.

iCapture works with inFORM’s iView. It lets users scan documents with PC-connected devices existing outside of the IBM i environment. Then, the scanned content is automatically routed to iCapture for processing, eliminating the need for dedicated 5250 sessions for scanning documents that are to be archived within iView.

You can explore the website of inFORM Decisions (www.informdecisions.com) to understand other benefits of iCapture more.

Source: Mcpressonline

Tags: IBM iSeries, iSeries document capture, iSeries scanned documents, iseries signature capture, iSeries imaging, document capture software

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A powerful suite of open platform products of inFORM Decisions

I am sure that if you are running a company, you only want your business process to be improved as much as possible and your business environment to be more efficient. 

In fact, when you want to use products to help your business gain productivity and efficiency, you have two choices: a proprietary system and an open platform. It is believed that an open platform is better when it provides a lot of benefits. I agree with that. However, I am sure that you may be confused when there are a lot of open platform products out there. You really do not know what best open platform products are. But now your problem is solved when inFORM Decisions introduces a suite of open platform products including iCapture, iView and iSign. They will help your business a lot. 

Let’s discover these open platform products. 

iCapture : Feature-rich, affordable document capture and scanning solution

iCapture is a good capture platform for those who want to automatically scan and image. It can meet all the needs of an organization such as document scanning and import, data capture, OCR/ICR, forms processing, data extraction and the ability to migrate the information into a backend. You can use this solution whether your company is small or large. In fact, it is an affordable, scalable solution.

iView: Web-based Content/Document Management Solution 

In fact, iView is an affordable document archive – retrieval solution with powerful integration capabilities. With iView, you can archive your documents and make them available for search and retrieval via a web interface by anytime, anywhere and anyone. You can save costs related to storing, retrieving and sharing documents. 

iSign: Mobile Signature Capture

iSign, a mobile electronic signature capture solution allows you to capture signatures from a browse java enabled mobile device, apply them to business documents ranging from invoices, forms, to reports and upload iView. Signatures provided by iSign are 100% legal. 

As you see, these open platform products provide a lot of benefits. Especially, they are easy to use interfaces and powerful integration capabilities.

Source: inFORM Decisions

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