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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General information about an open platform

Open Platform Overview

An open platform is an approach where a company lets other companies build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform. The sponsoring company creates a standardized interface and allows other companies to build products and services leveraging their assets rather than controlling the development pathway.

Open Platforms has become popular in the energy and technology sectors and successful in the internet world through the use of open APIs (Application Programming Interface). 

How an Open Platform Works

An Open Platform leverages standards to let the third parties add functionality mainly in the energy and technology sectors. However, now applications are expanding into other industries because digital technologies have increasingly penetrated into daily home and work life. 

Benefits when using an Open Platform

There are numerous benefits to the open platform owner when letting partners to build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform: 

• Offer features to customers while your organization is kept focused 
• Allow for deep customization without tying up your own resources 
• More closely integrate a customer to your system, making them less likely to leave 
• Save time and money spent on sub-scale business development 

Where Open Platforms work well

Open Platforms will work well if they are platforms to serve a wide range of customer needs/ segments and a modular architecture lets different companies work together to support specific customer needs. 

Here are some elements referring to potential for open platforms to be successful:

• Multiple capabilities required where one organization is unlikely to span everything 
• Multiple customer needs and segments where a large variety of supported products will expand the market for the platform and fend off competing platforms 
• Competition along the value chain making innovation in each module/ component a requirement to maintain the pace 
• Financial models supporting the ecosystem of players where monetization maps to investment required 
• Low frictional costs for stakeholders in the ecosystem to make the required connections to the platform, enter the market, sell their product (automated business development and digital data transfer is what makes this so compelling in internet-based models) 
• Mechanisms for updating the standards as needs evolve 

Source: innovationinthecrowd

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All things about Microsoft SharePoint document capture and scanning solution of inFORM Decisions

If routing content to Microsoft SharePoint is difficult for you, you have reached the right place. Due to iCapture’s powerful SharePoint integration, you can route your documents easily.

It is a fact that SharePoint has been extremely famous for I.T. departments while administrators are seeking applications to help structure and standardize the addition of documents and data to the repository. iCapture is an open platform product offered by inFORM Decisions. This powerful document capture engine can streamline any SharePoint Scanning and Capture workflow. 

In fact, iCapture works with any desktop scanner and can connect your scanning copier to SharePoint. Scanning is done in an instant due to iCapture’s automation. What is more, this document capture engine can automatically extract document information through barcodes, text extraction and pattern matching. As the result, you can save time while you can also do other things. Just press the green button and come back when the job is done. iCapture is really wonderful when it can scan anything from forms, contracts to invoices. You just name it and this open platform product can morph to your organization’s needs. As you can see iCapture really offers efficiency, automation and productivity. Additionally, with iCapture and its SharePoint OCR technology, everything becomes a searchable PDF. You can extract information and create a fully searchable digital “file cabinet” quickly and easily.

With iCapture, you standardize the flow of documents into SharePoint. Contact inFORM Decisions right now to get further information.

Source: inFORM Decisions 

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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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iSign Signature Capture’s iFD

In fact, the concept of paper a pen and is becoming increasingly unfamiliar in our mobile world. What do you need to capture some information? That's what tablets are for. inFORM Decisions (iFD), a software vendor, introduced a new IBM i-based signature capture solution for mobile devices called iSign. 

iSign is an HTML-based app that lets users capture signatures from the comfort of smartphones or tablets. It works by digitally capturing signatures from the touchscreen of any mobile device loaded with a Java-enabled Web browser and then applies the signature to any business document.

This software not only improves the business document workflow by making it electronic but also eliminates the need to print and carry large documents. These benefits make iSign a good potential investment for organizations that are trying to "Go Green".

iSign helps you collect signatures from the comfort of a touchscreen mobile device. 

To sign your name, select a document from the queue, sign the document (using either a stylus or your finger), and save the document on the device. After that, the signed document is uploaded to the document store or content management system, where it can be retrieved anywhere and anytime. You can print or email the document from the mobile device.

You can use iSign in the distribution, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and financial services industries. Insurance adjusters could use it to expedite claims processing in the field while banks could use the technology to avoid lugging around over 100 page documents during mortgage signings. 

inFORM Decisions president Dan Forster says that iSign provides the signatures which are legally binding per the federal government's 2001 Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN).

According to inFORM, signatures captured by iSign can be stored in any document management system. But the company recommends using its own iView document management system to store iSign documents. With iView, you can find signed documents and retrieve them from the comfort of a Web browser.

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

Source: itjungle

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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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