Hyland Software Revolutionizes Core Components in OnBase in 11.0

You can have the biggest and brightest house in the neighborhood, but if you neglect the basement, you run the risk of not having a sound structure. The same is true for anything you build, including software. The foundation is always the most important aspect of your product.

We get that concept at Hyland Software, and it’s what we think about when we develop our premier enterprise content management (ECM) software solution, OnBase. Never satisfied with the status quo, we continually enhance its foundational ECM core components.

That holds true with the release of OnBase 11.0.

“We remain committed to advancing the core components of capturing, indexing and retrieving information to help customers leverage their OnBase investment even more,” says Bill Filion, vice president of development.

Enhanced Capture

OnBase’s heart and soul is capture technology. It’s how the software began its life, as an enterprise reporting solution, capturing information for financial services organizations.

“So it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the key features we’re bringing to market with OnBase 11.0 is our new capture and indexing technology,” says Filion. “For 20 years, we have focused on automating various aspects of indexing and identifying what the document is. With 11.0, we take it up another notch, automating even more processes from the capture side.”

This new technology helps lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) by giving you an affordable capture solution. No need for expensive third-party capture technology, especially when there are so many businesses out there that don’t have the money to throw around for these pricey options.

And a company’s ability to affordably capture information opens up a whole new world for its employees, who can easily find and access information – as long as that information is free of errors and contains the right data.

Luckily, OnBase is expert at that, as well.

Intelligent Indexing

Not long ago, indexing documents into the database was a manual job. An employee would sit in front of a monitor and manually copy information from one form into another – a process ripe for error, misspellings and omissions.

To address part of this problem, OnBase uses a feature called Auto-Fill keyword sets. Through this feature, a user enters one keyword value and OnBase fills in the rest. For example, by entering a unique keyword, such as an employee ID, OnBase automatically fills in other values, such as department, manager, date of hire, and so forth, based on information already stored inside OnBase or another database with which OnBase integrates. While this eliminates a lot of manual data entry, someone still keys in the initial value. Hopefully, correctly.

“So our goal continues to be the elimination of manual activity the end user must perform to index documents coming from scanners and in large batches,” says Filion.

We’re getting closer. OnBase 11.0’s automated indexing and redaction functionality nearly eliminates all manual indexing, providing cleaner and more accurate information, reducing the cost of indexing documentation and information, eliminating low-value tasks, and increasing overall accuracy. And OnBase’s automated intelligent indexing feature actually learns as it indexes, so that indexing gets cleaner and more precise the more you do. It’s optimized to handle content like higher education institutions’ invoices and transcripts, and healthcare organizations’ explanation of benefits, as well.

So what’s better than cleaner and more precise information? How about access to that information in real-time.

Real-time Information Retrieval

You’ve captured information better than you ever have before, and you’ve indexed that information in a way that ensures clean and accurate data. Now how do you get the most up-to-date information into the hands of your employees?

In the past, information updates might occur once a day or overnight. If an employee wanted the most up-to-date information, they’d have to check it out first thing in the morning. Otherwise, eight hours later, that information might be out-of-date or obsolete.

The problem? A lack of communication between applications or databases or both. While information might be up-to-date in an application, it may not reach other employees until a server update, for example.

With OnBase you can integrate – or connect – your ECM solution seamlessly with your line-of-business application. Doing so permits instant information sharing between the two, enhancing the information your employees retrieve.

“Employees can access updates to information in real-time in the application they work with most,” says Filion. “As content is updated in each system – OnBase or your line-of-business application – whatever decisions are being made, users now have instant access to that information, regardless of what application they’re in.”

And in 11.0, Microsoft Outlook users can start a workflow or execute other tasks directly in Outlook. Most users won’t even realize they’re working in OnBase.

An added bonus is the ease with which OnBase connector technology accomplishes this. No need for custom code, which can be expensive, is not heavily tested, and is ridiculously difficult to upgrade.

Connector technology allows a company to maximize its IT investment by adapting it to your applications. This becomes a real differentiator. Beginning in OnBase 11.0, Hyland Software is offering new data-level integrations with applications such as Lawson, Datatel and Peoplesoft, in addition to its existing SAP integration.