What Is Imaging?
Imaging is the conversion of paper documents into digital images. These images are captured and indexed through scanning and automated data recognition processes, archived to electronic media, and viewed from a computer workstation.

Ascend Software offers an end-to-end imaging solution that manages the entire Life Cycle of the document. Documents are captured, indexed (OCR, ICR, bar code, RS AutoIndex, etc.), stored, distributed, and displayed by a powerful application, renowned for its reliability, accessibility, usability, and expandability. Images (e.g., invoices, forms, checks, etc.), and many other document or multi-media file types (e.g., PDF, JPEG, PostScript, Word, Excel, MPEG, AVI, etc.), are conveniently and securely stored and can be distributed or retrieved with unlimited indexing capability.

Imaging Process
Ascends expertise starts prior to the implementation of an imaging solution. We help guide you through the best imaging approach to yield an efficient, productive, and convenient solution. It is important to determine how documents will be retrieved and searched to define the proper indexes and ensure fast and accurate retrieval.

Easily meet your centralized and/or decentralized scanning requirements (including internet/intranet), and determine which scanning methods will be most efficient (e.g., Batch, Single-sheet, etc.). The document recognition process includes all the advanced features to insure a high quality scan (i.e., deskew, deshade, despekle, streak removal, etc.). Quality control features are optionally available for those documents that require 100% accuracy 100% of the time. Selecting the appropriate hardware is critical to balance the potential future growth with current need. One must consider duty cycles, largest to smallest document size, volume, duplex, speed, and connectivity. This approach sets the stage for a more effective and intuitive imaging solution after implementation, and leads to greater savings in time.

During the day-to-day imaging process, the documents are scanned, indexed, and stored for later retrieval. RS ImageManagers advanced image processing and unlimited indexing capabilities includes full support for OCR, ICR, OMR, and both one and two dimensional bar code recognition. Have the flexibility to define the image indexing and scanning process that best meets the enterprise needs. Optional conversion to PDF provides full text search capabilities on scanned indexed documents.

Document Storage and Management
The RS ImageManager document imaging solution integrates into the ReportSafe framework, which is a more robust back-end storage solution than is supplied with systems restricted to just images. ReportSafe is a document management solution that offers superior storage, distribution, retrieval, and viewing options.

You can save images, reports, and documents on a hard drive, then after a designated time period, automatically migrate them to a CD, DVD, or magnetic optical media. Both the migration and retrieval process can be automated to reduce support time. The flexible rule based system allows you to identify a single document or a group of documents and uniquely or generally define: security, user groups, public or private folders, retention periods, centralize/decentralize storage locations, and multiple storage mediums. Our solution maintains an audit log for each document that records an entry every time a document is viewed, E-Mailed, forwarded, printed, or re-assigned (each action may also be restricted through security).