We’re looking forward to the upcoming release of the Kofax integration with Alfresco. The project is led by our friends at Aarden Ringcroft, who just gave me a demo of the latest version.

More details are on the Alfresco wiki. Here are some excerpts:

“Integrating Kofax and Alfresco provides complete Content Management support including capture, management and publishing of Content. Kofax captures content from all kinds of sources usually via scanning & OCR. The captured information is then “released” to Alfresco, for it to be managed in an ad-hoc manner or via pre-defined business processes.”

and…

“The following information will be captured via a UI Dialog allowing configuration of the Release script.

1. Alfresco Server Connection Details (username, password, repository instance)
2. Destination Alfresco Folder where Kofax captured information should be placed
3. Mapping of Kofax captured information (meta-data, tiff, ocr and pdf renditions) to Alfresco Content Model
   • Kofax Document Class -> Alfresco Content Type (Content or sub-type of Content)
   • Kofax Index Value (as extracted from document by Kofax) -> Alfresco Property (of appropriate data type)
   • Kofax Tiff, OCR or PDF document -> Alfresco Property (of binary data type)”

In other words, scan your documents, forms, etc., with one of the leading scanning platforms, automatically recognize the contents (typed characters, check marks, hand writing, etc.), assign relevant meta-data, and automatically insert the image, meta-data, and converted text into a corresponding content item within the Alfresco repository.

Once in the repository, the document and its contents are available for enterprise search using Alfresco’s built-in search engine, where searches may be performed on the full-text and/or on the meta-data fields. Other benefits of managing your scanned documents within Alfresco include: secure access, records management/archiving for compliance purposes, seamless integration with other enterprise applications (e.g., via an enterprise portal), improved workflow and business process management, among others.

Stay tuned for an upcoming webcast that we will have on this topic, including a demo of the Kofax/Alfresco integration.

“At O’Reilly, we keep our ears to the ground on promising open source projects and communities, especially ones that are ‘on trend’ with some of the big issues that we see shaping the industry,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. “Alfresco is one that sits high on our list.”

Read more by clicking here.

Matt Asay suggests in this Infoworld post that open source service vendors should pick their battles, and focus on a particular set of open source projects/packages.

We couldn’t agree more. (And Matt mentions us as one of the successful companies doing so!)

Of course, this is just fundamental business strategy that applies to companies of all types — open source or not. “Differentiate or die” applies to everyone in the marketplace.

How does this drive our business strategy?

1. Select the best in class open source projects in the domain areas in which we have experience.

2. Invest a tremendous amount of energy in deeply understanding the selected technologies, and in applying them to solve real world business problems. This includes partnering closely with the open source technology vendors and projects, and contributing to their communities in numerous ways.

3. Find voids in the marketplace and transform our open source technology investments into market leading, clearly differentiated services and solutions.

4. Deliver tangible value to our customers using our differentiated expertise.

5. Wash, rinse, and repeat.