Essex County Registry Of Deeds Rebuilds And Improves Old Automated System
In late 2002, the Essex County Registry of Deeds was hit with a vicious virus that infected and disabled many of their computers. Three of the computers infected and rendered useless by this virus were working as Kofax standalone Capture workstations running on Ascent Capture 4. The original reseller utilized by Essex County Registry of Deeds had gone out of business and all the customized source code was held by the reseller so there was no chance to reinstall.
Essex County Registry of Deeds is a state run organization. The Registry of Deeds handles all records for the sale and transfer of property within the County of Essex. The registry is scanning approximately 200,000 pages a month and utilizing 3 Standalone installs of Kofax Version 6.1 with three Bell & Howell CopiScan II document scanners. All documents are handfed and imaged within 7 days of receipt. Images scanned are uploaded into an Oracle Database with a Web Based Search Engine for retrieval.
Donna Deschenes, Manager of IT, contacted Kofax and the inside sales team referred her to Inception Technologies Inc. Donna had inherited the system and therefore was not intimately aware of the background processing that was going on for each of the 2 applications that needed to be rebuilt. The applications were simple yet had some twists that were only uncovered by doing some hands on testing. In both applications, Bar Codes were being utilized. The Bar Code value was a multi-value code that contained a unique identifying number, Document Number, and information that was hand-keyed into an Oracle Database. In addition, the Bar Code was being used as a document separator. The first challenge was to parse the bar code into several fields. Keying on the Document Number, the values were then validated against the Oracle Database along with the page count to ensure accuracy of the read bar code and that all pages were scanned.
The Kofax system is vital to the operations of the Registry. Without the Kofax system, all automated research for the customers of the Registry of Deeds would be done manually and by Essex County employees. Documents which take seconds to retrieve online or over the internet would have to be requested in person and could take hours even days for an Essex County employee to retrieve.
Working with the Donna, Inception Technologies completely rebuilt the application to improve and emulate the prior system. The system has been implemented for approximately 3 years and is now in process of being expanded. The new system will maintain the current scanning applications and hardware, but be moved to a network configuration. In addition, four more scan stations are being added and 2 more applications so that documents received prior to the implementation of Bar Code technology can be processed in a similar fashion.
Inception Technologies is a document management and mass storage VAR/Integrator based in NH. The company specializes in providing customers with the latest in capture technology and integrating into their present environments. With over 50 years combined experience in document management, Inception brings a unique understanding of the digital and analog worlds together to function in a capacity that best fits the customer's needs.