(For more resources on Open source Content Management, see here.)

The administrative user interface

The administrative user interface has five tabs across the top that provide access to key areas of the system. They are as follows:

• Batch Class Management
• Batch Instance Management
• Workflow Management
• Folder Management
• Reports

Batch Class Management

The Batch Class Management interface allows administrators to create, modify, edit, and delete batch classes. The batch class configuration is broken down into sections for workflow modules and plugins, document types and fields, e-mail configuration, batch class fields, scanner profiles, and CMIS import.

Administrators can configure six aspects of a batch class. They are as follows:

• Modules and Plugins: Modules are the major steps in the workflow. Each module is implemented by a series of plugins. An administrator can configure the plugins that comprise a module by selecting the module and pressing the Edit button.
• Documents and Fields: The Document Types tab is where the documents that will be processed in the batch class are specified. Fields can be specified per document. Extraction rules for automatic indexing of field values can be created as well.
• Email Configuration: Ephesoft can process e-mail messages and attachments. Ephesoft is configured with authentication information to check mail on an account, and it will process any e-mail sent to that account.
• Batch Class Fields: This prompts users for batch-level information from the Web Scanner. They can also be used in scripting to persist information at the batch level.
• Scanner Profiles: This is where administrators can configure Web scanners associated with each batch class.
• CMIS Import: Ephesoft can monitor documents in an existing document repository to import into Ephesoft for classification and extraction.

Batch Instance Management

Batch Instance Management within the administrative interface allows administrators to see the status of batches and restart in-flight workflows starting at a previous step in the workflow.

Workflow Management

The Workflow Management interface allows users to add new custom plugins and create dependencies. The following screenshot shows the Workflow Management interface:

Ephesoft is designed to accommodate customizations to fit any customer’s needs. For this reason, Ephesoft incorporates the jBPM workflow engine. This gives Ephesoft the ability to adapt to specific customer requirements from the capture workflow perspective.

Ephesoft’s capture workflow can be thought of as workflow within a workflow. The workflow for each batch class consists of major steps called modules. The main modules that come with Ephesoft are the following:

• Import
• Page Processing
• Document Assembly
• Document Review
• Extraction
• Document Validation
• Export

Each module above is composed of a series of substeps called plugins. It is worth noting that some plugins may depend on other plugins. For example, the CMIS export plugin requires the CreateMultiPage Files plugin so that it can upload documents instead of individual pages.

Ephesoft allows developers to add custom modules and plugins to the Ephesoft capture workflow. The ability to add custom modules allows Ephesoft to extend to meet any document capture need. The ability to remove unused modules allows Ephesoft to run as efficiently as possible, maximizing the use of expensive server hardware.

Folder Management

The Folder Management interface allows the administrator to upload new and updated files for batch class creation.

Reports

Reporting can be enabled to provide administrators with statistics on the average time batches, documents, and pages that are processed on each module or plugin. The administrator can filter by batch class, start and end date, and type of report.

To access reporting, click on the Reports tab in the administrative user interface.

(For more resources on Open source Content Management, see here.)