As we start to look back on the past year, one of the key trends we have seen is the resurgence of interest in capture software. It's early days for sure, but just as there is clearly increased interest in multi-channel publishing and CCM (component content management), so too at the entry point of the content lifecycle, is there an increased recognition by buyers that efficient capture delivers big dividends. Be it forms, paper, xml, pdf, or whatever -- making sense of the incoming information as early as possible in a process is one of the biggest productivity boosters your organization can attain.

Where there remains a disconnect between buyers and vendors - is in just how expensive and difficult good capture technology can be to acquire. For it seems that now OCR (optical character recognition) is commonplace, that buyers still imagine that dealing with the issues of distributed capture, multi-paged documents, multi-languages, in multi formats is somehow easy, and by default should also be cheap.

In fact the difference between the high end capture vendors (such as Abbyy, ReadSoft and Kofax) and low-end OCR is the difference between a bottle of wine vinegar and a bottle of vintage Krug. For at the high end, capture systems not only recognize multipage documents, but also relationships between pages and the context and content on them. They can recognize and capture a paragraph that is written in English, and just as accurately capture the native language Chinese footnotes related to that paragraph. They can capture at a staggeringly fast and accurate clip -- and once configured and running are typically far more accurate and faster than humans keying the same information in to a system manually.  And of course, they cost more. 

Key advice to buyers: don't underestimate the value of good clean captured data at the start of your process.  Remember the maxim, rubbish in = rubbish out. At the same time don't underestimate the capabilities of what are genuinely some of the most technically advanced products in the ECM stack -- as it is likely that just for once, the right vendor may be able to do more for you than you think.