I am trying to put together a project for our users so that they can scan documents from our warehouse storage and also future files (Papers printed by clients and or office staff) into our document imaging system (DI) using cover sheets. We are doing it currently with our DI reading text fields, however, sometimes our workflows do not read the text well, paper may be scanned in skewed, may have spots on it and or may be scanned in incorrectly, and we end up needing user interference to fix/edit the issues before the documents go to their final storage place.
We experimented with barcodes and found that if we added barcodes to the coversheet we could allow the DI system to search a whole page for a barcode and it would read it with 100% accuracy.
So we created bar codes on our coversheets that would calculate themselves depending on how a user filled in a particular text field such as an employee ID or a registration number such as a jailing ID, a date of the event and the name of the type of form. This would dictate where the form would be stored in the DI system. Our DI system imports documents, reads the pages, if it finds a bar code it will assume it is page 1 of a document, the next process will read the bar codes and determine how to populate the meta data in our DI system and store it accordingly or email a user to tell them that a user must add any missing items.
This works perfectly if one uses Adobe Livecycle Designer to create the form and inserts Paper barcodes and puts in some code to let the barcode get its value from another field, however there is a catch. The user filling in the coversheet and then printing it MUST have Adobe Pro. If all the users within our organization must have Adobe Pro and not use any of its features this could be quite costly. And... how about if the public needs to fill in a form and send it to us, they would also need Adobe Pro. At the moment we are talking about 20 perhaps 30 different barcodes and forms, however, if every department within our organization starts to use this to save time, we could be talking about hundreds.
If we could delegate one person per department as the person to create the forms and have the "Reader Extension" Plug in for Livecycle Designer for each of these persons we could perhaps save cost, as this is what this whole procedure is supposed to do in the first place. However, I cannot find out if I can purchase a plug-in for LiveCycle Designer (I have ES4) and how much it would be and for "how many" forms I would even be allowed to use it, or is it unlimited.
Anyone have any ideas?