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Hello all,
I recently started a small document imaging and retention company. We just landed our first big account. The client is a law office which needs roughly 500k pieces of paper converted to digital images each month. Their files are made into six sections. The client wants to be able to view closed files via file number. Once the correct file is brought up, the six sections of the paper file will need to be referenced.
I am completely unfamiliar with programming. I'm not even sure the proper questions to ask. I know there will be a lot of coding associated with this. I have been told that pdf would be a good format to use.
What would be the best programming language to use?
How hard is the coding?
Where should I start?
Thank you in advance, I apologize for any ignorance.
Well you really don't need coding unless you want some custom stuff done. You will need to buy a 3rd party piece of software and hardware to do what you want to do. If you want to code that software yourself it will cost several hundred thousand, and that's assuming you can actually recognize a good coder (a high percentage are not).
We use Datix, and while I don't really like their apps it's a good starting point to give you an idea of what you need your applications and hardware to do. However, it is not an out of the box solution and you will still need to have decent IT knowledge, which it appears you don't.
So, anyone at your company that knows anything about IT? Btw, I will tell you that pdf is a file format and not an image format. You don't scan to pdf. We use tif where I work.
Well a very random suggestion would be to maybe cut the images up into small portions, assuming its text, and then create an account at http://decaptcher.com and use their API to upload the small portions of the image. I say cut it into small portions because we outsource captchas to them to type, and uploading an image of 5 paragraphs of text just wouldn't be cool. FYI After you upload the image they will type it out and return it in text format. That'd POSSIBLY work if you understand what I'm trying to tell you.
OR Look into google's tesseract OCR project thing, maybe thatll work for you
I agree that starting the company without the required knowledge was having the cart infront of the horse to say the least. The client will be well taken care of, I can afford to offset my shortcomings.
Z Stalker- Do you know of any good companies that I can contract?
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Try them if you want although there may be better solutions. It's a matter of a scanner, web access to view, and document image storage. You can get an estimate from idatix then come up with a solution for your customer. Idatix would do the customization and basically you would be adding a surcharge for managing the system and providing their on site support. I would stay away from OCR simply because it's not what the customer would want. They want a document imaging solution.
Be prepared though you are going to have to learn a lot. It looks like this is going to be a fairly large project with 500k pages each month. I assume they'll be doing the scanning.
lol how could you start up a company without actually having the skill set? Sux to be your client.
You seriously think things work this way that often? Believe me, I've seen tons of situations like this. Learning the skills is not difficult compared to landing a good first client. If he has the ability to do the job he'll be fine and his client will most likely have no clue how much he knows.
I have a friend who runs his own IT consulting company and does this sort of thing all the time. He'll take a job to rewrite a java application for example while knowing nothing about the language. He'll then contract someone like me who does and add a surcharge onto the rate.
This actually sounds like a simple problem to solve. Sounds like a basic image cataloging where you need to reference multiple images based on file number. As pointed out, you can try and find a software that will do this for you or hire a contractor to do the work. My main recommendation is that you do not try to do this yourself. Coding is a skill that takes years to develop and many people still aren't good at it after years of schooling. Just make sure to gather all functional requirements from the client and make sure you understand them. After that, come up with design specifications and I'd recommend making a basic prototype. Show the prototype to your client and reaffirm that this is what they will want. This will also allow you to confirm that you're covering all functional requirements. Once you get all the details worked out on paper and design finalized, the actual implementation (coding) is the easy part. Good luck.
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I need computer programming help...
