Kofax (kofax.com) has launched a strategy aimed at transforming information capture from a centralized back-office process to an everyday front-office activity that encompasses the intelligent capture and exchange of information from within business processes.

The strategy is embodied in the new Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite, which allows organizations to link paper-based and electronic information with mission-critical business activities such as invoice processing, loan origination, account openings, contract life cycle management and forms processing applications.

The first step of this strategic initiative was the shipping of Kofax Document Scan Server earlier this year, a solution that scan-enables any existing business application such as content management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and supply chain management.

Kofax reports the Intelligent capture and Exchange Suite addresses four critical business requirements:

* adapts to the way knowledge workers work by scan-enabling any business application;

* removes points of failure by automating the integration of paper and electronic documents directly into business processes;

* reduces risk by leveraging enterprise IT standards for integration with existing business applications and by meeting corporate regulatory requirements for traceability of documents; and

* captures and exchanges information during business transactions, such as sales order processing and customer relationship management, to meet increased customer expectations for fast, responsive ebusiness processes.

Kofax further claims its suite makes it easy to scan-enable a knowledge worker's business applications by:

* providing access within a Web-based portal application or a messaging client application like Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes;

* removing the need to install, manage and upgrade expensive device drivers for each desktop computer on the network;

* offering an easy to administer management console that automatically detects and manages all the document scanners on the network;

* delivering high-quality scanned documents regardless of original quality, even if the original document was scanned incorrectly; and

* automatically moving scanned documents directly into a business process or application.

Additionally, the company developed the Kofax Document Scan Server for AppExchange, a thinclient application for salesforce.com that lets customer relationship personnel scan documents directly into the online service, enabling accelerated response times to customer inquiries.