Bethesda, Maryland-based document capture software specialist Intrafed Inc, has now opened an office in the UK in Windsor, Berkshire. The new office forms part of its strategic expansion from its exclusively US base. Privately-held Intrafed’s particular speciality is software that improves the performance of document capture hardware such as optical character recognition systems and scanners, and then manages the digitisation and workflow of these documents before they end up in some form of storage. From its UK office, Intrafed plans to enter the UK, Scandanavian and Benelux markets first and from there on expand into English-speaking countries. At the moment it is localising its software into French, German and Spanish editions, which will be a vailable this summer. Intrafed says it has already got one UK customer and is planning to sell its products only through resellers, although end users will be able to contact Intrafed’s technical support team which is being established at the moment. Intrafed’s products are aimed at companies that need high-speed high-volume, data capture systems and its products link into many types of document imaging systems, therefore making it system-independent. This openness comes from a product called the Format Bridge that attaches to a captured document all the information needed by the storage and retrieval system in which it is to be placed. The company’s big publicity break came during the Allied war with Iraq in 1990 when Intrafed provided on-site scanning capabilities to the Pentagon of millions of captured Iraqi documents. Analysis of these documents helped prosecute the war. Intrafed has four main products that can be used with Unix or Windows-based systems. PowerScan software drives most types of optical scanners, ensuring that the scanner achieves its rated performance. The other three products are part of StageWorks, a suite of software modules that Intrafed describes as an automation system that organises and indexes captured documents for output into image and retrieval systems, creating an almost assembly line process. StageWorks Office is for single users and is said to have all the functionality of a back-file conversion system; combined with PowerScan it can undertake visual quality control, optical character recognition, mark documents for later refinement and enhance documents. A level up is StageWorks Production, a module for workgroups that comes with StageFlow software for managing the workflow of caputured documents. And StageWorks Industrial is for major installations of the software running on multiple networks.
