How can capture help?

The question of how can capture help increase productivity is one question that no one asks. The way I look at it, the capture middleware is creating highways with built in traffic lights, signs, flow control and all other nice tools you need to control the flow of content traffic on highways.

Let me explain a little deeper. Let's say you had, like most companies have today, teri-bytes of disk space. Now let's ask employees use a ECM application to index and store documents into this vast disk space. What do you get?

The answer is "a mess!!"... duplicate content... people using version control to keep multiple copies of the same file. Well the world would be different if we put a middleware between people and ECM. That's the Content workflow Middleware. What's the job of the Content workflow middleware?

The first task performed by content workflow middleware is to take away the burden of finding the right location for a file out of the user's hand. That's right, the user is, I am sorry but "busy", so the average user tends to store files where it makes sense to them. Somewhere really close, easy to find and easy to use FOR THEM.

The trouble is that not every user thinks the same way and not every user can find that same "easy" location. The Capture Workflow middleware applications take the job of finding, naming, indexing the files out of user's hand and use business rules to acutally do it right. Doing it right means, the Capture Workflow software is going to ask the user about the index information and further interogate the content or back end systems to properly categorize, index and store the files.

There I said it... in short that's to me the one and the most important role of Capture Workflow servers. The ability for users to use the Capture Workflow to save content rather than storing the content directly into the back-end system is the key to choosing a successfull Capture Workflow application that can impact your bottom-line productivity.