15 years is an eternity in the world of technology. Take a trip back to 2004 and you’d discover that a new product called Skype was just starting to gain market awareness, Facebook was just an innocent new start-up and Bluetooth was still far from the ubiquitous technology it is today.
But if you looked at the documents created and stored by your typical SME business, you might be surprised how little has actually changed over that timeframe. Much like today, back in 2004, there were generally the digitally born documents, dominated by the various Microsoft Office products, and then there were the rest.
Many of these might have started out as paper documents, which were digitised by scanning to TIFF or PDF files. Others may have started life as a digital output from another software product, but were then printed to paper and subsequently scanned to re-digitise them. As uncomfortable and environmentally unacceptable as this was in 2004, we still see examples of this happening even today.
While the Invu Document Management software has tight integrations into the Microsoft Office suite, we simply cannot create these connectors for every application. Over the years many third-party software vendors have added their own ability to output PDF files directly, but not all can, particularly in the case of older or bespoke line of business applications.
Even where these third-party applications can generate their own PDF output natively, there’s often a rather clunky and clumsy interaction between saving the output from one application and picking up the file and indexing into Invu.
To address this, Invu Document Management 6.14 has introduced the ability for any application to print to a virtual “Send to Invu” printer, automatically creating a PDF output and opening the Invu indexing screen, all in one action.
We’ve already seen customers putting this to use by capturing transaction confirmations on websites, printing copy statements and invoices directly from online account portals or creating digital copies of account listings from their legacy finance systems.
