Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format
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Business Trends on Converting Paper Processes to Electronic Format
4003 Wood Street Erie, PA 16509 PH (814) 866-2247 http://www.documentimagingreport.com
NASHVILLE, TN—Capture is not always called
capture anymore. End users consuming it are more
often than ever business analysts who look at
ORLANDO—Microsoft has officially
capture as part of an overall automation initiative
announced a document capture product.
within their digital transformation (DX) strategies.
Incorporated in Microsoft’s new Project
To them, capture is “OCR” or “AI” and it’s used to
Cortex is a capture service that is tightly
take unstructured content, from both paper and
integrated with SharePoint. It is driven by a
electronic documents, and convert
pair of engines developed by Microsoft
it into something their
and hosted on Azure. Microsoft has
electronically driven business
leveraged its AI Builder interface to create
processes can understand.
a front-end for these services designed to
be utilized by non-programmers.
Okay, so that second part is kind
of what capture has always
The announcement was made at
done—but it’s how capture
Microsoft Ignite, the platform giant’s annual
processes are being executed
developer and ISV fest, which was held at
that is changing. No longer strictly
the Orange County Convention Center and
implemented with a top-down, IT-
attended by more than 20,000 people.
heavy, focus—capture vendors are
Microsoft is pitching Project Cortex as a
finding success in today’s market
way to apply “AI to automatically organize
putting technology in the hands of “citizen
your content.” In addition to capture, Cortex
developers.” This was evident at last month’s
includes expanded meta data and
ABBYY Content IQ Summit held at the Gaylord
taxonomy capabilities for Office 365, search
Opryland, where sessions on the ISV’s recently
connections to locations like MediaWiki,
launched Vantage product, which is squarely
ServiceNow and file shares, and
aimed at democratization of capture [see DIR
knowledge management—yes, Microsoft is
4/12/19], were packed with enthusiastic attendees
bringing that term back into vogue.
snapping photos and asking questions.
Microsoft announced Project Cortex as “the
first new service in Microsoft 365 since the
The conference also focused on ABBYY’s recent
launch of Microsoft Teams [March 2017.]”
acquisition of TimelinePI, a process analytics ISV
The first version is due for release into
whose technology is being positioned as
general availability in the first half of 2020.
complementary to capture as a pillar of ABBYY’s
focus on improving organizations’ “Digital IQ.”
Microsoft’s capture technology is built on
“Digital IQ is our brand of digital intelligence—an
top of its Form Recognizer and Text
emerging market that a lot of people are starting
Analytics services, which are both currently
to reference,” said Anthony Macciola, Chief
available for licensing as part of its
Innovation Officer of ABBYY, during an exclusive
Cognitive Services offerings on Azure. Form
conversation with . “One pillar is Vantage for
Recognizer is machine learning driven
content IQ and the second is Timeline for process
technology designed for extraction of data
IQ. We will add another pillar in 2020 and another
from structured and semi-structured
one in 2021.”During his portion of the keynote, Macciola explained
that ABBYY is positioning itself within the $322 billion
decision management segment of DX. “It’s about
helping people make better decisions quickly, and
creating value from their data,” he said. “This means we
are never going to do RPA or BPM. We want to increase
intelligence related to those solutions and make them
more valuable.”
In addition to capture, RPA and process intelligence
were the two most popular topics at the conference.
Macciola credits RPA for driving the trend toward
“democratization” in capture. “This trend started with
EFSS’s [enterprise file sync and share] impingement on
the ECM space,” he told . “With ECM, if you wanted
to share and sync files, it was an IT-centric activity, the
licenses were expensive, and deployment could be
sophisticated. So, along comes something like Box and
Vol. 30, No. 13
now everyone is enabled to set it up themselves with no
IT dependency.
“We see the exact same thing happening with RPA. If
you go back five years, if people wanted to re-engineer
a business process, they would have been using BPM,
which can also be very IT-centric and expensive. Then,
along comes RPA and business users realize they don’t
have to wait for IT, they can do this themselves. With
RPA, you have knowledge workers creating automation
for tasks they are responsible for. And, guess what?
They are probably the best suited to know what needs
to be done, instead of writing requirements and having
IT figure it out. So, we saw this democratization trend
happening with automation and it became very
apparent to us that the same thing was going to
happen with capture.”
It’s no secret that ABBYY has had great success
partnering with RPA vendors. It started with the vendors
licensing ABBYY’s FineReader OCR engine to create
their own capture processes. It expanded into ABBYY
licensing FlexiCapture (a traditional capture
application) to many RPA users. “We have been very
successful with FlexiCapture in RPA implementations,
because, for many RPA users, the starting point for
adding cognitive technology into their robots is
finance,” said Bruce Orcutt, VP, product marketing, for
ABBYY. “It’s typically an accounts payable use case,
which FlexiCapture nails right out of the box.”
According to Orcutt, sales of FlexiCapture for Invoices
grew 86% YOY, primarily driven by RPA. So, what was
the point of introducing Vantage, which ABBYY is
positioning as ideal for integration with RPA? “Vantage
is really about self-service—it’s simple to use and
designed to be set up by the knowledge worker,” said
Orcutt. “So, it doesn’t have the same complexity as
FlexiCapture.”
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.About a week before the ABBYY conference, have not been exposed to capture and are now
heading into the UiPath conference, a press being presented with it through a digital
release was issued touting ABBYY’s success with transformation initiative.”
its RPA partner. We noticed that most of the wins
discussed were for FlexiCapture and began to
wonder if Vantage was gaining any traction. Capture as a part of DX certainly has the
“While Vantage is the preferred interface for technology going through a bit of a
RPA users—and customers respond very well to renaissance. This is reflected in a host of new
it—it’s still a version one product and has some vendors entering the
shortcomings,” said space leveraging AI
Orcutt. “Maybe it and machine learning
doesn’t support all algorithms for document
the aspects of a use classification and
case or the user extraction. This includes
needs the robustness well-funded start-ups
of FlexiCapture. We like HyperScience,
have been teaching Ocrolus, and Taiger
our salespeople to that we have covered in
sell Vantage and , as well several
fulfill with others. It also includes
FlexiCapture.” technology giants like
Microsoft, Amazon,
That said, ABBYY is continuing to develop and Google, who have launched their own
Vantage, and, in his keynote, Macciola noted capture initiatives.
that at some point, it is likely the two products
will converge. There were also reports of ABBYY It’s unclear how much some of these initiatives
recently landing a large Vantage deal. rely on traditional OCR—which is a staple of
ABBYY’s business, as its FineReader Engine has
Macciola’s view is that a product like Vantage historically been a major revenue producer.
has the potential to greatly expand the “What’s happening in the market is that people
addressable capture market. “I remember in the are confusing data capture with OCR,” said
old days, I’d be talking to people from FileNet Orcutt. “All OCR does is convert analog images
and Documentum, and we were all very proud into text, which is often the first step in a data
of our market penetration,” he said. “We’d cite capture process. You still have to run processes
facts like 84 of the top 100 banks were using our to determine the meaning of that text.
technology. But, I think maybe we were
measuring ourselves by the wrong metric. We “And companies like ABBYY, Kofax, IBM, and
might have been in one or two projects at those Brainware (now owned by Hyland) are all built
banks, so if you measured our success using OCR. I would argue that these capture
horizontally, we were doing really well. But, if vendors are processing more documents
you measured our success vertically, in how far globally than any of those that say they don’t
we had penetrated into these enterprises—then use traditional OCR.”
you could see that the entire capture, ECM, and
even BPM markets were just skimming across Interestingly, the service bureau Ripcord,
the top. which counts Google as an investor and at the
AIIM show told me they were relying on the
“Democratized technology is addressing the open source Tesseract OCR engine combined
same enterprises, but from the bottom up. So, with Google’s Machine Vision technology, was
while maybe back then we had reached 15-20% a sponsor at the ABBYY Content IQ Summit. “We
penetration on processes, the other 80% is now have found that there are a variety of different
waking up. When we get called into an account OCR and classification tools that have been
with one of our RPA partners, we find that we effectively commoditized but that there are
are not talking to capture experts, and they are some tools that are better than others,” said
amazed that we can capture headers and Ahson Ahmad, Chief Product Officer, for
footers on invoices. I remember being at a Ripcord. “There are also different price points,
meeting recently where our salesperson was so depending on the needs of our customers
looking at me like, ‘what planet have these and their budgets, and depending on the kind
people been living on for the past 20 years?’ of content we are getting, we will plug in
But, it’s really just a whole new set of buyers that different engines.”
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.Ripcord currently licenses ABBYY FineReader around it is what is going to differentiate you.
for OCR and classification and is rolling out
FlexiCapture for an invoice application. “We “I don’t want to denigrate our competitors, but
think of our ourselves as a service vendor that a lot of the start-ups we see are specializing in
has classification and extraction capabilities,” one area. It’s easy to make things better by
said Ahmad. “We create a dynamic of skill narrowing your scope. We’ve been doing
selection to fulfill our customers’ needs.” capture for 30 years and we’ve done the entire
gamut of use cases. We feel our technology is
ABBYY, of course, has traditionally leveraged more robust, more mature and handles the
its own FineReader engine in its data capture fringe cases better. When you are new at it,
products, but Macciola indicated that the ISV there are a lot of things that pop up that you
must not be afraid to embrace change if the didn’t even realize were going to be problems.”
market dictates. “Vendors like Google,
Microsoft, and Amazon don’t have solutions,
they have technology stacks—and I think this To complement its capture technology, ABBYY
will help fuel a whole new round of ISVs acquired TimelinePI [see DIR 5/24/19]. Scott
entering the capture space—all leveraging this Opitz, the co-founder, and now president of
refreshed AI technology,” he said. “This could ABBYY Process Intelligence, described his
put a lot of the more mature vendors at risk of company’s technology as the combination of
becoming irrelevant. process mining with monitoring to see if
changes are having their desired affects.
“To prevent this, you can’t be afraid to disrupt “Ultimately, you need to predict the outcomes
yourself. A lot of the strategy we are pursuing in of processes and make changes to improve
Vantage is designed to reduce the risk of those outcomes,” said ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson
irrelevance. For example, even though we have during his keynote. “Our Digital IQ strategy is
a visual classifier that we continue to improve about being able to extract valuable
and make easier to use, I can’t guarantee that it information not only from processes but from
will be the best one available. At some point, documents in those processes as well.”
we might want to license technology from
someone like Google. Vantage is extensible, so Opitz may be familiar to those in our industry
we can plug in whatever technology we want.” from his work with Kofax, which he joined after
another company he founded, Altosoft, was
Macciola noted that this is a different acquired. Altosoft was an analytics and
approach for ABBYY. “Historically, we have business intelligence ISV where Opitz first
been closed and everything we used was began to see the value of process intelligence.
ours,” he said. “But, we’ve come to the “At Altosoft, we needed to find ways to make
realization that there are some things that we certain types of calculations related to
are good at and able to focus on and other processes,” said Opitz. “This started my
areas where we’ll need to embrace experimentation with what I call ‘process
alternatives. For example, currently we have a intelligence’ features, such as the timing
Vantage skill that does signature recognition between activities and counting how many
and we felt it would be stupid for us to build things went a certain way vs. another way.
that on our own, so we reached out to a What we came up with was dramatically easier
competitor to license it. We are also working to use than what other BI tools were offering,
with big consultancies that build their own AI but it was only a tiny way to where we are
and want to leverage it in Vantage now. Still, those couple features seemed to
applications. We are going to try and push the resonate very strongly with people.”
envelope in everything we develop, but we
can’t do everything. It’s important for us to allow Opitz went on to explain the difference
our customers to have a framework where they between BI and process intelligence. “BI is very
can use whatever they want.” good at giving an analysis of a single point of a
process, such as how many new orders did I
At the end of the day, Macciola said it’s about receive today or how many things did I ship?
being able to develop capture applications that What BI does not do is give you any way to
work in the real world. “A lot of this AI and associate those different types of activities in
machine learning stuff is really cool, but setting the same instance of a process.”
it up and getting it to work well is not trivial,” he
said. “The technology stack is important but Opitz breaks down process intelligence into
how you expose it and everything you do two parts. “The first is discovery and analytics,
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.which you could make the argument is a selling to the exact same person that buys
process mining tool,” he told . “You use it to capture.”
reconstruct all the processes by gathering
events, such as those involved in an invoice Reggie Twigg, director of product marketing at
process, from various systems. You do this by ABBYY, concurred that having TimelinePI in the
using some sort of qualifier like an invoice portfolio has helped introduce ABBYY to more
number. So, you would put together all events business analyst type buyers. “TimelinePI’s
that have the same invoice number and that audience is the people responsible for
would give you the lifecycle of that invoice. That measuring business processes—business
would be one timeline, and it could be spread owners and analysts,” he told . “With
out over several days. Being able reconstruct, Timeline, we are able to position ourselves as a
visualize and analyze these events is what we ‘know your process’ company, and we can help
consider the first phase of process intelligence.” customers find what they need to fix. This will
often lead to a discussion about our capture
According to Opitz, this mining is enabled products with people who have never been
through the reporting tools of most modern exposed to them. This is at least partially
business applications. “They produce audit trails responsible for our huge uptick in FlexiCapture
that we can use,” he said. “For cloud-based for Invoices sales.”
applications, like Salesforce or ServiceNow,
there are SaaS connectors, because it’s a Like Vantage, TimelinePI is designed with
cloud-to-cloud connection.” (TimelinePI is a democratization in mind. “The product is
cloud-first application.) geared toward customer enablement—it
shouldn’t require a lot of professional services,”
Opitz defines process intelligence as the said Opitz. “The real challenge is more about
second piece in TimelinePI’s offering. “That is the bureaucratic steps that must be taken to get
using the information gained in the first phase to permission for TimelinePI to access the various
affect process change,” he said. “Based on this systems it needs to. Once a customer clears
information, I am going to make changes and those hurdles and gets their data in hand, it’s no
then monitor those changes. So, I am constantly more than five minutes before they can see if
listening to my running system, and any time a something is wrong with their processes.”
step is performed I figure out which process
instance that step applies to and recalculate my Like ABBYY, TimelinePI has found traction
analytics. I can create definitions of specific alongside RPA implementations. “We had a
patterns that might be interesting or check if relationship with Blue Prism prior to being
certain rules are being followed. So, for acquired by ABBYY,” said Opitz. “RPA vendors
example, if I am querying a pattern and it and integrators like to bring us in because they
matches the rule, we let it go, but if it doesn’t, want customers to do preassessments to give
then I send a notification. Those types of them a sense of what they should
monitoring capabilities don’t exist in anybody automate—where they are going to achieve the
else’s product today.” biggest savings in time or cost.”
According to Opitz, the future of process Opitz concluded that the decision to sell
intelligence lies in being able to automatically TimelinePI to ABBYY has helped accelerate the
invoke actions to fix sub-optimal processes. “In organization’s growth. “We started selling our
addition to sending an alert, I am able to invoke software in Q2 of last year,” he told . “To this
action in another system,” he said. “So, if I point in 2019, we have seen significant YOY
detect a certain condition, it will trigger an growth. We had some large deals lined up prior
action to fix it, like launching a robotic activity. to the acquisition, but the short amount of time
And then I can use monitoring to ensure that the we’ve been with ABBYY has driven a large spike
problem was really fixed. This should work with in sales. We had built a good operation, but it
anything I can call with a Web service or send would have taken us at least two years to have
an MQ series event to in real time.” anything considered to be a serious global
presence.”
Capture intersects with process intelligence
when a document-centric process is involved.
“Some of the most important processes we deal To open his keynote, ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson
with are document-centric,” said Opitz. “These stressed that ABBYY is “all about partners.” “We
include mortgage applications, insurance want to be an active part of an ecosystem that
claims, and onboarding. Many times, we are is thriving on diversity and collaboration,” he
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.said. come in a few years. “Historically, we were an
OCR technology vendor that sat inside capture
At the Content IQ Summit, we caught up with solutions and nobody really knew who we
Markus Pichler, VP for global partnerships and were,” he said. “But since we’ve expanded our
alliances at ABBYY. “It is very important to have marketing and our reach into the intelligent
support from the top, and over the next year, we automation ecosystem, we are seeing big
will be increasing our focus on pushing business enterprises telling partners that if they need to
through, and together with, partners,” he told address documents, they want to use ABBYY.
. “We feel this is opposite from the trend you We are now seeing pull for our brand coming
are seeing in the rest of the industry.” from enterprises.”
It was definitely interesting to see a lot of
partners at Content IQ Summit who have The evolution of ABBYY was evident in the
traditionally worked with other leading capture attendance at the Content IQ Summit. Only six
vendors. “We see a lot of partners coming from years ago, in 2013, I covered the first ABBYY
the competition that are now very interested in partner conference, and it was attended by
working with us,” said Pichler. “They see we approximately 25 people, mostly ISV partners.
have a strategy and that we are looking to This year, several hundred people converged
innovate and expand our presence in the on Nashville—a combination of ISVs, resellers,
market, as well as our portfolio. A year ago, we press and analysts, and more. ABBYY has plans
invited a lot of them to attend, and this year, to keep expanding the event.
they really started to show up. They love to hear
us tell them we are going to focus on partners; From a financial standpoint, Persson reported
now we have to implement that and live it.” that through the first nine months of 2019,
ABBYY’s growth was up 16-17% YOY, which he
In addition to traditional document capture expected to rise to 17-20% before the end of
resellers, ABBYY has been pursuing partnerships the year. This includes significant growth in the
with systems integrators that focus on the RPA Asia-Pac market, which has helped expand
space. “Traditional capture partners still deliver ABBYY’s global presence.
a significant portion of our business, but we have
also added a new category of reseller, which we ABBYY faces some challenges in the years
call intelligent automation partners,” said Pichler. ahead. As we discussed, its OCR business
“These are typically big global systems could potentially be marginalized by services
integrators, as well as second-tier SIs that drive offered by tech giants. Then, there is the RPA
RPA projects. They realize that when it comes to market. There is no question that ABBYY’s
document processing, when they need to capture technology has been a key element in
introduce intelligence, we have the answers.” helping RPA vendors reach a level of cognitive
processing. But, if these vendors have to rely on
Pichler said that both Vantage and TimelinePI partners like ABBYY to provide cognitive
are good fits for these partners. “In addition, services, what is their future growth path? The
TimelinePI brings its own set of partners who week of ABBYY’s conference, and just one week
focus on the process analytics market,” he said. after its own multi-billion conference was held
in Las Vegas, it was reported that UiPath was
Pichler said seeing how technology partners laying off several hundred employees or about
like UiPath handle their channels has helped 11% of its workforce.
ABBYY adjust its program. “Starting in 2018,
we’ve added a lot of new partners,” he said. It seems like the RPA market that ABBYY has
“We’ve had to ramp up our support. In the past, been so successful working in tandem with is at
partners would go to training and they’d be on a bit of a crossroads. The keynote speaker at
their own. We started looking at how the RPA the Content IQ Summit was Craig LeClair of
vendors trained their partners and we saw they Forrester, who recently wrote a book on RPA
had a lot of focus on enablement that we didn’t. entitled
The biggest challenge with our newer intelligent . LeClair firmly believes RPA is going to
automation partners became, ‘how fast can we have a huge impact on our lives and the job
enable them?’ So, we set up programs for that. market going forward. He just doesn’t believe
We changed internally how we train, educate, that current RPA offerings are anywhere near to
and support our partners. We are not quite all fulfilling their potential.
the way there, but moving closer.”
Pichler concluded by noting how far ABBYY has LeClair has a come up with what he calls a
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.“rule of five” for today’s RPA applications. “They replace humans and Automation Anywhere
work fine if you keep the number of decisions to touts its ability to introduce more AI in its latest
less than five,” he said. “But once you extend extensible platform [see DIR 10/18/19]. But to us,
that, they start breaking down. There is no it still seems to be more of a message than a
decision management, and rules have to be reality.
hard-coded in scripts.”
That said, ABBYY made it clear it is not married
LeClair added, “Today’s RPA [which is at stage to the RPA market. From the outset, its intelligent
1] is a crude tool with no native intelligence and automation integration strategy has always
learning.” To reach its full potential [stage 3], he included BPM. And its process intelligence
said RPA needs to be integrated with technology is applicable in multiple markets.
“conversational intelligence.” The integration of ABBYY has done a great job emerging as a
ABBYY’s and other vendors’ document and leading capture vendor by increasing its focus
process intelligence technology is somewhere on traditional capture applications, as well as
between that and where we are today. looking at both complementary markets and
technologies to help it expand its breadth.
We have certainly seen posturing from RPA
vendors about wanting to evolve past their For more information:
current utilization. Blue Prism has talked about https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/content-iq-summit-nashville-2019/
creating digital “silicon-based” workers to
documents, including table data. Text Analyzer
At its recent Ignite event, a Microsoft representative
offers natural language processing of raw text
joked that “we are bringing back the document
and is focused on four areas—sentiment
scanner,” while demoing a capture application. The
analysis, key phrase extraction, language
fact is (based on our infoSource numbers) the
detection, and entity recognition. Cortex
document scanner market has never gone away, it’s
capture is initially leveraging the entity
just that it’s currently being opened up to a whole new
recognition function.
type of customer—business analysts looking to
onboard documents into process automation
These services are being front-ended by AI
workflows. So, it’s no surprise that the scanner
Builder—an interface designed to make
Microsoft was demoing was the Fujitsu fi-7300NX—
Microsoft’s AI technology accessible and
which represents one of a new breed of network
applicable to content. In a demo we saw, a user
scanners we are seeing that enable tight integration
was able to build an extraction model for
with server and cloud-based apps like Office 365.
purchase orders by uploading a handful of PDFs
and JPEGs of similarly structured POs into
Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA) recently
Cortex. Form Recognizer automatically
showcased its new NX Technology (NXT) Partner
extracted paired value sets like “vendor name”
Program at its annual One Capture Alliance (OCA)
and the name of the vendor. The user could edit
event in Hawaii. “The program is designed to
the values they wanted to keep and then
embrace partners that may or may not be participants
upload the model into a SharePoint library. From
in the traditional ECM market,” said Bernie Schweiss,
that point on, every time a purchase order is
VP of Sales Business Development for FCPA. “Eight out
uploaded into that library, the defined data will
of 11 partners at OCA were demoing RPA or BPM and
be automatically extracted. The data can also
positioning our product as an on-ramp to their
be used to kick off a Power Automate workflow
solutions.”
(previously knowns as “Microsoft Flow,” which
was renamed at Ignite and also now offers RPA
Fujitsu introduced the 7300NX last year. It features wi-
capabilities).
fi, Ethernet and USB connections. The network
connections can be used to connect to NX Manager a
There were some shortcomings in the initial
middleware that provides image processing,
implementation of Cortex capture. For example,
centralized scanner management and the ability to
if Form Recognizer does not extract a field, it
connect to third-party applications. The connections
can’t be added manually. Also, currently only
can be done as one-offs through an SDK, or Fujitsu
one model can be associated with a library, so
has packaged several of them in an Easy NX Connect
purchase orders with differing layouts would
package that is available for licensing from Fujitsu.
need to be put into a separate library for
The latest integrations, which were demoed at the
processing. These issues will not likely require
OCA event are with UiPath and Nintex.
major surgery to fix.
Notice: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of RMG Enterprises, Inc., Erie, PA, USA.The second demo we saw leveraged Text Azure database to create a file management
Analytics to extract a patient name from a system with less overhead than SharePoint.
correspondence document. In this example, the
Microsoft presenter, Sean Squires, a KnowledgeLake is bringing these services to
program/product manager, showed the market in partnership with Microsoft’s direct
incorporation of what he called “machine sales team.
teaching” in the creation of the document
model. “It’s not machine learning, which is
much more complex,” said Squires. “Machine Microsoft’s knowledge management initiative
teaching involves a subject matter expert is designed to summarize and surface
helping define what they want to extract or information about entities such as people,
how they want a document classified. This can places, and projects. It has the ability to crawl
involve adding clues, like a keyword and through anything stored in Office 365 and
constructing an expression to help the computer leverage AI to build a “topic page” about the
know where a field is going to live.” entity. This includes a summary page as well as
links to all documents about the topic and to
Squires noted that the technology is evolving people who would be considered experts.
beyond what he showed in the demo. “With Users are able to curate the page and make
Cortex, we are modernizing the management adjustments to it manually. Every time a topic is
of meta data,” he said. “We are adding AI to mentioned in Office 365 content, it will include a
what we already have to make the ingestion link to this topic page.
process smarter. We are giving users the power
to build reusable models, as well as tools to The initial use case, for which we saw a demo,
define and teach those models.” will be for organizing information on projects.
For more information:
Obviously, what Microsoft has introduced with https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/project-cortex-microsoft-365/
Cortex is not the be all and end all when it
comes to capture in SharePoint and Office 365.
Microsoft partners have been building At Ignite, Reveille was showing its new
advanced capture integration into SharePoint integration with Microsoft Defender Advanced
for years and will continue to do so into the Threat Protection (ATP), Microsoft’s security
future. KnowledgeLake, which pioneered the application for Office 365. Reveille specializes in
idea of using SharePoint as a document providing real-time and “active” insights into
imaging system back in the early ‘aughts, was capture and ECM solutions. “For the past year,
at Ignite, showcasing its current cloud-based we’ve been able to identify unusual behavior
suite of products. within Office 365,” said Brian DeWyer, CTO of
Reveille Software. “For example, if someone
Historically, KnowledgeLake had specialized in from outside your network downloads 15
integration with SharePoint Server (on documents at midnight, we could make you
premises). In recent years, however, it began aware of that. The integration with Defender
moving its technology to the cloud and offering ATP will enable us to take action.”
integration with Office 365 (which incorporates
SharePoint Online). Last year, the St. Louis- Actions can escalate from sending a notice to
based ISV was acquired from PFU America by an admin, to triggering an anti-virus scan, to
an investment group led by one of its former freezing a desktop. “We can also isolate a
owners, Ron Cameron, who is now serving as machine and the final step would be disabling
CEO [see DIR 8/17/18]. This summer, it through Active Directory,” said DeWyer. “We
KnowledgeLake launched a new line of cloud- are now offering this for SharePoint and Office
based services. 365 through Defender ATP; we are also going to
be offering similar capabilities for OpenText
These services are divided into three and Documentum repositories leveraging the
categories: capture, process, and content. The EnCase security software their acquired with
capture service is machine learning and AI- Guidance.”
based. The process service facilitates
integration with third-party applications through For more information:
the RPA technology KnowledgeLake acquired http://bit.ly/ReveilleMSDefender;
earlier this year [see DIR 2/1/19]. The content http://bit.ly/ReveilleGuidance
service leverages Azure Blob Storage and an
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