Hey Ryan,
I am following up for Clay as he asked the questions but I am the one basically working on the project.
We have a large client that wants to do some integrating between their Finance software and Laserfiche. They are under a time crunch and brought us in pretty late in the project and wanted to know their options. In the past we have written small VB apps that basically do screen scrapes and launch the scanning window, or we use the product Affinity (which is a PDP I believe). In this case, the Affinity product would not work with their software. We also tried a few other products that were similar but went over either time or budget requirements.
Then we noticed the features in WebAccess 9 with the direct URL's. The client just simply needs to use the URL link syntax and fill in the variables with the correct information depending on what screen they are in. The software they are using is a Finance package. So for example the link would contain a check number, vendor name, vendor id, and check date if they were on the AP screen. If they were on the Invoice screen the URL would contain PO number, vendor name, and vendor id. By burying the URL behind a button we have a solution where the user enters the data into their Finance application and then just clicks a button (in their software) to scan into Laserfiche. They don't have to key anything twice or choose a folder path.
You are basically correct in your assumption. We would like a procedure similar to the scanning URL for importing. It would be OK if they had to browse to it too, almost preferred in fact. But we envision three buttons in the client’s software: a Search, Scan, and Import. The Search and Scan are done, but the Import would be awesome. They will be getting invoices and checks electronically as well as scanning things in. If they get an electronic invoice it would be great if we could have a URL that opens up a browse window for them to pick the file, and then import it into Laserfiche. We really would almost just need the "name" and the "path" variables for this URL string.
To expand on needing only the "path" and "name" variables (for you and others who may read this) we are using Workflow to really file the scanned (and possibly imported) documents. In the client’s sofware, the native URL field that they are using is limited to 256 characters (weird I know but they can't change it). The URL we are using for WebAccess scanning is quite long. There is the extra stuff at the start, then the normal WebAccess syntax, then the name, then the template, then the field names, then all the corresponding values. No way to change it of course, it just gets long.
In our syntax we are having them fill in the path and the name only to shorten the URL. We are having the name of the document contain all our metadata separated with a delimiter. So instead of all the extra field names and such we just have our doc name being "checknum_vendname_vendid_chkdate". The document gets scanned to a generic folder where then Workflow takes over. We pattern match off each value and fill in the appropriate metadata and file the document in the correct folder.
So probably more than you wanted to know but there it is. We think the scanning URL for WebAccess 9 is a fantastic feature and I can see us using it frequently as a "quick integration". Having some kind of import syntax alongside the scanning syntax would make all that more powerful.
Thanks,
Chris