Is that OCR Engine's full functionality/capability included with the Laserfiche Client or does Omnipage simply provide a "basic" version with the Laserfiche Client?
What exactly are you looking for?
We would like to know if the OmniPage OCR Engine within Laserfiche contains everything that its standalone product offers - that we aren't just getting a "watered down version" of it in Laserfiche.
In essence, we are looking around at other OCR Engines to see if they can more accurately capture/convert E-files and their associated text than the engine provided by OmniPage withinin Laserfiche
The extraction of text from electronic files are handled by vendor-specific engines. For example, the text extraction engines for Microsoft Office documents are provided by Microsoft; text extraction engines for PDF documents are provided by Adobe, Inc., and so on.
These electronic file text extraction engines communicate via an industry-standard software programming interface known as "IFilter".
In a typical installation of Laserfiche products, some of these vendor-specific IFilters are automatically installed, unless the administrator-user excludes them from the installation options.
Correction: According to my colleagues, these IFilters are not installed by Laserfiche. Any third-party software for electronic files must be installed on the same machine where they are to be opened, or text-extracted. Laserfiche is not authorized to redistribute these IFilters, therefore they cannot be installed automatically.
OCR technology is typically not applicable to electronic files, with the following exception: The user could choose to convert the electronic files into images first via virtual printing technology (of which Laserfiche Snapshot is one example), and then use OCR technology to extract text from the image instead of the electronic file.
Understood, but back to the customers initial question, is the version of OmniPage Pro a "light" version that comes with Laserfiche or the Full Fucnctional version and is it the latest and greatest version?
The latest versions of Laserfiche products use OmniPage 18.5. We make use of it to extract text from images. Other features, like outputting to different formats or connecting to the cloud, that are not necessary for this functionality are not used.