Electrofiche
Electrofiche+ allows printed output from computers to be diverted to a PC or to Network storage for electronic filing, distribution and retrieval.
In some cases the documents are not printed at all, as with large accounting reports. In other cases the back copies are no longer produced, as with invoices, purchase orders etc.
Electrofiche+ offers a sophisticated Windows-based viewing and retrieval system, which allows documents to be found within seconds. Once located they can be viewed, printed, faxed or 'copy and pasted' into other Windows based applications, such as spreadsheets and word processors.
Printed data can be extracted from the spooling system of a number of midrange computers including AS/400, HP3000 and various flavours of Unix.
The greatest strength of Electrofiche+ is the ability to examine documents as they are archived.
By examining the spool files the archiving system can store the data into the correct folders. Individual documents within spool files can be separated and stored as separate documents. Each document is stored with a header, also derived by examining the document.
For example, a spool file containing several hundred invoices could be examined. The invoices would be stored in a folder such as 'company/year/month/invoices/'. Each invoice would be split and stored separately. The header of each would contain customer number, customer name, customer contact and the invoice number.