Alliance Imager is a Document Management and Imaging software application for Microsoft Windows 98, NT,  Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Alliance Imager is capable of scanning, storing and managing paperwork from A0 to A6 size. Image documents may be black & white, greyscale or colour produced by a scanner, fax or other applications.

A database of stored documents is maintained using a choice of database management systems. Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Sybase and other SQL compliant databases are supported.

Alliance Imager supports different styles of ‘Views’ to meet different requirements. A Cabinet/Drawer/Folder view provides a simple, easy to understand and flexible method of storing and accessing documents. A Database view provides a simple customisable database. An Index view is provided where typically only a single key is required to find a document.

Alliance Imager allows multiple databases, each of which may have different views. Alliance Imager has been developed using Microsoft Visual Basic.

The Alliance Imager window is divided into three panes.

The top left pane displays the cabinet / drawer / folder structure and the bottom left pane lists all documents within the selected folder. The main right hand pane is used for displaying the scanned document for editing, printing, viewing or annotating.

This interface is primarily used where many different disparate documents require scanning and storing. A cabinet / drawer / folder structure is used. Cabinet, drawers and folders may be created be the user for any hierarchical storage requirements. This interface provides the user with a storage mechanism with which they may immediately relate to and be entirely comfortable and familiar. Typical uses may be where many different types of documents are required to be held collectively in a single folder. Types of information may include incoming and outgoing mail and faxes, personnel details, supplier and product information.

The Alliance Imager window is divided into three panes.

The top left pane displays document indexing information in a database form layout and the bottom left pane lists all documents within the selected folder. The main right hand pane is used for displaying the scanned document for editing, printing, viewing or annotating.

This type of interface is used where many documents are held against a single database entry. Documents are retrieved by selecting the required database entry which is displayed in the top left pane with all associated documents in the bottom left pane. The main, right hand, pane is used for displaying the scanned document for editing, printing, viewing or annotating. Typical uses may be the scanning and retrieval of items such as supplier documents, patient records, personnel or member details etc.

The Imager window consists primarily of a single pane to display documents in a landscape format with a single, horizontal toolbar above. The toolbar allows the user to type in a document index for retrieval purposes. Other buttons on the toolbar are the standard image manipulation buttons such as zoom in, zoom out, rotate, annotate, print etc.

This type of interface is mainly used for very simple imaging systems where a single, unique key or index is required for the retrieval of a document. Typical uses may be the scanning and retrieval of items such as delivery notes, proofs of delivery, purchase invoices, work cards etc.

All the above views may be used in conjunction with the Alliance Batch Scan, Batch Indexing, Bar Code Recognition, and COLD (Print File capture) modules.

Optional Modules

Scans documents into a temporary store for subsequent indexing. Such indexing may be either by viewing each document on the screen and entering index information against the document, or by auto-indexing by reading a bar code printed on the document.

Batch scanning is the preferred method of scanning in large volumes of documents.

Interrogates documents batch scanned into an Alliance Imager import directory, locates the bar code printed (either horizontally or vertically) on the original document, reads the bar code and renames the scanned image file (in standard Microsoft / Kodak/eiStream  Software multi-page TIF format) for import into the Alliance Imager.

Imports images and other data generated by other systems. Typically documents may be generated by a third party system and imported into Imager without the need to print the documents.

COLD (Print File capture) Module:

Allows viewing of the contents of Print Files output from existing systems. Print files may be generated by any system and may contain one document (such as a monthly report) or a number of documents (such as Invoices or Delivery Notes).

Uses Global360 Imaging for Windows to provide the OCR component to convert scanned images into text for import into Alliance Imager.