One SharePoint shortcoming is getting documents into a document library directly from a scanner. Out of the box, you would need to scan the document and save it to the hard drive and then either upload it via the utility within SharePoint by clicking on Upload. Or you could click on Actions and select “Open with Windows Explorer”
The downside of the “Upload” method is that you can only do one document at a time. You can enter metadata when you are uploading, which is helpful, but if you have multiple documents, you must either select “Multiple Documents” or use the Windows Explorer method, both of which require you to ingest the documents, check in the document and enter the metadata.
I cannot tell you how many times I have uploaded the scanned documents and then just plain forgot to enter the metadata. This leads to confusion and multiple visits to the document library and extra steps.
KnowledgeLake Capture is software that allows a user to scan a batch of documents at a time, import them into a SharePoint document library and add the metadata.
The first step is to scan the documents into a batch using Capture. In this example, I scanned six sample invoices for import into my Invoices document library.
The next step is to add the required metadata to each document. In this case, the require fields are Invoice Number, Invoice Date and Category. Category was set as a drop-down box within SharePoint and you can see the drop-down box choices are available in Capture.
Once all of the metadata has been input, you can release the batch to SharePoint. The documents will appear in the library (Checked In) along with the associated metadata.
