Overview

IBM® Content Manager OnDemand provides support for storing and retrieving letters and other types of correspondence. The most straight forward way to store this type of information is to transform a printed copy of a letter into an image file using a scanner and image capture software. In addition to scanning the letter and saving it as an image file, you must create index data for the letter. You can then use the ARSLOAD program to load the index data into the database and store the letter file on the system. Your users can then query, retrieve, and view, print or send copies of the letter using one of the Content Manager OnDemand client programs.

Content Manager OnDemand provides the Generic Indexer so that you can index input files that contain data other than AFP data, line data, and PDF. You specify the index data for the input files that you want to index with the Generic Indexer in a parameter file. The parameter file contains the index field names and values and identifies the input files that you want to process. You can create up to 128 index fields for each input file that you want to load into the system, providing many ways for users to query and retrieve the letters. The number of index fields that you define usually depends on how your users retrieve documents from the system. In the example that follows, index fields were defined for the date on the letter, the name of the person that sent the letter, the company name, and the subject of the letter.

This section describes how to use a scanner and image capture software to create the image files. Before you can load the image files into the system, you must define an application group to manage the storage of the letters, an application to specify the physical and logical properties of the letters, and a folder to let users search for and retrieve the letters.