Access to information is critical to business success. Decisions need to be made quickly and information needs to be readily available, accurate and complete. Organizations have invested heavily in enterprise content management (ECM) systems and search technologies over the years for better information management. But research indicates that as much as 30% of documents in a content repository are invisible to search technology and, therefore, missing.

Missing documents or ‘dark data’ pose an enormous threat to businesses. Hours and hours of employee time is lost searching repositories for documents that cannot be found. Organizations are spending large amounts on storing documents that cannot be utilized since they cannot be found. Most significantly, dark data has the potential to undermine regulatory compliance and information management.

The solution to making missing files searchable is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology – technology that converts image-based documents to text-searchable documents. Here’s how it works.

Convert your documents to text-searchable PDFs

contentCrawler is an integrated bulk processing framework that intelligently assesses documents in a repository for OCR processing. contentCrawler converts all image-based documents in an ECM, document management system or, another repository to text-searchable PDFs and saves them back as new or replacement documents ready to be indexed and found. An additional Compression module can apply compression and downsampling to all PDFs, reducing them in file size.

contentCrawler runs as an automated end-to-end process that doesn’t require any intervention from staff. It can process new files added to a repository as well as existing or legacy files from over the years that may contain dark data.