There are not a lot of competitors to compare this product with, but ActiveDocs holds its own as a very useful software for the need. I recommend doing a demo to see how the process works, but it's rather streamlined and easy to create a template and produce a document from it.
Kofax [Capture] meets our needs and for the most part is easy to use and setup. Configuration could be a little bit easier. The scripting language is a double edge sword if you will. It gives you nearly unlimited possibilities to script what you need, but the downside is you have to script it. Does a good job at batching and scanning documents. The tool integrates well into our workflow which makes our business partners happy and in turn provides for happy customers.
The VRS application included with Kofax Capture is the best image pre-processing platform available on the market today. It can handle a wide array of common document problems such as skew, flipping, wrinkles, lines, and dots.
The platform is incredibly scriptable and can be customized to handle all sorts of unusual document contents to allow information to be extracted that many other platforms just struggle on. Table extraction, line item matching, and smart extraction are all strong points with this platform.
Through the use of SBL and .NET the platform can be expanded and scaled quite easily to allow for the software to be integrated into existing business processes and platforms with ease.
We struggled with configuring Kofax with AP Automation. We used to receive vouchers in different formats by different companies, by different departments. The people from different departments used to scan those vouchers through regular scanners to a central location, which ended up as image pdfs. We fed these image pdfs through Kofax Capture for character recognition, which was painful as the accuracy of recognition was 50 to 60%.
Having a connectors with a workflow tool would be helpful where people can validate and approve the output.
More samples and documentation related to use of API in .NET applications would be a good improvement, that would help users to adapt the product easily into their organization.
Very good usability overall. Any user can pick this up and run with it. HotDocs, the closest competitor, has similar end-user usability, but from a designer of templates perspective, ActiveDocs definitely has the edge in this regard. I would recommend this for any company that mass produces documents from templates as deliverables.
The software overall is very excellent. It responds quickly and produces documents well. The integration with systems makes data input easy. Questions can be designed to allow further expansion of template creation/customization. The rules section is very useful for complicated If/Than/Else style templates. Although experience and training help, the software is very user-friendly out of the box.
ActiveDocs can be a considerably complex product because your use cases can be potentially endless. In our experience, when we have come across a problem or issue with the product ActiveDoc's support has always responded to our queries within 24 hours. Support is only provided via email in 95% of cases. Each year your support and maintenance includes support hours. These are used when you contact support and your issue is not found to be a bug or problem with the product (completely fair and understandable). When we've identified or discovered bugs (mainly with the latest version of Word) it is patched by the next release. They typically release about 4-5 updates per year.
In relation to other software that have a functionality similar to ActiveDocs, they don't even compare in relation to the interface, I didn't use all the software available on the market, but the ones I used and I can compare, ActiveDocs is without a doubt the best among them. We really likes the interface.
Quality of data capture. Automatic data integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic image integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic invoice booking in Oracle and SAP ERP.
We were able to decrease personnel expenditures as there was not a need for individuals to index documents prior to incorporating them into the record.
