Perceptive Content Tips & Tricks

Perceptive Content is a flexible platform that can be tailored to nearly any solution. RPI Senior Consultants will show you some of the tricks you can use to make the most of this product. An effective technique for load balancing in workflow, and a method to easily use ImageNow Printer to append pages to a document are just a couple of the tips you’ll learn in this webinar!

Jeff Jones:
Hi my name is Jeff Jones, so we’re going to be talking about Perceptive Content tips and tricks today. To give you a quick overview we’re going to start with Perceptive client tips because there’s a lot of handy features in Perceptive Content that both the users and administrators do not, maybe don’t know about or use widely. These little things can make your life a little bit easier on a daily basis.

So, like I said, we’re going to discuss Perceptive Content client tips. We’re going to discuss and Imagenow printer appending script that we are going to provide you guys. And then we’re also going to go over some workload tips and tricks.

So, to start off we’re going to discuss Message Center and this is a very handy tool that a lot of users aren’t aware of. The Message Center allows the user or admin to keep track of document count within the queues they have access to. All from a convenient interface on the tool bar and we’ll show you that in a second. But, to access the Message Center from the Perceptive Content toolbar you just choose the settings, and then select the show Message Center option, this will bring up the Message Center underneath the toolbar.

Go back into your settings menu, select the options, and then this will bring up your dialogue box. You’ll select the toolbar option, and then there’s three tabs, general, default, and Message Center. Select the Message Center. And the top stuff is just kinda stylizing. You don’t really need to do anything with that unless you want to customize your Message Center. But, down here is the important part where it says workflow queue status. This will have all the queues that you have access to. You can select any or all and then just click apply and okay and then you will have a nice little display here showing all your various queues and how many documents are idle, working, et cetera.

Also, it gives you a total queue count. Another nice feature is if you need to go to that workflow queue you can just double click the name and it will take you right to that workflow queue.

Alex Lindsey:
So this is particularly helpful for administrators that have responsibilities on error queues, if you have scripts that are running and you’re responsible for going out and checking if those are erroring or not. If you don’t want to rely on the emails and things like that, the Message Center is a nice option for you to kind of see a rolling tally of kind of where things are in terms of your responsibilities.

So, the next part is kind of fun because this is particularly geared towards the visually impaired. Sometimes these toolbars can have icons that are pretty small so there’s a real easy way for us to, basically for you guys to go out and make those larger so you can kind of see these icons a little bit better and navigate a little bit better.

So, from your document viewer, you can click on the view drop down here, navigate to toolbars, then to customize, and this will pop up another box over here. And then, you’ll go over to the options tab and from there you’ll just click on the large icons checkbox. And you can basically close it from there. That should take care of it automatically. No need to disconnect or restart or anything like that. It’s just a real quick setting that you can do to make things a little bit easier for you to see if you’re having trouble seeing some of the smaller icons.

The other thing that you can do from the toolbar here is to give access to basically, to enable logging for the client and user side logging. So, how you would do it, and then I’ll get to kind of what the best case scenario for that is. You shift right click on the toolbar here. And then you would select logging and from there you can basically enable user logging to kind of track what some people are doing. It’s particularly helpful when you’re trying to troubleshoot something and you can’t quite figure out what’s going wrong and what weird behavior might be happening. It’s a great way to track that.

It’s also important to note for the logging that you want to turn it off once it’s done. I think that if you have a lot of users on there that log can tend to balloon out a little bit. So you want to turn it off once you found some resolution there.

Something else you can do from this drop down here is related to your capture profiles or your scan profiles as well. So this explore application data folder, if you click that, that will actually give you access to the location of your capture profile file that you can then use to distribute to the rest of your users so you don’t have to recreate capture profiles over and over again.

Another thing, as Jeff mentioned earlier, there’s a script you can do for appending documents. So, to start talking about this let’s talk about a use case. So, a good use case is vendor documents tied to an invoice. So if you have a solution processing invoices or just storing accounts payable documents and you would like to append vendor approval or vendor documents to that particular invoice itself, there’s a good way for you to use your Imagenow printer to capture that, essentially append that document to that existing document in your system. So, if you were to configure your Imagenow printer capture profile, you would open this box here and go to the document keys. And for the type you can select just VB script as part of this and it will essentially have you run a VB script. You’ll also be prompted to actually input a script so this is kind of where we’re going to help you out here.

And if you can see here, on field two we have it set up to basically do that. So, on the back end what it’s essentially doing is when you’re capturing that document, it’s going out and it’s finding the related document keys to that existing document in your Perceptive Content system and it’s identifying that and mapping it back to the document you’re capturing. And it will then append to that existing document. Because we like to share a lot and this is a beautiful presentation here, and don’t worry we’re going to make this available to everyone on the webinar that you guys can take this, and you can copy this and try it yourself. But, this is the actual code that we used to essentially make that capture profile appending process happen.

Speaker 3:
It actually appears that everyone was dropped off of the webinar after that.

Alex Lindsey:
I don’t blame them.

Jeff Jones:
Well, since this webinars done (laughs). So now we’re going to go into some workload tips and tricks. So after that awesome knowledge that Alex just dropped on us, we’re going to talk about a few things to make your life in workflow and workflow design a little bit easier. So, some of the things we’ll talk about here is the proper workflow layout. The difference between archive, we’ll do it from workflow, we’ll do some routing rules, talk about queue types, simple ways to search in the workflow designer, iScripts and then exporting the workflow as an image.

So, I’m sure many of you have dealt with workflows where you open these things up and they just jump out at you like this big spider web, right? They’re impossible to manage and figure out where the routes go. So, there’s a lot of nice tools in the workflow designer to help you with that. Kind of from left to right we have, our grid tools here, some of this is like snap to grid, which helps you keep things in line and organized. Our routing arrow styles, so like an angled route, straight route, curved. And then you actually have options on how you want your route lines to lay over each other. And then, continuing on we have our zoom in and zoom out so if you go to your workflow designer and you’re only seeing a portion of it, you can zoom out to see more queues and easily find the one you’re looking for. And then, probably the most widely used for me are the draw container and text description. And here’s an example so, if we have a start queue and a finish queue, I can draw containers around each one to separate them out and categorize them.

I can also color code them and then I can even create a text box, which will allow me to put a description of what each queue’s purpose is, if there’s any iScripts on the queue, and what their iScripts functions are. So, if for any reason say your admin’s out of the office and somebody has to take his place, and there’s an issue they can jump right in. It’s nice and organized and they can see what everything is supposed to do and it will help them get to the issue faster.

And then, finally once you’ve done all of your building out and organizing, you can actually save out the workload as an image for your reference at any time. So, to do that from the workflow designer you just click file, and export. It will bring up your save as menu, give your workflow a name. Example workflow, AP workflow, whatever the workflow is. Save it where you’d like it to and then it will create a bmp image of your entire workflow for easy reference. So, you can open that at any time, see where stuff is in its entirety. Hopefully that makes things a little bit easier for you.

Alex Lindsey:
Those can sometimes be kind of large files as well. So, as we roll into other workflow type items we’re going to talk a little bit about kind of, the routing rules. You guys have seen these before, you guys have used them before if you’re using workflow. So we got the different types here. So, there’s sequential, sequential auto, parallel, and load balance. So, sequential is basically how it sounds. Documents that you just need to route forward, it’s a sequential route. Just one direction essentially. That’s what we use for a lot of different things.

There’s sequential auto, if you wanted to get a little bit more technical. You can input routing rule type data and routing rule type information into a routing rule so that when you route out, it kinda makes that decision for you. So those can kinda come in handy when you know, [inaudible 00:09:57] to produce clicks and things like that.

We also have parallel. We don’t really like to