NetCFax PRO+ v3.50 provides built in support for v1.4 of the Transym OCR system (TOCR).

Because some people may not want this facility, we do NOT provide the Transym OCR engine as a part of the NetCFax installation, but you can download an evaluation copy of TOCR v1.4 by going to the transym web site. The direct link page is http://www.transym.com/downloadv14.html. Please not that although Transym have now released v2.0, NetCFax cannot use this version (currently), so please ensure you download the v1.4 system.

The TOCR evaluation system lets you test it by allowing up to 100 pages to be scanned, and the registration cost for TOCR is only $40.

Only the NetCFax server has the support built in for TOCR, as the clients do not need to have it installed on their machines at all.

Once you have installed TOCR on the Fax server machine, restart NetCFax and it will identify the TOCR engine as being available, and you can then enable the OCR system in NetCFax. The OCR configuration options can be found at the bottom of the Tools menu.

You can have the OCR system automatically scan all incoming received faxes, and you can even control how many pages of those faxes you want it to scan, which allows you to simply scan the first page (the cover page usually) to identify recipients etc if you only want to do this. The OCR system generates an editable ASCII text file that has the same name as the fax itself, and these are automatically saved in the OCR sub folder of the fax servers installation tree.

You can create filters that are used with these text files. These can contain one or two different words or phrases, and if a match is made, you can set the filter to perform any one of the following actions :

1 - Route this fax to a specified NetCFax login account
2 - Route this fax to all members of a specified NetCFax group
3 - Email this fax to a specified email address (with the fax attached)
4 - Add a comment to this fax
5 - Delete this fax completely.

Once the OCR scan has been performed successfully, NetCFax will check for filters, and if any are configured it will check the contents, searching the file multiple times, once for each configured filter. If a match is identified, the filtering system then applies the action you have specified for that filter. Filters can of course be ordered in any way you want them in the list, allowing you to use the last one (typically) as a "catchall" filter if required.

The Fax clients can also take advantage of this system if the fax server is configured to allow them to do so. A fax client can use the OCR option on the context menu of the received fax drawer of their faxes cabinet. The fax server will perform a new OCR scan, and if this is successful, the client is offered a copy of the OCR text file to view themselves.

The TOCR system is a well known and widely used OCR engine that in our tests has performed extremely well on a variety of different types of faxes. However, you should remember that OCR scans do not always get all the characters in a fax, which is just a large image file. Therefore the conditions used in your filters should be decided fairly carefully.