FileNet Capture Architecture

IBM FileNet Capture provides the capability to add documents to the Content Engine object store or Image Manager repository. Capture supports the automating the document entry process which saves lot of time compared to manual entry. Apart from image capturing tools like ADR (Advanced Document Recognition), OCR (Optical Character Recognition) are available to read the data from the captured image. FileNet Capture supports three document capture methods.

1. Scanning

2. Faxing

3. File Import

FileNet Capture supports a wide variety of scanners from low volume personal scanners to high volume production scanners. 

The FaxEntry portion of the Capture product provides an automated method for automatically capturing inbound faxes.

The Capture File Import capability provides a method to import existing documents from user directories. 

There are two different API are available to develop custom applications apart from the out of box capture application.

1. Capture COM API 
2. Remote Capture Services .Net API

Capture COM API set provides Capture repository objects and ActiveX controls for image acquisition (for example, scanning and document upload), batching, advanced document recognition (ADR), and others.

 

Remote Capture Services (RCS) provides a .NET framework for developers to build custom .NET Web applications. The RCS toolkit includes Web interface controls, the RCS framework, as well as Capture repository objects.

 

There are two different capture applications are available

1. IBM FileNet Capture Desktop
2. IBM FileNet Capture Professional

Capture Desktop is intended for low volume applications where as Capture Professional intended for high volume applications. Capture Professional is allowing us to save the documents to both Content Engine and image services repository where as in Capture Desktop we can save the documents only to Content Engine repository.

FileNet Application Engine Architecture

Today I will discuss about the Application Engine architecture in the FileNet. The Application Engine represents the out-of-the-box user interface for the FileNet P8 platform. Workplace is the user interface for the FileNet P8 and it provides the folder based view of an FileNet P8 content repository along with various components like inbox, public queue and step processors. Based on the roles users can access the admin tools like Process Administrator, Process Confiugration Console and developer tools like Process Designer.

Major components of the Application Engine is application server, Java API and Component Integrator. Currently FileNet P8 is supporting the below application servers.
1. Websphere
2. Weblogic
3. JBoss
Java API is used to communicate with Content Engine and Process Engine. Workplace can be customized by using the WAT(Web Application Toolkit).
Component Integrator is used to integrate the custom components to the Process Engine. The component can be a jar file, web service or JMS. Component Manager is process engine component but hosted and managed on the application engine. By default IBM is providing the custom component for CE Operations for performing the basic Content Engine operations like copy, delete and moving documents etc.The Application Engine also supports the integration with Microsoft's Office and WebDAV.