ABBYY FlexiCapture 12 Video – Creating a Hot Folder

Watch a video to discover how to create a hot folder in ABBYY FlexiCapture. Some of the key functions displayed in this demo include: creating an adequate UNC import path, creating a share, and using the Administration and Monitoring Console.

Hello. Today I’d like to show you how to create a hot folder within ABBYY FlexiCapture. The first thing I will do is go to the “Project Menu” and go to “Image Import Profiles”. I will hit new and I will provide the path of where I will import the document from now in the distributed version of the software. It’s very important that this is a share, whether it be a folder that is shared on the Application Server or a network share, but it needs to be a proper UNC path here. And also it’s very important that this share has given rights to the service account that you’ve installed ABBYY FlexiCapture under. So in other words, that service account needs to have the read-write ability to make modifications to that folder because the software will literally use this folder to import documents and then transfer them accordingly.

So once I provide the shared to the text box there I’ll hit next. We will tell the software how often to read from this directory. This is literally the number of seconds that it will take every pull. So it’s going to pull by default every 20 seconds and of course you can modify that accordingly. You can see some other settings here. I’m not going to go into detail, but we can control what happens from a batch perspective. Do we grab multiple items per batch? Or maybe we want one document to be imported per batch. So you have a lot of that control here from the “Image Import Profile” screen.

The next tells us what we want to do with the document. How do we create the document? Do we want to use an “image enhancement profile”? Do we need to keep a searchable text layer on the document if there is one? So we can make some of those decisions here or leave it out of the box. And then lastly, what happens when a document comes in? Will the software delete them or do we want them moved to a subfolder that the software will create called “Processed” or “Exceptions”?

Next thing we will do is give it a name and I’m just going to leave this defaulted here and we’ll go with that from there. So now that I have a share created, you’ll see that within my share, so far I have nothing there. The reason I can tell is that the software will actually create some subfolders as documents come in and get processed. So what I typically do next is we need to make sure we open up our Administration and Monitoring Console, and that can be found from the “Start Menu” on the Application Server. And here it is. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and open that. On the “Settings” screen of the Administration and Monitoring Console, you will see the projects that you have listed. This is the project here that I selected, and I’m just going to go ahead and put “Hot folders” and turn that on there. The next step, then, if all goes well and we’ve given the proper rights, as we will see a subfolder called “Processing Tasks”, get created here by the technology.

And “Processing Tasks”, a system folder that the software will use. And actually if I drop in a sample. I’ll just pick any sample. You’ll see the software will monitor this and it will actually automatically adjust it. I set mine by default to 20 seconds. So the software will pick up this document and you can see now it’s gone. And now it’s ingesting that document and following the proper workflow that I have outlined for that image import profile. So you’ll actually see the software create other subfolders. So if you remember by default, what happens is the software, if it processes an item successfully, will bring it in and it will move it to the “Processed” folder. So I’ll be able to see the batch that the software named it and the file there that was imported or files if we selected multiples. So there are some subfolders. And once again, those subfolders are found within that menu. So if you recall, we told the software to move imported profiles to the “Processed” folder so that we have a history of them. And if there were exceptions, we would have the ability for the software to create an “Exceptions” folder there as well.

So I hope you enjoyed this video of how to create a hot folder, what we call “Image Import Profiles” within the technology. Thank you so much.

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