DocsCorp has extended the reach of its contentCrawler data discovery platform to Microsoft SharePoint Online, and the solution is now available from the Azure Marketplace.

contentCrawler searches SharePoint Online libraries for image files such as TIFF and scanned PDFs, either on file shares or within email attachments. It then OCRs these documents, profiling the resulting searchable documents back into SharePoint.

Processing is in the cloud which means it is faster and more secure as files are never downloaded to local machines. Operating in the cloud also means on-premise infrastructure is unnecessary. Provisioning of the software is very fast and occurs within minutes. contentCrawler running in Microsoft Azure comes preconfigured and ready to run in Audit mode, providing insight into how much content is static images in your SharePoint Online libraries.

“contentCrawler enhances the searchability of images stored in SharePoint Online. The contentCrawler free audit process enables the CIO to assess the quantity of content in their system that can benefit from this solution,” said Shane Barnett, DocsCorp CTO and Co-founder.

The solution currently supports two services, OCR and compression. In the case of the Compression module, contentCrawler will identify documents where a certain level of compression is achievable to free up space for other documents to be added. IT Administrators can combine contentCrawler modules into a single, multi-process service for greater efficiency and productivity.

For example, a combined OCR and Compression service would locate all the image-based documents in SharePoint Online, OCR and convert them to smaller, text-searchable PDFs.