ABBYY has introduced a Recognition Server iFilter product that is integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Search or Windows Search.

It unlocks image files such as TIFF, JPEG, DjVu, and PDF for full-text content indexing to speed up search of all documents in a corporate network.

"Enterprise search systems give corporate users quick access to information contained in a variety of documents necessary to perform everyday tasks. A document that cannot be quickly retrieved is usually considered to be lost even if, nominally, it still exists somewhere in the archives. But some documents are stored in formats that are not convenient for search and retrieval, such as image formats," commented Andrey Isaev, director of Technology Products for ABBYY.

Many important documents, such as scanned faxes, agreements, correspondence, etc., are stored as images and, therefore, cannot be indexed by the Microsoft search engine.

The ABBYY solution provides an iFilter plug-in to integrate with the Microsoft search system and gives access to a background optical character recognition (OCR) service which is performed by ABBYY’s Recognition Server software.

SharePoint Server indexes text documents which are located in the corporate network itself, and utilises ABBYY Recognition Server iFilter when image files need to be processed.

iFilter transmits the image-based documents to Recognition Server for OCR processing and then submits the recognised text back to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for indexing.

This processing makes the documents available for full-text search. To avoid the possibility of overloading the search system, ABBYY Recognition Server is installed on a separate computer and can be scaled up with additional capacity.

ABBYY Recognition Server iFilter also works with Microsoft Windows Search. One copy can perform OCR for all Windows Search clients installed on the corporate network. The background image processing is performed on the server and does not consume resources of the users' PCs.