A major program is underway to digitise more than three million pages of paper records recording the history of more than 20 cemeteries dispersed across Melbourne stretching from Lilydale to Werribee. Created in March 2010 by amalgamating eight former cemetery trusts, the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (GMCT) has begun the vast undertaking in tandem with a move to adopt the ELO electronic document and records management system.

Texthelp, a provider of software for the education sector, has incorporated ABBYY’s Cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) technology to perform text recognition in its Snapverter app for Google Apps for Education users.

Even in today’s digital world, documents proliferate in every part of an organisation – from accounts management (invoices, checks, and remittances) and human resources (employment applications and benefits forms) to engineering and manufacturing (design documents) and sales and marketing (sales plans and marketing collateral). Documents remain a key vehicle for making transactions and business processes work, and so document management continues to be a challenge. Optical character recognition (OCR) was the initial answer to many document-management woes, but in the age of big data analytics, OCR shortcomings can result in bad analytics.