By Scott McKeever, Certified Intelligent Capture (Captiva) Professional
With OpenText™ Captiva version 7.5 going to extended support, the impetus to upgrade to Captiva 16.5 becomes stronger. An upgrade can move you forward in several ways.
First, with each new version of Captiva, the desire to create the best user experience possible has driven development of new interfaces and retirement of old ones. For example, if your organization still uses IndexPlus, that module has been merged into the new Completion user interface. It has a much more robust and customizable user experience. This allows the image to be detached from the form in support of multiple monitors.
What does this mean if you’re not on version 16.5? Before you upgrade, you need to know the modules you have in production that have been deprecated and are no longer available in 16.5.
If you’re like many of our customers, you’ve implemented custom logic into these deprecated modules. When you upgrade, that logic will need to be carried forward in the configuration of the new modules.
Second, an upgrade to Captiva 16.5 is a fantastic opportunity to review your processes to make sure you’re getting the most efficiencies for your organization. A deep analysis of how you’re using your capture system will help you decide, “Is this really the best way to do this?” or “Do we really need to keep doing that manual process when it can be automated?”
Third, an upgrade can provide an opportunity to improve your operating environment. If you’re on outdated server operating systems and databases, upgrading to Captiva 16.5 can help you take advantage of the current Microsoft Operating Systems and Databases. This will yield performance improvements from new hardware and servers.
Since Captiva is transitory in nature, an upgrade is often the best method to procure a completely new environment for the latest version instead of an “upgrade in place.” What we mean by this is implementing the new Captiva version in an isolated environment. This allows you to preserve your current version while running testing in parallel to your production system.
Finally, adequate planning for testing of your updated Captiva system is imperative. You should collect sample documents and scenarios for those “edge” cases that you seldom run across but that can cost you valuable time in daily operations. For example, if you’ve created a manual workaround, an upgrade is a good time to automate it to take full advantage of Captiva’s automation features.
As with any upgrade, moving to the latest version gives you the opportunity to take advantage of any patch corrections and keeps your capture environment in top shape.
To learn more, join us for a June 14 webinar on “OpenText Captiva 16.5 and Tips for a Successful Upgrade.” Get details and sign up for the webinar today.
