SuneroDoc Leverages Dynamsoft SDK to Help Legal, Insurance and Consulting Users Experience Simple but Comprehensive Document Management

IN BRIEF

Sunero Technologies develops enterprise software for many industries and platforms. One such application is SuneroDoc, which is used by more than 200 customers in the legal, insurance and consulting services fields. When Sunero set out to develop the application, it realized it had to partner with a software development kit (SDK) provider to enable SuneroDoc's comprehensive scanning / image capture capabilities. This would help the company save a lot of time and money. The path paid off. SuneroDoc was created in record time for the company and today practically runs across many enterprises without technical concern.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Sunero Technologies was founded in 1997 to develop enterprise software solutions for a variety of industries and platforms. Over the years, Sunero has developed applications for records management (document management); photography and imaging; enterprise resource planning (ERP); healthcare and counseling practices; and web applications using ASP.NET, PHP and Ruby on Rails.

The company serves clients around the world. Overseas revenues account for 90 percent of Sunero's total revenue. Sunero typically earns its projects by being awarded with contracts after a competitive bid process. In addition, the majority of Sunero's software projects have been with clients in developed economies that include the USA, Western Europe, and more. The company is based in Pune, India.

One of the company's significant software applications is SuneroDoc, a comprehensive document management application. This solution is provided and licensed under a software as a service (SaaS) model and as an on-premise solution. The application has more than 200 current users. There are 30 users from the insurance industry, 60 users from the legal services industry, and 120 users from the consulting industry.

http://www.sunerotechnologies.com

CREATING A DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT APPLICATION

Sunero set out to develop SuneroDoc as a general-use comprehensive document management system. This was achieved and the application is successfully deployed in many industries. To accomplish this, Sunero's management understood the application would require several characteristics. Four characteristics became apparent. First, Sunero's developers had to ensure the solution could allow flexible metadata. This was because Sunero assumed metadata or other categorizing shouldn't be forced. The user organization knows best how to differentiate one document from the other. Second, it was important the approach SuneroDoc took toward document management was one of a generic concept. This would mean that the application, in its simplest sense, would treat a document as a just a collection of pages. And, optionally these collections could be grouped into sections. These two factors were critical to ensure SuneroDoc would have far-reaching document management capabilities in various industries.

The third characteristic is obvious but, not always one that is realized. SuneroDoc had to be lightning- fast when users searched for documents based on metadata. Finally, customization of generic document metadata had to be possible by industry-specific nomenclature with linguistic localization. These additional two characteristics would help it achieve worldwide enterprise-grade quality.

With these characteristics, Sunero believed the flexibility could be endless. An insurance industry user could process documents by policy numbers, a legal services user by case number, a consulting services user by project number, and so on. Other metadata could include the client name, client address, other relevant client demographics, and dates.

The process for using the document management features would also need to be straightforward but powerful. A user should be able to easily create, delete, export, select, lock / unlock, edit, search and manage any document.

Then, document workflow was also to be highly comprehensive but, easy too.

After initial development, user feedback and updates have contributed to SuneroDoc today being highly adapted. It's very simple in its architecture and as a result maintains information in formats that could be considered future-proof. It's also easy to migrate to.

Looking back at the development of SuneroDoc, to build in all the scanning, editing, and management capabilities would have been exhaustive and costly. Sunero's management and developer team knew they had to consider alternatives for quickly enabling strong scanning capabilities.

LEVERAGING A POWERFUL SDK

As most developers well understand, many specialized components of a software application are often best left to experts of that domain. In this case, the image capture capabilities of SuneroDoc clearly followed this understanding. Sunero wanted to focus on its objective of delivering a good document management system to its end users. Sunero decided to use a software development kit (SDK) for the image capture capabilities. This helped the team concentrate on design and implementation rather than developing a scanning module. To develop a scanning module in-house would have taken many extra months just to learn relevant standards, then many more months to develop. This would have meant much longer time to market and a far greater expense to develop.

So, Sunero set out and tried a couple of alternative code bases or application programming interfaces (APIs). Nothing was pleasing. Finally, the company came across Dynamsoft's SDKs via a web search. The team tested Dynamsoft's Dynamic .NET TWAIN SDK in a sample application. The results of the test enabled Sunero to conclude Dynamsoft's SDK was their best bet.

Dynamsoft's Dynamic .NET TWAIN SDK

Dynamic .NET TWAIN is ideal for developers to use in creating image capture and processing functionalities within .NET-based document management applications. This includes image capture from scanners and webcams. It has built-in support for Windows® Forms (WinForms) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

The SDK also provides add-ons to support the use of barcodes, optical character recognition (OCR), and PDF formats. Dynamsoft's SDK provides a plethora of other built-in capabilities. Customizable scanning configurations are offered and include ADF; duplex; resolution; pixel type; and more. It also enables saving images into a variety of formats that include JPEG, PDF, TIFF, PNG, BMP and byte array to a local disk, web server, database or document libraries.

Dynamic .NET TWAIN, the TWAIN and DirectShow Webcam Capture wrapper library, is based on Microsoft's .NET framework. They are optimized for use in C# and Visual Basic .NET. A recent SDK update lets users develop 64-bit or 32-bit applications to seamlessly work with common 32-bit based TWAIN drivers.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Dynamsoft's SDK helped Sunero's team create a best-in-class user experience ideal for key industries such as consulting, legal and insurance. Today, the application provides fast document search and page movement, reliable support for absorbing paper documents, and reliable support for absorbing a variety of digital document formats. These are critical to any organization looking to experience the gains they expect when moving from paper-based to digital-based document management.

In developing this application, Sunero's management has learned the importance of fully understanding sensibilities of the users. Sunero also came to understand the importance of working with partners that understand their customers and their customers' customers too. Dynamsoft demonstrated this understanding and it turned out to be critical to success. Good understanding between organizations working together for a common purpose is a great glue that keeps things successfully together.

SuneroDoc was completed in record time for the company. More importantly, the solution has been well accepted in their customers' workplace.