Vendors unite for charitable mission - Easter Seals benefits from industry donations and support at AIIM

Serving as an example of how easy it is to integrate data capture and data management in an office, several imaging companies teamed up to make information from about 100,000 paper documents more useful for Easter Seals of the Bay Area (San Francisco).

Part of Law Cypress' (www.lawcypress.com) AIIM booth, named the Xionics Document Conversion Pavilion for Easter Seals, was turned into a service bureau to convert and index documents previously stored in filing cabinets and boxes.

Easter Seals of the Bay Area was approached by Xionics (www.xionics.com) about the demonstration at the AIIM show. "They figured why not do real documents for real people and why not do it for a non-profit," said Sylvia Wolf, VP of development for Easter Seals of the Bay Area. "We are really humbled and thankful."

Easter Seals of the Bay Area operates many programs for children, adults and the elderly.

"It generates lots of documents, lots of records, lots of information," said Wolf. The organization will benefit from better storage and better access to information on CDs.

"The documents we are having Lason (www.lason.com) convert are used by our staff on a daily basis," said Wolf. "By converting them to an electronic format, retrievals will be fast and easy."

Law Cypress provided the booth space, technical support, integration services and coordinated the activities around the event, which was developed with Xionics. Managed by Lason, the project started with a Fujitsu (www .fcpa.com) M3099 scanner for high-speed capture of the documents.

From there, documents were indexed using Xionic's Cruise Line data capture software. Documents are stored in a Sony (www.sony.com) 5.25-in. optical jukebox managed by OTG Software's (www.otgsoftware.com) DiskXtender software. Finally, the documents were stored and replicated using a Rimage (www.rimage.com) Perfect Image Producer.