Over the past month we’ve examined some of the new features that Laserfiche 8.3 brings to you via the client and administration console. This week I’m very excited to switch over to Laserfiche Workflow 8.3 and talk a little bit about the major enhancements that it provides. To start off with, we’ll examine the new Retrieve Document Text activity.

So what does the aforementioned activity do exactly? This may not require much elaboration because it is so aptly titled, but it takes existing text from a Laserfiche or electronic document and stores it as a token for use within your workflow. If the ideas for how you could use this aren’t exploding like fireworks in your head, let me give you just a few ideas.

By pairing the Retrieve Document Text activity with something like a Routing Decision activity, you can build logic into your workflow that is based upon certain words showing up in the text. Said logic might include identifying what the type of document is and applying a certain template and possibly even extracting information from the text based on pattern matches in order to populate fields. If that sounds a little bit like Quick Fields to you, I would certainly agree.

In a very controlled testing environment, I’ve been able to duplicate the work that Quick Fields might do via Workflow, but I certainly wouldn’t view it as a replacement of the product, and there are a lot of reasons for that. That said, I believe the Retrieve Document Text activity could certainly help you with some very basic identification and advanced routing of documents based on what it reads within the document, which is a fantastic enhancement and will open up the ways in which you use Workflow!