We are huge ABBYY fans! Read Wayne’s 2019 Content IQ Summit Recap

Each year, we visit the big ABBYY conference of the year. In the past, the event has been held in San Diego and Las Vegas, but this year it was a little closer to our home. Wayne spent a few days in Nashville for the conference, but ventured out around the city in his downtime. See what he had to say here!

What did you like/dislike about the venue?

The venue was great. This location has everything you would ever want for a convention like this. I did not venture too far from the resort but I did manage to find myself in the mall next door. The Soundwave Water Park is amazing and would be a great vacation destination for kids.

Which session(s) were your favorite?

The ABBYY FlexiCapture recertification training was great and opened up several discussions that were not necessarily answered during the training but left open to opinion by the instructor. One example of this was whether or not fixed forms was still something worth creating or if everything should be done FlexiLayout studio.

What is one skill you are looking forward to bringing back to the office and implementing for Optiform customers?

ABBYY has added FC admin tools to help with the automation of many tasks. These tools are will allow better syncing of data for datasets and also allow you to migrate and publish projects into different environments at an automated pace.. The use cases for this would include migration from a DEV system a Test system or migration of a production system to a HA Disaster Recovery system. Information about the fcadminTools.exe can be found in the System Administrator’s Guide.

ABBYY has also added tools to perform a backup without having to be so invasive in the system. You will want to read about it in the release notes for FC12 R3 and those can be found here. ABBYY FlexiCapture 12 Release 3 Release Notes

If someone is teetering on whether to make an ABBYY purchase, what are some things that you learned from the conference that you think would help them make the decision to pull the purchasing trigger?

FlexiCapture performance was improved. With smaller batches you will see an improvement in processing by 50% and in larger batches of 100 pages you will see a improvement at about 10%.

The newest version of FlexiCapture now comes with a clustering mode. This allows vendor layouts to vary and yet be able train the different layouts for better results. You can find out more about this in the release notes as well.

“When one vendor issues invoices with different layouts, training one FlexiLayout for all possible layouts from that vendor will not produce very good results. ABBYY FlexiCapture 12 Release 3 offers clustering technology to address the issue. When a new document arrives, its vendor is detected first. Based on the vendor, the special training batch is selected that stores the field extraction model for this particular vendor. If the program fails to detect the vendor, the “unknown vendor” training batch is selected. Training is done separately for each training batch, but instead of creating one FlexiLayout for all the sample invoices in a training batch, the program will first cluster the samples (i.e. group all similar-looking documents together) and then train a separate field extraction model for each cluster. This approach yields high-quality results even if a batch contains documents of varying layouts.”

Thanks for the recap, Wayne!

We grabbed a few photos from his experience too. Enjoy!