Content and document management companies took center stage Monday at a conference and expo for IT and business professionals looking for the latest technologies to develop, capture, manage, and store documents and digital content.
The Association for Information and Image Management kicked off AIIM 2004, an annual event that focuses on enterprise content management. It runs through Wednesday at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.
Adobe was among the major players with announcements keyed to the AIIM crowd. Adobe unveiled new technology that will add bar codes to PDF formatted documents to speed forms processing, the company said Monday. Among the first customers of the new technology will be the U.S. tax collection agency, the Internal Revenue Service.
The bar codes, which are a "2D" format -- rather than simple lines, as in retail product bar codes, these include more information by using both lines and blocks of ink -- can be added to PDF forms by users equipped with Acrobat Professional 6.0, the company's top-of-the-line PDF authoring software (a plug-in will be provided for the bar code feature) or the upcoming edition of Adobe Designer.
Once filled out by the end-user -- with a plug in-enabled version of Acrobat Reader -- the form automatically generates the bar code, which carries all the entered data. The form is then printed for mailing or faxing. At the originator's end, the form is scanned, and the data pulled from the bar code is sent to a server running decoding software Adobe's developing. Finally, the data is fed into the organization's database or other backend system for processing.
