As Barbattini and his colleagues researched document management solutions, they realized that the basis for that solution could be the collaboration software they had already started to use: Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. To provide comprehensive document management capabilities that complement Office SharePoint Server, the bank turned to KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri. The KnowledgeLake solution is based on Office SharePoint Server, to which KnowledgeLake adds its expertise in document imaging, capture and workflow.
Now, when Bank of Choice receives paper-based or faxed loan applications, staff members scan them using standard, low-cost multi-function scanners, and the scanned images are indexed into the KnowledgeLake application, which also adds custom metadata tags to facilitate search, and provides the document search and retrieval capabilities for the solution. The documents are stored in Microsoft SQL Server® database software and accessed through Office SharePoint Server. Documents received electronically are entered directly into KnowledgeLake, augmented with metadata tags, and stored in the solution.
In the remote branch offices, loan officers access the KnowledgeLake and SharePoint Server solution through a Web browser and the bank’s intranet. The solution retrieves documents using Microsoft ASP.NET® AJAX technology, which provides loan officers and other bank executives with quick access to documents, even though they are not stored locally.
The solution runs on four Dell PowerEdge 2850 server computers, with two machines serving as load-balanced Web servers, one as the application server, and one as a database server. Within months of deployment, the solution held several hundred thousand documents and Bank of Choice expects to store one million documents in the solution within a year, with the solution sufficiently scalable to accommodate that volume, and more, as business continues to grow.