LOW COST, HIGH PERFORMANCE IMAGE VIEWING & ANNOTATION

C.O.L.D. (or 'Computer Output to Laser Disk' to give it its full title) is a system which is specifically geared towards organizations that regularly produce large quantities of electronic forms which they will need to store and retrieve.

Originally COLD systems involved software and hardware elements - the electronic forms system and the Laser Disk archiving system referred to in the name. Increasingly, rather than outputting to laser disk, companies are storing their generated COLD documents onto large server hard drives and magnetic storage devices, but the name, COLD or C.O.L.D. is still applied to the process of forms generation and retrieval.

In order to minimize the storage space required for each form entry, COLD keeps each form as two layers - a background image (of the form itself) which is stored once in the system (and is usually stored as an image), and the foreground or data infill of the form (which is usually stored a text, but may also be in image form). By separating the forms into layers prevents the need to duplicate the form image for each copy of filled-in forms stored in a system. The layers are re-joined by the viewer when required.

This approach can have a significant impact on storage costs and so this approach is used widely amongst Document Management providers and systems vendors.

However, although the COLD approach is widely used, there is no real COLD standard. Each system vendor has generally created their own format, and so finding a viewer that is not supplied by the COLD vendor and one that supports multiple COLD formats is next to impossible. Daeja aims to address this and has begun by introducing the first generic COLD viewer (as an optional ViewONE Pro Module). Daeja will also be seeking to implement support for some of the widely used formats. Please contact daeja for current progress in this area.

ViewONE Pro's COLD Module allows C.O.L.D. system users to use a single viewer for their PDFs, TIFFs and C.O.L.D. documents, with no end user installation to centrally manage.

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