It is once again that time of the year when Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax has announced the next version of their flagship product, Tungsten TotalAgility. This article is intended for experienced Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax consultants trying to understand the new features and the changes introduced in Tungsten TotalAgility 7.8.0.

Tungsten

TotalAgility Express Install

If you are some who are pre-sales, I am sure there would have been times when you had to quickly setup a new Tungsten VM to demonstrate some of the cool features in the Intelligent Automation platform. That’s when you recognise, its not just about setting up a VM, but on top of that you also need to download/install SQL Server, and configure a number of settings on the server before taking time to install Tungsten TotalAgility.

With Tungsten TotalAgility v7.8 you have some good news. The installation wizard now comes with an extra option: Express Install.

When selected, Tungsten TotalAgility can be installed with all default settings that need minimal user interaction. The express mode installs Combined Web Application server, SQL Express and Transformation Server. You can configure the license server while installing TotalAgility or post installation.
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Note: Because of the limitations of the Express installation, we recommend that you do not use this installation type in a production environment.

Cloud Storage for Tungsten TotalAgility Documents

The feature I like most in the new version of Tungsten TotalAgility is the ability to now make a choice where you want to keep the active documents/capture data between SQL Server, Windows Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3. This is a major shift in the product to improve its cloud deployment capabilities.

Once setup, pretty much any images that you upload are stored in the selected storage. We gave it a try with our AWS S3 bucket and interestingly we found everything including images used on various forms being stored in S3. I am sure this will significantly improve the overall user interface performance too as you are not dealing with BLOB storage in SQL Server.

Please note that with this transition of Documents storage into cloud, there are major changes to TotalAgility_Documents data model. Hence if you have been using SQL queries to get document field values or document specific values (which Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax always insisted should not be used, rather recommended to use APIs), they all need to be updated. For reference, please see below the new database structure.

OmniPage Recognition Engine

A new recognition engine is available for page and zone recognition. This engine is installed alongside Transformation Designer and is the default engine when creating new recognition profiles. This recognition engine replaces the RecoStar and FineReader recognition engines that will be deprecated in the next release of Tungsten TotalAgility.

The OmniPage OCR Engine was one of the first OCR programs to run on personal computers which was originally developed by Caere Corporation in late 1980s which was acquired by ScanSoft in 2000, then taken over by Nuance Communication in 2005 and finally with Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax since 2019.

Upgrade TotalAgility Databases

For TungstenTotalAgility on-premise and on-premise multi-tenant installations, the Upgrade Databases option is available in the Tungsten TotalAgility installer that upgrades all the databases to the latest version of TotalAgility, when it is not installed locally.

The upgrade option is supported only for databases created with TotalAgility 7.4.0 or later.

Form Batch Actions

This is going to significantly improve the time our form actions are going to take to execute. When deploying form actions, Tungsten TotalAgility now batches multiple sequential form actions that execute on the server into a single HTTP requests to provide the best possible performance.

Each batch of actions in an HTTP request will execute on the server before returning results to the client browser. Using client-side form actions intermixed within a sequence of server-side form actions could cause a batch of actions to be split if a client-side form action is placed in the middle of a set of server-side form actions. This will result in multiple HTTP requests, one for each batch of server-side form actions.

Generic Exception Handler for Suspended Jobs

Prior to TotalAgility 7.8.0, for suspended jobs, you needed to map each activity type, such as .NET node failed, web service failed, and so on. A new exception, Automatic Activity Failed, is available at System > System settings > Process > Exceptions. This exception process can be launched regardless of the activity type.

Quick Capture

Quick Capture is a new design environment that enables business users to create capture solutions easily without the need for training. The business user can upload and train sample documents, extract data and design the workflow that should be used to process them. The workflow can include document review, validation, verification, re-scan and making the documents available for download. Capture solutions once published are accessible from within the Workspace enabling the user to start scanning easily.

The Quick Capture Designer is available within the Start menu when you install Tungsten TotalAgility 7.8.0 or upgrade to Tungsten TotalAgility On-Premise 7.8.0. When you install Tungsten TotalAgility in an on-premise multi-tenant or Azure environment and create a tenant, a link to Quick Capture Designer is provided in the email if the tenant has access to the TotalAgility Designer.

Tile Control to Create Beautiful Dashboards

The Tile control displays the total returned from a query in a compact way to display this information on a dashboard. You can include an image on a tile control and have more control over the content.

SQL Server 2019 is now supported

You can now use any version of SQL Server from 2012 all the way till 2019 for your Tungsten TotalAgility databases.

While there are numerous features introduced in the latest version of Tungsten TotalAgility, mentioned above are the key features we felt worth noting. If you would like to know more or require assistance in upgrading your existing Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax Environment, feel free to contact us at info@acmo.io for a free no-obligation quote.