What's New in Sohodox

Sohodox now supports both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows.

We have made it easy for you to access your Sohodox documents from anywhere using devices like smartphones, tablets and even your web browser!

Any document in Sohodox can now be made available in Dropbox.Dropbox is a free service that lets you access your important files anywhere. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website.

To learn more about Dropbox integration in Sohodox, see Dropbox integration for documents that are in Sohodox.

For users upgrading from version 7.6 and older: If you had created a tag called Dropbox in Sohodox then upon updating your Sohodox installation, that tag will automatically be converted to the special Dropbox tag. The documents you had added to that tag will stay as they were, but the icon for the Dropbox tag will change to a ‘cloud’ icon. If you want to remove your existing documents from that tag (or not sync them), you need to create a new tag and move your existing documents to it.

From this version, Sohodox lets you rename tags too just like you can rename folders. Simply right-click the tag in the Tags node and then click Rename. Type the new name and press Enter to save it.

Sohodox has always supported duplex scanning i.e. scanning both sides of a page and storing them in the correct order in a PDF or TIFF file. However this required your scanning to have built-in support for duplex scanning. With the new Virtual Duplex scanning mode, Sohodox can now handle duplex scanning even with scanners which do not have built-in support for duplex scanning.

This is how it works

Put a stack of documents in to your scanner’s ADF (Automatic Document Feeder). Sohodox will scan the front side of each document. Now simply flip the stack of documents and place them in your scanner’s ADF. Sohodox will now scan the reverse side of all the documents in the stack. After this Sohodox will automatically re-arrange the scanned pages so that the reverse side of each scanned page comes immediately after the front side of that page in the PDF or TIFF file.

The virtual duplex mode also works if your scanner does not have an ADF (i.e. you scan using the flatbed of your scanner). However in this case, you have to individually flip each page after its front side is scanned.

1. New scan profiles added (these are only visible in new Sohodox installations).
2. You can now automatically despeckle scanned images.
3. Virtual Duplex Scanning supported (this option is only displayed when the selected scanner does not have built-in support for duplex scanning)
4. DPI settings are now adjusted dependent on the scanner.
5. Quality of Black and White scanned images has been improved.
6. Separator pages (Blank page or Barcode) are now displayed in the Scan Preview window so you can see if a non-separator page has been wrongly detected as a separator page.
7. The Scan Preview window now allows you to select a Page view (each scanned page displayed as a single thumbnail) or Document view (each scanned multi-page document displayed as single thumbnail) of the scanned documents.
8. When documents are duplex scanned, the Scan Preview window makes it easy to differentiate between the front and reverse of the document.

Sohodox now lets you update common information for multiple documents together. You can select multiple documents and update the following common information for them:

1. Set a document title (All the selected documents will then have the same title)
2. Assign a document type (The same document type will be set for all the selected documents)
3. Enter indexing information for that document type (All the selected documents will have the same indexing information)
4. Assign the same tags (All selected documents will have the same tags)
5. Choose a folder (All the selected documents will be assigned to the chosen folder)

This feature will save your time and effort as you won’t need to update information individually for each document. You will be able to do it in a single batch.

In previous versions, Sohodox required you to manually save any changes to a document’s indexing information. But from this version, Sohodox gives you the option to automatically save the changes you made to the indexing information of the document. To activate the option, go to Options -> User Options -> Auto Save and check the Automatically save changes to indexing information box.

While entering indexing information for a document, sometime the values you need to enter are already present in the document. So it can save a lot of time and typing mistakes if you can just copy them from the document preview pane and paste them into the field. This new feature allows you to do just that. Simply select the area of the scanned page which has the text you need and copy it. Sohodox will OCR that selection, convert the selection into text and copy it to the clipboard. All you have to do is paste the information into the right indexing field.

Sohodox now supports previewing of .msg files imported from MS Outlook.

For every document in Sohodox, until now you could see the folder in which it is stored. It could be seen under Information panel -> Information tab -> Other Information -> Related Folder. But you could not quickly jump to that folder. Now Sohodox automatically creates a hyperlink to the folder so that when you click the link, it jumps to that folder, where you can see the other related documents in that folder. This feature also lets you quickly switch from the document to its folder in just one click, thereby saving your time.

Now you can replace an existing document in Sohodox with a document you are about to scan. All you need to do is right-click the document and select Replace by Scanning from the menu. This will bring up the scan window. Scan the appropriate document just as you normally would. The scanned document will automatically replace the existing document. The file name will change to the new document’s file name, but the document title will remain unchanged. The older document (the document being replaced) will be removed.

The Information tab in the Preview pane displays the indexing information of the document. You can choose to view the indexing fields in a single column or double column view. In previous versions, if you switched to a different view and then previewed another document, Sohodox would revert to the original column setting. But now Sohodox retains the setting until you change the setting again.

In previous versions, if you changed the zoom level of a document in the Preview pane, Sohodox would return to the default level when you switched to another document. But from this version, Sohodox remembers the zoom level you last selected and retains it across all documents until you change it. In fact, it remembers the same zoom level even if you logout and log back in.

In previous versions of Sohodox, if you added a tag to a document and hit the Enter key, it would display a confirmation message. This message was not required. So we have done away with it.

By default, Sohodox automatically begins to index a newly added/modified document in the background. Sometimes the documents can be very large (taking up too much processing time to index) or just unindexable (for e.g. photos which have no text which can be recognized or extracted). Also sometimes Sohodox can have trouble indexing a particular document. With this version, Sohodox lets you block the indexing process for such documents.

Two new Command Line Options have been added in this version of Sohodox. They are: Reset Cache DB and Reset User Profile.

Now you can merge one tag with another. This will delete the tag that is merged, remove that tag from all documents bearing it; and automatically add the other tag to these documents. When you click the Tags node in the Navigation pane, you will see these documents added to the other tag. This new feature helps you in case you misspelled a tag while adding it to a document. To replace the incorrect tag with the correct one, you need not edit the tag individually in each document. You can simply create a new tag and merge the incorrect tag into the correct one. This feature also helps in rectifying situations where multiple users accidentally create similar tags.

Until now, if you wanted to view the Destination Profiles you have saved in Sohodox, the Destination Profile drop-down would not display the list in an alphabetical order. But now, Sohodox displays the profile list in the drop-down in an alphabetical order.

Now you can drag and drop your emails from Thunderbird version 9.x onwards, into Sohodox. These email messages will be displayed in the Preview pane in Sohodox.

From version 7.6, the Sohodox setup will be separately available with user interfaces in English, Spanish and French. Although the user interface (menus, messages etc.) is now available in the above mentioned languages in addition to English, you can store documents and data in any language in Sohodox.

Prior to version 7.6, viewing an email message stored in EML format required you to have MS Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail installed on your machine. But now Sohodox natively supports viewing EML files in the Preview Pane. So email messages including those downloaded by the Email Capture module can be viewed without needing MS Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail installed on your machine.

Email Capture can now handle in a better way, email messages which have attachments. You can configure Sohodox Email Capture such that, whenever an email message with attachments is detected, the attachments will be stored as separate documents. They will automatically be linked to their corresponding email message. So for example if an email message with a single attachment is captured, Sohodox will create two documents, the email message itself and the attached file. Both the documents will be linked to each other.

Inbuilt viewer for MS Word and MS Excel now supports viewing password protected .docx and .xlsx files.

Minor bugs have been fixed in this version of Sohodox.

Now when you give a scanned document a title, Sohodox will automatically treat that as the file name. Earlier, Sohodox would generate a file name by itself. But now, Sohodox will take the document title given by you as the file name, thereby making it easier to track documents.

The new built-in Word and Excel Viewer allows you to view .doc, .docx, .xls and .xlsx files

even if you do not have MS Office installed on your computer. What’s more you can even annotate and stamp MS Word and MS Excel files the same way as you could with files such as TIFF and PDF files (annotations cannot be burned on MS Word or MS Excel files).

So how does this help?

Let us say you use Open Office Writer from Sun Microsystems, and your colleague uses MS Word. You have just received a Word document in Sohodox that has been created by them. If you didn’t have version 7 of Sohodox, you would click the button at the top right of the preview pane (“Open this document for viewing in its associated application”). This would open the document in MS Word if you had it installed on your machine. But if you did not have MS Word installed, it would have given you an error message. But now that you have version 7, even if you do not have MS Word installed on your machine, you can still view the document with the built-in MS Word viewer.

Using the options dialog, you can now specifically configure what viewer you wish to use for MS Word, MS Excel AND PDF File.

Using the options dialog, you can now lock the file type viewer settings so that only the superadmin can change them.

In the earlier versions of Sohodox, whenever a document was added to Sohodox, the OCR/Text Extraction for the document was performed at the time of adding the document. But now this process will be performed in the background. This means adding multiple files (even hundreds of them at a time) to Sohodox will be much faster than before, as you will not need to wait to add the next file until the OCR/Text Extraction has been completed for the current file.

The text extraction only happens on the machine on which Sohodox is installed in server mode (a single user installation of Sohodox is always installed in server mode).

Since text extraction now happens in the background, the process continues even when you close Sohodox.

The background text extraction service can be viewed by exploring Control Panel>Administrative Tools >Services>ITAZ Sohodox Indexing Services under the Name column. A user can stop or restart this service by right clicking and selecting the Stop or Restart options.

Sohodox now features built-in text extractors for popular file formats such as MS Word (.doc, .docx), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx) and PDF files. This means you no more need to have iFilters installed on your machines for these file formats, as Sohodox can handle them on it’s own.

Sohodox now ships with a backup and restore utility which makes it very easy backup and restore your Sohodox DB. The utility support encrypted and multi-volume backups.

Now Sohodox will remember the width of the various panes that you set within the main window and within the document windows too. It will also remember the document window size you had set last time. So the next time you open the application or the resized document, it will open Sohodox with the pane and window sizes you had the last time when you closed the document or the main Sohodox window.

While adding large number of files to Sohodox, if an error occurs for a file, that file will be skipped and Sohodox will continue adding the remaining files. After the addition is complete it will display the list of skipped files.

You will now hear a confirmation sound instead of the confirmation dialog being displayed, when you press the CTRL + F7 keys on the keyboard, to copy the full path of the document to the clipboard.

Press the CTRL + F7 keys on the keyboard, to copy the full path of the document to the clipboard. You can now paste the document’s location to a data field or any application you want.

Use Policies to control some aspects of Sohodox Security.

You can now drag and drop documents from Sohodox to Windows Explorer by pressing the CTRL button on the keyboard and dragging the documents to a Windows folder.

You can now create, modify or delete destination profiles using the Destination Profiles Manager.