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2019.2

Introduction

This document introduces Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 and contains a short description of new features and enhancements to the Ephesoft Transact product as well as specific bug fixes and workarounds for potential issues.

Installation and Licensing

Licensing

If you are upgrading to Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 from a previous release, you may be required to obtain a new license file for your environment.

  • Customers on the following versions do not require a new license when upgrading to Ephesoft Transact 2019.2:
    • Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.0
    • Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.1
    • Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2
    • Ephesoft Transact 2019.1
  • Customers on Ephesoft Transact versions earlier than Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.0 are required to obtain a new license file.

Switch from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK

Oracle has announced a decision to require a commercial (chargeable) license to be entitled to receive updates to the Oracle JDK. While there is a low likelihood this would impact customers in the future, Ephesoft has taken the decision, for the long-term benefit of customers, to remove this dependency on the Oracle JDK.

As a result of this decision, Ephesoft is switching from using the Oracle JDK in Ephesoft Transact to incorporating OpenJDK in the Transact installer. This switch will eliminate the Oracle JDK dependency and remove the potential requirement to purchase a separate chargeable JDK license from Oracle in the future.

For all additional information, refer to the OpenJDK: Frequently Asked Questions.

MariaDB and MySQL Changes

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 does not support MySQL databases.

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 no longer includes the option to install MariaDB as a part of the Transact installer package. Customers who wish to use MariaDB must have their own instance of MariaDB installed separately in order to use it for Ephesoft Transact 2019.2.

For all additional information, refer to the Installation Documentation.

Web Scanner Client

Ephesoft Transact and the Web Scanner versions must be in sync for each release.  When upgrading the Transact product all Web Scanner clients in use on client machines must be uninstalled and re-installed to the latest version to be in sync with the Transact product.

Note: Current Web Scanner client comes with Oracle JDK and will be updated in the next release; for an OpenJDK patch, please contact our Support group.

Important Installation Notes

  • Before upgrading to Ephesoft Transact 2019.2, make sure to have all your current batch instances in the Finished state for the reporting jobs to run successfully.
  • If installing with Oracle 11g, ensure that your time zone is set properly before running the Ephesoft Transact Install Wizard.
  • If you are a customer intending to integrate MariaDB (new or pre-existing) or previous MySQL database with Transact 2019.2 please see the prerequisite document prior to installing or upgrading your Ephesoft Transact product.

Install and Migrate MariaDB or MySQL for Windows

Installation Documentation

Installation information for Release 2019.2 is available at the following locations:

Windows

Release Overview

Release Category Functional Area Description
What’s New? Export Custom Export Plugin
Web Scanner Imprint Feature
Feature Enhancements Cloud Ephesoft Cloud HyperExtender Plugin Improvements
Machine Learning Machine Learning Improvements
Reporting Reporting Design Improvements
Extraction Recostar Extraction Optimization
Bug Fixes Various

What’s New?

Custom Export Plugin

Ephesoft Transact 2091.2 introduces the new Custom Export feature, which offers greater flexibility with data and metadata output. The list of output formats has been expanded to include:

  • CSV — comma separated value
  • HL7 — Health Level-7
  • HTML — Hypertext Markup Language
  • JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
  • TXT — text-only files
  • XML — eXtensible Markup Language

To configure and enable this feature, the Administrator browses to the Batch Class Management screen and opens the batch class. Within the Export module of the batch class, the Administrator must enable and configure the CUSTOM_EXPORT plugin.

The following snapshot illustrates the location and some components of the CUSTOM_EXPORT plugin:

Figure 1. CUSTOM_EXPORT Plugin Configuration

Imprint Feature for Web Scanner

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 introduces a new Imprint feature within the web scanner functionality. This feature is developed to ensure compliance with EU regulations requiring the user to have a digital copy of any page before discarding or throwing it away. The imprinter is used to print a unique string on the page while saving the digital copy of the same string using the digital endorser.

To implement the functionality, a new Imprinter Profile screen has been created. It is included in the list of batch class level configurations available for each batch class.

The following options are available for the imprinter string:

  • Date:
    • Year: YYYY format
    • Month: MM format
    • Day: DD format
  • User Name: The user name of the user logged in to the Ephesoft server for scanning.
  • Host Name: Hostname of the machine used for scanning the documents.
  • Batch Counter: A unique counter maintained on the server level.

Figure 2. Imprinter Profile UI

Note that this feature has been developed and tested only for Fujitsu scanner and imprinter (e.g. Fujitsu fi-7160 scanner and Fujitsu fi-718PR imprinter). Each scanning equipment producer has different hex-codes to access the various functions of their scanners and imprinters using EZTwain, so this feature might not work with other scanners.

Feature Enhancements

Cloud HyperExtender Plugin Improvements

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 enhances the Ephesoft Cloud HyperExtender plugin with the following new functions and benefits:

  • The Ephesoft Cloud HyperExtender plugin supports the Bring Your Own Key (BYOK).
  • Transact 2019.2 enhances the Sentinel library to include the CHEOCREncrypted feature.
  • The CLOUD_HYPEREXTENDER plugin in Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 also tracks the page count when the customer uses an encryption key with BYOK.
  • This release enhances security for the multitenant user interface. Transact 2019.2 complies with BlackDuck security auditing.

Machine Learning Improvements

Machine learning functionality in Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 has been improved.

Language Support

Italian has been added to the list of supported languages.

Web Services

Two new web services have been created:

  • /rest/mlExtraction for machine learning for invoices
  • /rest/emlExtractionForBatchClass for enhanced machine learning extraction

Machine learning support has been re-introduced for the following web services:

  • /dcma/rest/OcrClassifyExtractSearchablePDF
  • /dcma/rest/initiateOcrClassifyExtract
  • /dcma/rest/ocrClassifyExtract
  • /dcma/rest/v2/ocrClassifyExtract
  • /dcma/rest/v2/ocrClassifyExtractBase64

Editing JSON Files in the Ephesoft Transact UI

JSON files containing enhanced machine learning data can now be edited from the Transact UI. For that, the user needs to navigate to the Folder Management → SharedFolders → Batch Class Id → enhanced-machine-learning → Document Type, select the file and click Edit in the top menu.

Figure 3. Editing JSON files from the UI

Note that any changes introduced in these files will not be verified for compliance with JSON format. Online tools can be used to ensure correct JSON file structure.

Important Note: Machine learning for tables is no longer supported in Ephesoft Transact 2019.2.

Reporting Design Improvements

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 continues to improve the performance and accuracy of reporting, with enhancements to background data migration, data calculation, and data cleanup operations:

  • Additional workflow improvements that persist more accurate data and details across multiple modules in the workflow.
  • Persisting field correction type data during the workflow process from the batch.xml file data.
  • Resolving a previous limitation with the Classification Review module.
  • Continuing to reduce the KTR jobs required for calculations.
  • Improved SQL Server scripts.

Recostar Extraction Optimization

The batch processing and fixed form extraction using Recostar have been improved by making use of all available core licenses and grouping pages within a batch using one external exe command.

Bug Fixes

Axosoft / Salesforce ID Category Description
EPHE-27651 Batch Class Management After upgrading to Ephesoft Transact 2019.1, the KV extraction rules configuration took a lot of time to apply with “Please wait” message displayed.
EPHE-26764 Batch Class Management Starting from Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.0, RECOSTAR_HOCR plugin could not be used in the batch processing workflow multiple times.
EPHE-26991 Batch Class Management Function Key Mappings configured for a document type did not persist and disappeared when the same batch class was closed and re-opened.
EPHE-23004 Batch Class Management TXT and HTML files were not getting processed when the “wkhtmltopdf” conversion tool was selected.
EPHE-25691 Batch Class Management In some cases, large files failed to be converted from PDF to TIF by Recostar.
EPHE-25603 Batch Class Management When exporting document types, duplicate folders were created in the output ZIP file.
EPHE-22194 Batch Class Management After uploading learn files containing both letters “b” and “d” together in their names, the files disappeared from the lucene-search-classification-sample folder and the error was recorded in the logs.
EPHE-25552 Batch Instance Management In some cases, it was not possible to delete/restart batch instances on some nodes in multi-server environment for Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2.
EPHE-18063 Batch Instance Management Batch instances might fail when two or more files with the same name are uploaded for processing.
EPHE-25453 Batch Instance Management In some cases, the table rows could not be deleted on the Validation screen.
EPHE-25816 Batch Instance Management When processing batches containing a large number of RTF files, the soffice and sbin.exe processes were automatically terminated in background due to which other batches went to the Error state.
EPHE-20262 Batch Instance Management When batch instance was suspended and assigned to a group of users, the list of users was not displayed/accessible from the Suspend Batch pop-up dialogue on the Review-Validate screen.
EPHE-22423 Batch Instance Management In some cases, the images were not descewed correctly causing issues with values extraction.
EPHE-27878 Export The Compression Switch did not work with the Colored Switch ON when Itext Searchable was selected in the CREATEMULTIPAGE_FILES plugin of the Export module. So, it was not possible to control the size of the final output PDF file.
EPHE-25080 Extraction: Barcode In some cases, the Advanced Barcode extraction fetched junk characters.
EPHE-22011 Extraction: Barcode Recostar tool in the Advanced Barcode reader would not read barcodes where the length was not equal to or greater than 6.
EPHE-27576 Extraction: FuzzyDB Batches went into error if the Primary Key of the FuzzyDB table had special characters (e.g. quotes, apostrophe etc.) or if the Primary Key values were updated/deleted after performing the Fuzzy DB learning.
EPHE-22792 Extraction: FuzzyDB Some issues were observed when mapping a Boolean Ephesoft field using Fuzzy DB against a MySQL database in Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.1.
EPHE-25357 Extraction: KV Corrupted KV extraction entries caused slowness of Ephesoft Transact operations and processing.
EPHE-26882

EPHE-28269

Extraction: Recostar Extraction took much more time than in Ephesoft Transact versions prior to version 4.5.0.0 when using the RECOSTAR_EXTRACTION plugin and processing multi-page batches.
EPHE-26332 Extraction: REST API Lookup REST API lookup was not fetching any values on the Validation screen if the value contained special characters.
EPHE-26681 Extraction: REST API Lookup When using REST API lookup for updating the values in the COMBO type fields, the value did not get populated and the fields remained empty.
EPHE-26363 Extraction: REST API Lookup When using REST API lookup for updating the values in the index fields configured as search parameters, the search string got populated in the field rather than required value displayed on the REST API Lookup Results screen.
EPHE-25765 Extraction: Tables When a table validation rule was created for a table but the table contained no rows or no table extraction rules were created, the application dcma-all log was filled up with stack traces (one for each document).
EPHE-24823 Extraction: Tables In rare cases, the dash appearing as the last symbol in the table row cell caused the date regex to fail, thus not fetching the correct date value in the same row.
EPHE-22255 Format Conversion The format conversion functionality was not working when trying to replace empty fields with specific value. Testing the format conversion configuration also brought incorrect results.
EPHE-23377 Format Conversion Format conversion rule configured to replace any value with EMPTY option was not saved and applied when Oracle database was used.
EPHE-26981 Format Conversion The format conversion rules were not getting saved after clicking Apply in Ephesoft Transact 2019.1.
EEN-10095 Installation / Upgrade There were licensing issues on some nodes in a multi-server environment after trying to encrypt passwords using the Ephesoft Transact Encryptor tool.
EPHE-22415 Installation / Upgrade When configuring the Windows service account and enabling the Windows authentication feature for the MSSQL configuration, the database was not created and installation failed.
EPHE-26104 Import The batch went into error “Exception in breaking the input file. Error while counting page for PDF” as the input PDF file was wrongly classified as Portfolio PDF.
EPHE-27087 Import In some cases, the email attachments import failed and the logs contained file names with junk characters that appeared after decoding.
EPHE-25627 Import When using email import, special characters were lost during conversion of files from HTML to PDF using wkhtml utility.
Import HTML and TXT files were not getting processed in Linux OS with the following error message recorded: “The process for which error information is being fetched is null or invalid wait time is specified…”
EPHE-25124 LIM “Exception occurred” error was displayed when trying to access LIM screen for batches configured with multiple database connections.
EPHE-17256 LIM LIM functionality failed when trying to fetch data from the external PO table.
EPHE-22329 LIM The Image Preview and Pop-out functionality didn’t work in LIM screen when no table data was extracted.
EPHE-22067 Performance Fuzzy DB learning consumed a lot of memory and threw the GC Allocation error when database contained a really large number of records.
EPHE-25235 Plugins After installing Ephesoft Transact 4.5.0.2, the custom plugins restartfromreview and restartfromvalidation were not working.
EPHE-17624 Plugins The “Greater than” and “Lesser than” expressions used for configuring KV_PAGE_PROCESS classification rules did not bring expected results.
EPHE-17310

EPHE-28511

Plugins Color PDF files were converted to grayscale if the Compression Switch was set to ON in the CREATEMULTIPAGE_FILES plugin.
EPHE-26382 Plugins CREATEMULTIPAGE_FILES plugin took a lot of time to process the files.
EPHE-24905 Regex Some predefined date regex patterns in the Regex Pool did not include the abbreviated values for April, June and July. This caused issues when extracting data from the documents where these months were abbreviated using the first 3 letters of the month name.
EPHE-25204 Regex When “Match exact text” options were applied in the Regex Builder followed by the “Text in range” options, the final regex pattern displayed in the Test Regex field did not reflex the correct selected configuration.
EPHE-21642 Reporting Advanced Reporting stopped getting new data due to corrupt xml issue in the report-data folder. This caused the failure of advanced report sync as well as cleanup.
EPHE-27187 Reporting The batches in the Finished and Deleted state were not getting cleaned up. The issue was observed with SQL 2012 database.
EPHE-27644 Review Validate Merged pages were deleted from the batch when the operator changed the document type for a selected document on the Review screen, merged it with other pages of the new document type, and further tried to merge these pages with the original document type.
EPHE-27174 Review Validate It was not possible to select data by using overlays on the Validation screen for landscape PDFs.
EPHE-26323 Review Validate Re-scan functionality was not working in specific cases requiring the operator to save the batch again and again, when custom plugins were used in the workflow.
EPHE-18774 Review Validate In some cases, images were skewed when displayed on the Review Validate screen. The issue was observed in Linux OS (Nuance OCRing engine).
EPHE-17192 Review Validate After entering a new value in the field of the COMBO type on the Validation screen and clicking Validate, the value disappeared.
EPHE-23780 Review Validate Values extracted for COMBO type fields were not treated as case sensitive.
EPHE-21088 Review Validate The confirmation message when merging multiple documents on the Review screen was not clear and was improved in this release.
EPHE-20975 Review Validate The validation popup did not display correctly when validating data from the table view.
EPHE-27086 Web Scanner In some cases, the pages were missed during scanning with no error message or any notification for the operator about the problem.
EPHE-27700

EPHE-25283

Web Services API calls of some web services took more time than in previous Ephesoft Transact releases.
EPHE-27172 Web Services HOCR web services were not able to read the images rotated by 90 or 270 degrees.
EPHE-21675 Web Services ocrClassify web service did not work when zip file was provided as input.
EPHE-18499 Other “Cleaning up Unclosed ZipFile” record was logged to the system.out file on Ephesoft Transact Linux implementations as the ZipFile used to create the returned inputstream was never closed.

Known Issues and Workarounds

For information about known issues and workarounds, refer to the following document:

Ephesoft Transact 2019.2 Known Issues and Workarounds

End of Life Notices

When a software release reaches end of life:

Ephesoft does not provide new software licenses for that release.

Ephesoft does not provide support services for that release, stops support for mentioned DBs and OS.

Item Description Notes
Ephesoft Transact versions Ephesoft Transact v.4.1.0.0 Ephesoft will no longer provide new software licenses or support services for this release.
Ephesoft Transact v.4.1.1.0 Minimum release that customers can upgrade from.
Operating Systems Microsoft® Windows 7 SP1 This MS Windows version is no longer tested or supported with Ephesoft Transact 2019.2
All Linux versions prior to 7.0 When upgrading to Transact 2019.2 from an older application version on a Linux environment, Ephesoft recommends to create a brand new environment installing a Linux version 7.0, 7.1 or 7.3 that is supported by Transact v.2019.2.

After installing Transact 2019.2 in this new Linux environment, the customer can then migrate items such as shared folders, databases, batch classes, and other components.

NOTE: There is no requirement enforced by the Ephesoft Transact 2019.1 or 2019.2 installer. The installer does not notify the administrator if the Linux environment is older than Linux version 7.0.

Databases MySQL MySQL is no longer bundled with Ephesoft Transact and does not get installed from the Transact installer as of Transact Release 2019.1 and beyond. MySQL is no longer supported as of Transact 2019.1 and above.

If the customer has an existing installation of MySQL from previous versions of Ephesoft Transact please refer to the pre-requisites located here: Install and Migrate MariaDB or MySQL for Windows

MariaDB versions prior to 10.2.1 Refer to Platform Configuration and Third-Party Integrations – Ephesoft Transact 2019.2.

Customers who have a MariaDB version older than version 10.2.1 must upgrade their MariaDB version. Please refer to the pre-requisites located here: Install and Migrate MariaDB or MySQL for Windows

For more information on Ephesoft Transact versions support and EOL notices, refer here.

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