Dematerialization is the process that convert documents held in physical form into
electronic form, and thus helps to move away from the use of physical documentation to
the use of electronic Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The range of
documents that can be managed with an Enterprise Content Management system include just
about everything from basic documents to stock certificates, for example.

Enterprises dematerialize their content via a manual document handling, done by man,
or an automatic document handling, machine-based.

Considering the varied nature of the content to be dematerialized, enterprises have to
use varied technologies to do it. Scanning paper documents, creating interfaces to
capture electronic documents from other applications, converting document images into
machine-readable/editable text documents, and so on are examples of the technologies
available.

Furthermore, scanned documents and digital faxes are not readable texts. To convert
them into machine-readable characters, different character recognition technologies are
used. Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) and Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) are two
examples of such technologies.

Equally important as the content that is captured in various formats from numerous
sources in the dematerialization process is the supporting metadata that allows
efficient identification of the content via specific queries.

Now how can this document content along with the related metadata be aggregated and
indexed in an Enterprise Content Management system so that it can be retrieved and
managed in meaningful ways?
Talend
provides the answer through the
tAlfrescoOutput component.

The tAlfrescoOutput component allows you to stock and
manage your electronic documents and the related metadata on the Alfresco server, the
leading open source enterprise content management system.

The following figure illustrates
Talend
‘s role between the
dematerialization process and the Enterprise Content Management system
(Alfresco).