Importing Business Cards into Tessitura

I have not done this per se.  However, this is a really interesting task. 

• As I'm thinking about it there is the first OCRing the business card task.  There are a number of software and hardware tools out there that handle this part of the overall task. Evernote is one, and there are a number of software/scanners hardware packages out there that are specifically for this work.
  • In my experience, the OCR in these tools is not great but getting better.  You often have to do a bunch of manual cleanup of the records. 
• Once you have the data in a computer-readable format then you have the task of determining if the record from the card in new or needs to be merged into an existing record. 
  • For the new records, you might just use the constituent import utility. And just create one record for the person.  Anything more complicated than that might gets difficult with the standard constituent import utility.
  • Then, when you have to merge the information from the card into an existing record.  The rules/judgment about where the new information goes is substantial.  Things like do you create an Organization record for the company.  What address type do we use?  Is the new address the default address or an additional address.  Do you put the phone number on the person or organization? Or does the card contain both kinds of information?

If you have just a few dozen cards to deal with you may just want to manually enter the information. Or find an intern to help with this project. If you have hundreds or thousands of cards.  Some part of the automation might save you some time.

I'm interested if you or anyone solves this issue.

--Tom 

I have not done this per se.  However, this is a really interesting task. 

• As I'm thinking about it there is the first OCRing the business card task.  There are a number of software and hardware tools out there that handle this part of the overall task. Evernote is one, and there are a number of software/scanners hardware packages out there that are specifically for this work.
  • In my experience, the OCR in these tools is not great but getting better.  You often have to do a bunch of manual cleanup of the records. 
• Once you have the data in a computer-readable format then you have the task of determining if the record from the card in new or needs to be merged into an existing record. 
  • For the new records, you might just use the constituent import utility. And just create one record for the person.  Anything more complicated than that might gets difficult with the standard constituent import utility.
  • Then, when you have to merge the information from the card into an existing record.  The rules/judgment about where the new information goes is substantial.  Things like do you create an Organization record for the company.  What address type do we use?  Is the new address the default address or an additional address.  Do you put the phone number on the person or organization? Or does the card contain both kinds of information?

If you have just a few dozen cards to deal with you may just want to manually enter the information. Or find an intern to help with this project. If you have hundreds or thousands of cards.  Some part of the automation might save you some time.

I'm interested if you or anyone solves this issue.

--Tom 

Thanks for your comments Tom.

What you have described is more or less our requirements.

A quick online search tells me that there are tools (paid/free) like ABBYY, Evernote (like you've also mentioned), etc. that can do the job of extracting contents from business cards. But then the challenge is in the import to Tessitura phase, wherein we need to conditionally import the data, if we are to automate the process.

I know some business card reader apps have direct integrations with CRM suites, but I don't think there are any that integrate directly with Tessitura at this stage.

Also, I agree, the whole automation process would only be justified if there are a lot of business cards that need to be imported into Tessitura and on a regular basis.

Cheers,
Sujit.