Tool For Customer Service Reps - Offtopic

[rzr]

In our company, the customer reps skim / scan / search through thousands of warranty PDF documents stored on shared network drive manually each time they get a call warranty call from end customers. Are there any tool, similar to Dr. Watson, that can help them in this search process?

What I'm looking for is a tool where the customer reps will type in a question and the tool will scan through these PDFs and provide a list of answers. Has anyone implemented anything like this using OpenEdge or other software or are there any out of the box solutions that we can use?

 

[joey.jeremiah]

if you google pdf search engine software you'll most likely find something, maybe not for free.

but you could probably make something quick and dirty.

1. extract the text from the pdf's using pdf2text or some other free tool.

2. save the text in the database (in clobs or a character field in multiple records).

3. index the text maybe through word indexes or your own indexing solution.

i'd probably write my own and use some phonetic algorithm which would be really useful for names (there's an example of soundex in the standard libraries project at the oehive.org) and because of my "not invented here" syndrome

4. then you need a program for searching and and also ranking your results (maybe even something as simple as most word hits).

i am planning to add an electronic archive module to a framework i wrote (which will be opensource) so i'd love to hear if you write something.

hth

 

[rzr]

thanks Joey, will try this out...