Technical FAQs

Question

How can I improve the performance and memory usage of scanning/recognition in Barcode Xpress?

Answer

Barcode Xpress supports a number of optimization settings that can improve your recognition performance, sometimes up to 40%, along with memory usage. The best way to optimize Barcode Xpress is to fine-tune the properties of the Reader class to be specific to your application’s requirements.

BarcodeTypes

  • The best way to increase performance is to limit which barcodes Barcode Xpress should search for. By default, BarcodeTypes is set to UnknownBarcode which targets all 1D barcodes.

MaximumBarcodes

  • This property will instruct Barcode Xpress to halt searching after finding a specified number of barcodes. The default value is 100.

Area & Orientation

  • If you know the location or orientation of your barcodes in your image, specifying an orientation (such as Horizontal) and area can prevent Barcode Xpress from searching for vertical or diagonal barcodes, or in places where barcodes would not exist.

ScanDistance

  • Raising this value increases performance by applying looser recognition techniques by skipping rows of an image. However, this may fail to detect barcodes.

Finally, BarcodeXpress Professional edition does not impose a 40 page-per-minute limit on processing.

The simultaneous development of Pfizer and Moderna’s safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year stands as one of the great feats of recent medical science. Now that the vaccines are available, however, the healthcare industry and government authorities must take on the new challenge of distributing doses to the population quickly and effectively. In some respects, this logistical feat will be every bit as daunting as developing the vaccines themselves.

Fortunately, the use of barcoding in healthcare supply chains and patient records will prove incredibly helpful in overcoming some of the key difficulties in vaccine distribution. Medical barcodes are already being used in many essential applications. For organizations that have yet to fully embrace the potential of digital transformation, barcode processing integrations can help them quickly expand their capabilities to meet the growing demands of vaccine delivery.

4 Ways Medical Barcodes Solve Vaccine Delivery Challenges

1. Better Supply Chain Accuracy Means Less Waste

Given the high costs of manufacturing and distributing the vaccines, there is justifiable concern over the potential for waste. Both versions of the vaccine need to be kept at low temperatures for shipping after manufacture (approximately -90 degrees Fahrenheit for Pfizer and about -10 degrees for Moderna). Once they’re moved to a refrigerator for administration, they cannot be refrozen. While the Moderna vaccine can last for up to 30 days refrigerated (provided the vial is not punctured), the Pfizer vaccine must be discarded after a mere six hours. Further complicating matters, each Pfizer thermal shipping container can potentially hold up to 975 multidose vials (4875 individual doses), whereas each box of Moderna vaccine contains 10 vials (100 doses).

Without accurate inventory and shipment tracking, healthcare providers could easily end up with too much supply in one location and not enough elsewhere. In a worst case scenario, unused doses might even go to waste because they can’t be redirected to another site quickly enough. By incorporating medical barcode scanning throughout the supply chain, healthcare organizations can ensure more efficient distribution during the shipping process. They can also verify that delivery sites have the appropriate storage capacity ahead of time to avoid the possibility of doses going to waste due to lack of freezer space.

2. Improved Dosage Records

One of the key challenges with distributing the currently approved vaccines is that they require multiple doses. Although the doses are identical from a chemical composition and dosage standpoint, the problem is that they must be administered after a specified interval. According to the FDA, that interval is approximately 21 days for the Pfizer vaccine and 28 days for the Moderna vaccine. As healthcare providers work to deliver the vaccine effectively, they must keep accurate records to show who has received the first dose and how much supply of each vaccine shipment should be designated for second doses.

The ability to read and print barcodes providers quickly track where patients are in the vaccination process and ensure that second doses will be available at the appropriate time. This is especially important considering that the vaccines are not interchangeable. Once someone has received the first Pfizer dose, for instance, they should not receive the Moderna vaccine for their second dose (except in exceptional circumstances). By generating a specific barcode after the initial dose and including it with a patient’s health records, providers can quickly and easily match people with the correct vaccine and make sure they have available doses on hand.

3. Keeps Essential Medical Equipment On-Hand

Vaccine distribution involves more than just shipping the doses themselves. Many different accessories are required to administer the vaccine, including protective equipment, vials, rubber stoppers, syringes and needles, and alcohol swabs. Healthcare supply chains were already under significant strain throughout the pandemic, so it should not be taken for granted that providers will have everything they need when the vaccine arrives. Furthermore, as the overall pace of vaccinations increases, it will be important to keep an accurate count of available equipment, especially if a provider does a lot of off-site vaccinations.

Barcoding in healthcare is critical to establishing connections between different elements of the supply chain. By using medical barcode integrations, providers can track and coordinate every piece of equipment needed for vaccine delivery in near-real time. Incorporating the same barcodes into patient records also gives a more up-to-date inventory count as doses are administered, ensuring that hospitals and healthcare facilities don’t run out of essential equipment when they need it most.

4. Expands Distribution Beyond Traditional Supply Chain

Distributing the vaccine in major population centers is difficult enough, but extending delivery into underserved rural areas presents a different set of challenges. These areas often lack the supply chain infrastructure to accommodate the rapid and widespread transfer of medical products. Healthcare providers will need technology tools that allow them to set up remote distribution and treatment centers capable of coordinating with local communities in order to extend their reach into these areas.

While barcoding in healthcare may provide the visibility organizations need into vaccine logistics and patient records, certain regions will also require mobile medical barcode integrations that can put more power and control into the hands of field workers. Rugged, reliable barcode integrations capable of reading broken or damaged barcodes using any mobile device will be essential for overcoming the limitations of rural digital infrastructure.

Unlock the Potential of Barcoding in Healthcare with Barcode Xpress

Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress SDK integration helps healthcare applications read, write, and detect more than thirty different barcode types, even if those images are damaged, broken, or incomplete. With the ability to read multiple barcodes at speeds of up to 1,000 pages per minute, Barcode Xpress can help medical providers take control of their supply chains and manage patient records more efficiently. That same functionality can be extended even further thanks to Barcode Xpress Mobile, which can turn any iOS or Android device into a powerful barcode scanner.

Distributing COVID-19 vaccine doses is one of the great logistical undertakings of the 21st century. By expanding the usage of barcoding in healthcare, providers can create greater transparency into their supply chains to reduce waste and deliver the vaccine more efficiently to the patients who need it most. Find out how Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress can help the medical industry upgrade its infrastructure to meet the challenge of restoring a sense of normalcy to people’s lives and overcoming the pandemic. Try a hands-on demo of our barcode SDK today.

barcodes enterprise content management system

Information is critically important for organizations of all sizes, but it’s especially vital for large enterprises. Without access to accurate data, it can be difficult for separate departments to coordinate efforts or for leadership to make informed decisions. Important files can quickly be lost in a complex web of IT systems, some of which may not even be able to directly communicate with each other. Developers have worked hard to address these challenges by building content management platforms that integrate various technology resources into a single system and provide a primary source of digital information.

What Is an Enterprise Content Management System?

Today’s enterprises have massive amounts of information at their disposal. Much of that data, however, is scattered across the organization in different repositories, folders, archives, and file shares. A great deal of valuable insights could be found there, including information about customers, market trends, and product feedback, but so long as it remains spread across different locations, it can be difficult to access and view in totality.

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems help organizations to create a more workable structure for business knowledge. By implementing document automation and data capture tools, they can quickly assess and process information flowing into the enterprise to identify its value and route it to the proper destination.

A typical ECM system uses a few key steps when processing incoming information. These steps form the basis of the enterprise’s document or content lifecycle:

  • Capture: First, the information needs to enter the system in some way. This usually takes the form of document files or images being uploaded into the ECM.
  • Manage: Documents and other files need to be identified and labeled for accurate storage and easy access. Simply uploading content into the system without doing anything to organize it quickly results in content chaos. 
  • Storage: Whether the ECM utilizes physical, on-premises storage or cloud-based storage (or some combination of the two), the system needs to use a clearly defined structure when saving content so it can be easily located in the future. A database should contain all the necessary metadata to indicate where each file is stored.
  • Retrieval: Without some way of easily retrieving the right information when it’s needed, an ECM system isn’t going to be able to reach its full potential. Stored documents and files need to be accessible quickly and easily so they can help to inform key business decisions.

Avoiding Content Chaos with Barcodes

Without some way of effectively tracking documents through an ECM, organizations can quickly fall prey to “content chaos,” in which there is an abundance of information available but no easy way to access the right content at the appropriate time. This can be particularly frustrating for an enterprise that already has effective data capture and file conversion capabilities in place because without an effective retrieval mechanism, a great deal of valuable information will often go unused or even unnoticed.

Fortunately, ECM developers can provide a simple solution to this problem by utilizing barcode recognition technology. Although barcodes have been a mainstay of inventory management for decades across many industries, they’re finding a new use case in document management systems.

Rather than manually indexing documents with alphanumeric account number strings, barcodes can be created and applied to documents at the point of capture and then automatically routed to the proper storage destination. Once the barcode is scanned, key information about the file is uploaded into the ECM database so it can be easily located and retrieved in the future.

Another key benefit of barcodes is their ability to link documents that need to be associated with one another as part of the same batch. When documents are captured and converted into a digital format, one or more barcodes can be assigned to them to indicate connections to other file types. That information will be uploaded into the ECM database when the barcodes are scanned, instantly creating a traceable record of where files are located. 

This is especially important for situations where different information types could be stored in different locations. For instance, architectural drawings for a project may be stored in one location, but financial documents related to the same project may be stored elsewhere. When one of the files is accessed, the ECM’s database will indicate that there are related files in other locations and provide a link to them. This is particularly important for large enterprises with content spread across multiple departments that could easily be overlooked.

Build a Better Enterprise Content Management System with Barcode Xpress

Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress SDK provides powerful barcode support that’s designed to address the specific needs of document barcodes. While some software is oriented toward retail or supply chain applications, Barcode Xpress is optimized for document management, which makes it ideal for ECM systems. The SDK’s barcode reader can accurately locate and decode multiple barcodes on each page at incredibly high speeds.

With support for over 30 unique barcode types, Barcode Xpress provides tremendous flexibility when it comes to content management. Developers can also generate and detect both 1D and 2D barcodes to create a diverse content ecosystem within their ECM platform. Barcode Xpress can easily identify and recognize barcodes no matter where they’re located (and oriented) on the page. It can even accurately register incomplete barcodes from just a few intact lines.

To learn more about how Barcode Xpress can enhance your enterprise content management system, download our detailed fact sheet for a closer look at the barcode SDK’s capabilities.

barcode xpress pricing

 

When you’re looking to integrate a toolkit into your application, your first priority is assessing the capabilities. Once you’ve found the right fit, you need to make sure that the pricing matches your budget and makes sense for your needs.

Historically, Accusoft has offered a variety of different licensing options for our clients. Products were always licensed by core or number of installs, depending on which runtime fits best. 

These practices have been great for our clients so far, but we realized a missing piece that could help bridge the gap for new clients with smaller projects that dynamically scale based on workload.


Introducing a New Way to License

Barcode Xpress is the first product on the Accusoft line to offer metered licensing based on transaction. Metered licensing helps a variety of different clients scale up or down, when they need to. While our traditional licensing plan is great for projects with defined scope, smaller projects that have potential to grow need more flexible pricing options.

“The main reason we wanted to introduce metered licensing is to address SDKs used in scalable environments,” says Mark Hansen, Product Manager of SDKs. “Clients can use metered licensing to spin up their projects based on the traffic they’re getting, without the need to obtain additional licenses. While many companies opt for an ongoing usage, this new model allows for estimating a specific amount of use, so they only pay for what they need.”


The Benefit of Metered Licensing

Why would a company choose to specify the usage from the start? Metered licensing is great for short-term projects with a limited lifespan, as clients only pay for what they use. It’s also great for clients who don’t know the scale of their project and need to be cautious with how much they spend. 

Metered licensing is based on a pay-per-transaction model. A transaction is defined by the page. For example, if Barcode Xpress reads 30 pages with five barcodes on each page, the transaction total is 30 instead of 150.

This transaction-based model makes for a very low cost of entry, and a no-stress agreement. With this value in mind, clients don’t have to worry about how much they will use the integration after a specific project is complete. In addition, if the project grows, metered licensing allows the client to scale up.


Reliability of Metered Licensing

Accusoft understands that our customers are building mission-critical apps with our SDKs and has carefully architected the system to be extremely reliable. Our server-side authorization and reporting system runs in Amazon AWS and is split into online and offline parts. 

The online portion is built on AWS CloudFront and S3, two of the most reliable systems available on the Internet. All of Accusoft’s backend code is in the offline portion of the system and an outage in that portion of the system will have no effect whatsoever on our customers, even if it were down for several days. Nevertheless, we have 24/7 alerting in place so we will be notified soon after an outage occurs and will quickly get it back up.

barcode xpress pricing

Metered licensing is now available for Barcode Xpress 13.1 and following versions.

developer coding in .NET Core

Is .NET or .NET Core the better bet for application development? Both frameworks are designed and supported by Microsoft and offer the ability to create apps capable of using multiple languages, abilities, and libraries, but they’re not the same. .NET Core is rapidly becoming the language of choice. For most app developers, .NET Core comes out ahead of its .NET counterpart. 

To understand why, let’s break down both .NET and .NET Core basics, examine the rise of .NET Core deployments, and dig into some key .NET Core benefits.


What is .NET?

Originally developed in the late 1990s and known as Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), .NET reached beta release in 2000. As noted by Microsoft, .NET helps streamline application creation by allowing developers to write apps in C#, F#, or Visual Basic. By using a common language runtime (CLR) and class library, .NET manages system resources such as memory, thread execution, code execution, and security validation. This allows apps written in one language to talk with code written in other languages, significantly reducing the potential for interoperability issues.

Despite the benefits offered by .NET and work by Microsoft to standardize the software stack, concerns emerged among developers around the proprietary nature of .NET, especially in the realm of software patents. Microsoft has since changed its development approach to more closely follow open-source development models.

What is .NET Core?

.NET Core is an evolution of .NET that delivers both cross-code and cross-platform support. While Microsoft designed .NET to support Windows-based applications, .NET Core applications run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It also uses MIT and Apache 2 licenses to deliver true open-source architecture and ensure consistency across operating environments.

While .NET remains the more popular framework by sheer volume of app development, .NET Core is quickly gaining ground. A recent survey found that .NET Core is now one of the “most loved” frameworks by developers.


Why is .NET Core becoming popular?

So, what’s driving the adoption of the .NET Core framework over .NET? Several factors now contribute to this uptake, including:

  1. Linux & Windows Deployment – One of the biggest reasons .NET Core is gaining popularity is due to its ability to deploy in both Linux and Windows. This provides vast cost savings to development teams.
  2. Run-Time and Performance Improvements  Whether your application users are internal employees or external partners and customers, runtime speed and performance concerns are always critical to adoption. Since Core is the future of the .NET platform, all future performance improvements will be implemented there and most will not be present in .NET Framework. .NET Core enables APIs and applications to serve up application interfaces and data faster, regardless of the mobile, IoT, or desktop device which is interacting with it.
  3. CommunityBecause .NET Core follows an open-source development model, there’s a large (and growing) community of devs and designers now supporting its ongoing evolution, allowing IT teams to leverage prebuilt .NET Core code rather than building their own from scratch.

.NET vs. .NET Framework

Beyond increased popularity driven by the shift in software development and standardization, the .NET Core framework also offers key benefits such as:

  • Ongoing ImprovementsIn September 2019, Microsoft released version 3.0 of .NET Core and followed it up with version 3.1 in November of the same year. In addition, the company plans to release a new version every year and remove the “Core” distinction between the two frameworks to deliver increased interoperability.
  • Improved Security From security-specific APIs to Microsoft’s Secret Manager and the Azure Key Vault Provider along with straightforward support for two-factor authentication (2FA), .NET Core improves application security without increasing complexity.
  • Cloud-Based Development SupportWith cloud now the de facto framework for everything from mobile applications, Internet of Things (IoTs), and responsive web applications, .NET Core makes it easy for developers to design cloud-native applications across multiple platforms and devices.
  • Easy Updates .NET Core updates are easily managed and applied, allowing developers to spend more time building great applications instead of dealing with complex and convoluted service upgrades.
  • Cross-Platform Code .NET Core code can run on not only Windows but Linux platforms, which can help greatly reduce your cloud deployment costs. Combined with Docker, developers are able to leverage a greater amount of modularity and flexibility than ever before.

The Accusoft Advantage

To help companies compete on the cutting edge of app development and integration, Accusoft is making .NET Core available for specific products, starting with Barcode Xpress for .NET Core. With just a few lines of code, companies can deploy multi-platform, open-source support for industry-leading barcode recognition. From reading damaged, broken, and incorrect barcodes to scanning multiple barcodes on one document in milliseconds, Barcode Xpress makes it possible to easily integrate cutting-edge barcode functionality into any application across any platform. 

Several of our other SDKs are on deck for .NET Core capabilities. While .NET broke new ground for interoperable frameworks, .NET Core offers the next iteration of interoperable development with cloud-based, cross-platform support for applications at scale. Learn more about our .NET Core plans here.