The scanning/digital camera option allows you to attach scanned images and documents to the customers’ historical file or policy screens. The images are stored in a central location as defined in Power Broker under the Define Your Company Information screen but can be viewed, printed or emailed from the customer or policy screens.

Let's begin!                                                                    


The first thing you will need is Power Broker Scanning feature key file.  To find out if you presently have this key file, open Power Broker, and at the top, click 'HELP' and then ABOUT Power Broker for Windows' and see if scanning is enabled.  If not, then please call our sales line at 877-774-9444.  The key file is a one-time charge of $500.00 plus tax.  If you have seen this screen capture, then you know that you don't have this feature and need to call our sales line.





 

Setting Up Power Broker 

In Power Broker under Utilities – Define Your Company – Software Directories you need to enter in the path to the image folder that you have created on your Server.  When you create this folder you will want to consider the future capacity that will be required for storing the images.  The file can be on any drive that you wish, however we do recommend that you consider a different drive than Power Broker due to the file size that can result from storing images.  In the future when the file becomes too large you can create new folders however they must be called ‘Images2’ and ‘Images3’ as shown below and as defined in Power Brokers’ Utilities menu.  You then need to change the pointer from 1 to 2 or 3 as required.

If you wish to use PDF as a file format for storing images you will need to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be found on the Internet. This software needs to be installed on each workstation. You need to define the path for each user. Go to Tables – User Preferences and ‘browse’ to locate the Adobe executable file – acrord32.exe.

You will also need to complete the ‘User Image Holding Folder’. This is a folder that you have created on your local drive which houses temporary images.  You link to these images using the customers’ Notes function. Once you have attached the image to the correct customer it then moves to the permanent storage folder on the server (as defined in Utilities – Define Your Company – Software Directories). You will then need to delete the image from the local drive as it will continue to reside there and ultimately take up space.

Also complete the View function – view based on (1) Viewer or (2) HTML.

TECH TIP:  Choosing VIEWER will provide a much faster appearance of your saved document as choosing HTML will require Explorer to launch each and every time.  HTML will NOT support TIF images when opening in Explorer.

Each Power Broker user will need to have the Tables – User Preference screen completed otherwise they will not be able to see any of the Adobe files that have been saved and will encounter errors when trying to launch these images. You may also need to edit the User Security question #50 if you want the user to have the ability to add or delete stored image files. Log out of Power Broker then back in again for all changes to take effect.

You are now ready to begin scanning images and/or documents.

There are a few different ways to scan and save an image into Power Broker.  You can use the Scanning button found at top of the Policy screen, the Power Bar, the Camera Icon which is found throughout the customer and policy screens, and the Notes function. We will start with the Scanning button.

SCANNING BUTTON

Clicking on the <Scanning> button prompts the following screen to appear. From this screen you can change the type of document you save, the size of the document (dpi) and the color detail.

The first thing you need to do is to ‘Select Scanner’ source or ‘Use the scanning software’.

TECH TIP: If there is no scanner source, close out of Power Broker, open up a new Word document. Choose - Insert – Picture – from scanner or camera – if nothing appears here the scanner will not work in Power Broker. You will need to update the scanner drivers by going to the manufacturers’ web site.  If it does appear in MS Word and will import the image, you need to check the user’s network rights for access in Power Broker.

You also have the ability to change the color from the original (default) to Gray, Black & White or True Color. True Color only applies if the image was originally in color.

The Quality options (dpi) will affect your file size of the stored image. 96dpi being the default. The larger the dpi the larger the file size that is saved on the hard drive. It would probably not be necessary to increase the file size. If you do increase the file size you will probably always need to use the scanning software interface to have the image store properly as it tends to skew the image otherwise.

At the bottom of the screen you have the ability to select the type of file format for the image. These file types also change the size of the file that is stored on the hard drive. For example, based on scanning the same image using the default color and dpi, the file sizes are as follows:  PDF – 608kb; TIF – 736kb;  GIF – 11kb;  JPG – 50kb; PNG – 125kb. Please note you must use PDF or TIF if you are scanning a multiple page document and you wish to store it as one saved image.

Once you have made all your choices click on the ‘scan image(s)’ button and your scanner should start to scan your image. Once it has finisheded it will appear in the main screen. You then select ‘Attach Scanned Image(s)’ if you are happy with the image, if not, choose delete and scan image again. Once you have chosen ‘Attach scanned image’ the system will bring up the abeyance box for you to complete. This image can now be found and viewed from the Abeyance/Document screen in either Customers or Policies.

From the Abeyance\Documents icon, you can choose your image, then select ‘View’ and it comes to screen. You can from here Email it, Print it off or Send to the Clipboard. If you have saved your image in the PDF format, it will open up in Adobe and not the Viewer screen. You will need to use the Adobe functions if you want to email and/or print image.

If you are doing a Multiple page scan, select the defaults that you want, click on Scan. Once image has scanned in select the ‘Next’ button found at bottom of the screen. Continue in this manner until all pages have been scanned. You will see Page 1of 1, then page 2of 2 and so on. Then click on the ‘Attach Scanned Images’. This now saves a multiple paged document as one item. Please note that these multiple page scans can end up being very large so you may want to consider saving them as separate images if in fact you are going to email this file.

The use of the POWER BAR SCANNING BUTTON works the same way as choosing the Scanning button at top of screen.

CAMERA ICON

The Camera Icon is found throughout all the policy screens, plus many of the other screens – vehicles, driver, customer, watercraft, schedules, etc.  Each camera icon has the ability to hold 4 images. These images can be imported by linking to saved documents or by scanning.

Choose the first empty field by clicking on it with the Mouse, this is now the active image field. (as indicated on screen in top right hand corner – ‘Selected: Image 1’). You must complete the fields in numeric order. Click on the field and it will tell you what the number is. Then choose your options whether you are scanning an image or importing an image that has already been copied to the image folder on the server and you now want to link the image to the correct Insured.  

Choose Scan Image and the scanning screen appears, you proceed to select your options or go with the defaults, scan and save your image. You will now be able to see the stored image in the image box. From here you can view or print image.

Choose Import Image

The screen opens to the image storage folder that is on the server. From this screen you select the image that you wish to store back to the customers’ policy screen. These stored images have either  been scanned in and saved to the image folder or digital camera images have been downloaded here. You click on the correct item, then choose ‘select’ the image now stores back into the policy screens.

If you have mistakenly added the wrong image to the customer or are just deleting the image, select the correct image box, then choose ‘Delete Image’ The first question box appears asking if you want to delete the image from this screen, you choose yes. The second box appears asking if you want to delete the image from the image folder (permanently deleted). If you mistakenly say Yes to the last question, the image is permanently deleted you would need to scan it in again.

These questions are subject to User Securities – Item #50 – Delete image file – Yes/No. You may not want all users having the ability to permanently delete images.

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(Saying ‘Yes’ removes it from the Customer screen.)

(Saying ‘Yes’ permanently deletes it from the Computer.)

Choose View/Print Image

Select the image that you want to view or print by clicking on it, then choose view/print button at bottom. Screen.

From this screen you have the ability to Print, View, Send to Clipboard or Email this image.

Importing Pictures using the Notes function

From within the Customer or Policy screen you can link to a stored document using the Notes function. Click onto Notes and you have 2 different methods of doing this.

Method 1

Choosing the ‘File Folder icon’ (the first one in the top row) in the Notes screen opens up the link to the image folder you have on your local C drive (as defined in Tables – User Preferences).  From here you select the image you want to move from your C drive, attach it to the customer file and at the same time it moves it to the network folder for images (as defined in utilities).

Once you have selected your image, click on ‘Add File’, it moves the image from the top menu to the bottom menu.

Once you have the correct image, click on ‘Attach Image(s)’ at bottom, this moves it over to the network location plus writes a path in the note.

Click on Save Note and it is now stored in the clients Abeyance/Document screen.

You will need to go back to the local C drive after image has been attached and delete these files as they will not remove on their own and the file will continue to grow in size.

Method 2

Choose Notes from the Customer or Policy screens, complete the abeyance information at top, enter a description of the image you are saving then click on ‘Launch Using’. The option for images is ‘X’.

Then choose ‘BROWSE’ and it opens to the image folder on the Server (not the local C drive folder).

Select your image, click on OK and the path pastes back into the Notes screen.

Click on ‘SAVE NOTE’, this can now be viewed from the Abeyance/Document screen.