OCR Plugin for ITSM

Unlock the information in screenshots! When users send in screenshots of error boxes or other system messages, don't re-type them into ITSM. Harness the power of OCR to quickly extract the text from any image and store it as an event against a support call or add it in as an answer book page.

Images are not searchable, but text is. By saving the text of these images, you add value to your ITSM system, as the text is then fully searchable via full-text indexes. Later on, error numbers, system messages and so on can be searched across your knowledge base and support call history for easier incident and problem matching. Here is an example - a user sends in this screenshot which you load into the OCR plugin:

Screenshot 1 - user screengrab
Figure 1: User screenshot loaded into OCR plugin

You can see that the user has already cropped the image down from a full desktop screenshot, but the OCR plugin allows you to quickly highlight the specific area of interest. Then, simply hit the "Run OCR" button! If there was no output, or the accuracy was not good, it might be the case that the image text was too small for OCR. That's OK - the OCR plugin has convenient zoom tools:

Zoom controls

Hit the Zoom In button a few times, and now your image is magnified, with your original selection still set:

Screenshot 2 - zoomed image
Figure 2: After zooming into the area of interest

Hit the "Run OCR" button again, and in this case the results are better. Here is an example of actual results returned: 

Easy Trade could not connect to the Trade Server
The following error was reported by etrd32.dll:
at lang.en.system.Framework
at Iang.en.system.bootstrap
at lang.en.system.coretrade
at lang.en.protocol.trade
at lang.en.protocol.wrapper
at Iang.en.protocol.socket.send
method sendTrade() returned error [262424] Trade Server did not respond in 60 seconds

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