Talk to me like I’m a 5 year old.
We’ve had Docstar for almost 10 years now. It was set up by our previous IT team, none of who work here anymore. It’s a black box that has never been improved since its inception and has been “maintained” by our current IT team (I’m separate from IT). “Maintained” is a strong word…
I’ve decided that I need to take it over and am getting my feet wet. I want to figure out the current state of our system so I can plan accordingly.
Can somebody explain the basics of the architecture and the hierarchy? I’m confused between ECM (Epicor ECM Client), DocAlpha (verification station, etc.), SOLr, Epicor IDC (Ancora?).
I will obviously read the manuals, but I was looking for a good starting point. I started with the IDC admin guide, and the first thing is, “Enter the URL provided by your system administrator”…which nobody knows.
The ECM Client is an associated tool of ECM that provides several options of functionality, but the main purposes are to import documents to ECM, process those documents as images and run custom datalinks.
Based on the SOLr detail I would assume your environments are hosted on premise. Could you confirm this? If so, what version are you currently on for IDC, ECM? Could you confirm that you’re currently on Epicor v2024.1.13, soon to be v2025.2.13?
A number of could spend a lot of time typing answers, or complete descriptions of environment, but..
Being 100% new the administrative side of ECM, I’d say your best time/money investment would be to engage one of the Epicor ECM partners and have a complete education and documentation session. Your system could be quite simple, or it could be fairly complex - and understanding all of the bits and pieces, how they interact, how they even work is going to take a couple of days of assistance, if not more.
I’d start with a few things:
all the Epicor ECM documentation
decide if moving to the cloud is what you want to do - all new features using AI are currently only available to you in a cloud hosted environment.
arranging for a system review/upgrade/overhaul from a partner
consider moving away from docAlpha to IDC - imo it’s better/easier
then you have a path forward to be at the latest release, on the platform of your choice, and can focus on understanding how it all works and what new things you can do with it.
It really is a nice and easy system to maintain and use - and is quite powerful. The workflow editor takes has a learning curve, but it’s not that bad.
I appreciate the info. Most of my confusion stemmed from not realizing that Epicor split from DocAlpha years ago, and all of the docs I was looking at were for Ancora. Makes sense why none of it made sense .
The reason this came up is because I’m in the process of upgrading to 2025.2.13. I have to migrate/repoint ECM to the new servers and figured I would upgrade it to the latest and greatest while I’m at it. I didn’t expect it to possibly turn into a new integration. I really should learn to leave “well enough” alone.
@MikeGross, we’re on prem and not going to cloud anytime soon. From what I can tell we have a fairly simple environment. ECM is only used for AP Automation, single company, with only handful of workflows. One of my goals is to expand on the functionality and use for several other crazy ideas I have. Even without the new AI features does it still actively learn without using templates? How was your experience with training documents?
I guess now the question is, in everybody’s personal experience, would you say that IDC is superior? If you were in my shoes, would you switch? If you did move from docAlpha to IDC, how bad was the migration?
Woah… Just because you can doesn’t’ mean you should in the words of the illustrious @aosemwengie1
Start small.
as @MikeGross the resident long term user of ECM (is that ok to title you that Mike?) says get the documentation, the AP automation steps at are in the online help in Kinetic.
Being fairly new to Epicor, start trawling through those documents on Epicweb, there are heaps. (maybe too many).
The other way you can get access to this is if you are logged into Kinetic and go to the online help lookup the topic Launching the ECM Help Center.
Finally the Epicor learning centre also has content.
What pieces of functionally are you really using vs what you are paying for? It may be that you will find a wealth of other features that you could really help make the business sing (or not, and that makes for another conversation).
@cpilinko I’ve done a number of conversations with folks here, both online and in person - call it free consulting if you want - but we explore what you know, need, want, and I can show you some things. I’m happy to do a 30-60 min session with you (or more from your team) just to help you get your head around it. Just message me.
Also - come to Insights and hang out with us. Lots of free opinions there - plus I think we’ll be doing some sessions on ECM this year.
We started with docAlpha and just before we went live, we learned of the split and changed to IDC. I liked the docAlpha stuff, but IDC is just so much better. So yes, I would seriously consider changing. It’s annoyingly/surprisingly great at the OCR recognition, and we haven’t even tapped 50% of what they say it can do.
the migration was easy and in fact had better functionality for interfacing with SQL and Kinetic to assist in validation rules and the like (eg Vendor Validation and Multi-company support). A few folks here also do the complicated OCR process for line-level OCR instead of just header level, so you’ll have some folks to talk to on that part.
The ECM AI features are really just UI features - document summaries, data validation, etc. If you mean the IDC ‘AI’ for document learning, then yes, the on-prem version works very well and there’s not much need to go to the cloud to use the IDC AI stuff (I’ve not seen that part btw).
Expanding functionality is the perfect intent for this platform. You may want to investigate some of the add-ons like Forms & Packages - they can extend the product in new ways.
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