News | January 24, 2009

New Redact-It Desktop Includes OCR And Microsoft Office Support For Multi-Format File Redaction

Redact-It(™)Desktop 1.1 removes sensitive content and privacy information, such as social security numbers, names and phone numbers, before making documents widely available. The software dramatically reduces the time it takes to redact, review and release documents for public access, eDiscovery and other processes. Redact-It Desktop 1.1 applies powerful redaction capabilities to Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel, the most widely used software programs in the world, while providing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing of documents to convert PDFs and TIFFs into text-searchable files.

Redact-It Desktop is the first low-cost desktop application using pattern recognition to find and redact information within a document. It includes many built-in macros to redact privacy information such as a person's name, phone numbers, social security numbers, driver's license numbers, credit card numbers, birth dates and more. Users can also create custom search macros and scripts for specific needs like account or ID numbers. Redact-It also includes "Defined Area Redaction" (drawing a box around the area to be redacted), adding the ability to redact an entire page or range of pages. Combined with Redact-It's "peek through" feature, this makes it easy to select limited areas to remain visible.

New Redact-It electronic redaction capabilities include:

  • Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint support. Not only can the documents be opened natively, Redact-It can install a plug-in into these applications allowing the launch of the current document in Redact-It. For Outlook, Redact-It supports the message body and attachments.
  • Ability to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when opening TIFF documents, creating searchable text.
  • Ability to create a draft version of the redacted document for review by others before finalizing redactions.
  • Redact a full page, range of pages or the entire document.
  • Ability to filter redactions during the Verify step. For example, users can filter all redactions by reason code or search pattern.
  • Ability to redact "all but..." For example, a user can redact all social security numbers, but leave the last four digits, or redact all phone numbers or email addresses except those specifically stated.
  • Extensive logging of search terms used, who performed each redaction and when, scripts run and redaction templates applied, creating a useful audit trail of redactions.
  • Scripting capability. Users can record mouse actions to create a reusable redaction script.
  • Ability to delete all redactions. Users can now delete all redactions, or only those of a particular color or reason code, making modifying redactions easier.
  • "Entire document validated" feature that creates a specific log entry when the reviewer has completely verified the entire document.

Other members of the Redact-It family include Redact-It Enterprise Server for batch and automated redaction as part of workflow processes, and Redact-It for Kofax(®) Ascent Capture(®), which works directly within the Kofax batch process to remove the data from selected redaction zones with associated OCR text, typically as files are bulk loaded into a document repository. For more information, visit www.redact-it.com.

SOURCE: Redact-It Desktop