New Redact-It Desktop Includes OCR and Microsoft Office Support

Redact-It Desktop 1.1, a new offering from Informative Graphics Corp. announced recently, Scottsdale, Ariz., removes sensitive content and privacy information, such as social security numbers, names and phone numbers, before making documents widely available.

The software is designed to reduce the time it takes to redact, review and release documents for public access, eDiscovery and other processes. By applying redaction capabilities to Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel, and using OCR (optical character recognition), Redact-It Desktop 1.1 can process and convert documents, PDFs and TIFFs into text-searchable files.

According to the company, Redact-It Desktop is the first 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 also can create custom search macros and scripts for specific needs such as 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.