WAN Support Policy for Kofax Capture Server Client Installations

Issue

Is installing Kofax Capture to run over a Wide Area Network rather than a Local Area Network supported by Kofax?

Solution

Kofax Capture is designed to be used in a Local Area Network environment. For ideal performance, Kofax Capture requires network throughput approaching 100 Mbps. Wide Area Networks approaching these speeds are rare.

Deploying a Kofax Capture client/server installation across a WAN is not supported. Any portion of the client/server installation that is on a LAN will be supported. To run Kofax Capture in a supported configuration, Kofax Capture Network Server (KCNS) must be configured and implemented. KCNS was developed to support implementations that require remote clients that will be connected to the Kofax Capture server.

This is not a limitation of our software, but rather has to do with network latency.

Clients of a client/server environment require direct database communication, database validation calls, and linked user calls against Active Directory. These are areas that are prone to inconsistent results when run over a WAN. Also, file I/O across the WAN is unpredictable and can again result in inconsistent performance behavior.

The Kofax Capture Installation Guide for your respective version states that Client/Server over a WAN is an unsupported configuration.

Note: Kofax Transformation Modules (KTM) operate as Custom Modules within the Kofax Capture framework.  KTM operates under the same parameters and requirements as Kofax Capture.

• Kofax Capture never opens MDB files over the network, but copies them to \Ascent\Local to ensure local access. That is why a delay may occur during batch open and close: the MDB (typically ~1MB) file gets copied from/to the server when the batch is opened and closed. To avoid this delay, configure Kofax Capture to use "Batches in SQL"
   
• Use Kofax Capture Network Server (KCNS) to sync the Central Site with Remote Sites over a WAN. This situation is exactly what it was designed for. With KCNS, the bandwidth on the network is reduced for normal operations (as data is only submitted once), and "working" and "data transfer" are completely separated. Also you no longer depend on the connection - the system continues to work even when you encounter a WAN outage. Instead of SMB, KCNS is using HTTP, which is a lot more efficient on WAN connections.

We recommend to our customers that want to deploy multiple standalone remote sites to consider using either KCNS, or Citrix/Terminal Server, or Thin Client Validation. The two last solutions provide a significant saving on costs for the deployment and maintenance, since there is no need to install a Kofax client on the site. Additionally, it simplifies the upgrade to a newer version, and as well the application of a patch in case of a software problem.

Level of Complexity 

Easy

Applies to  

References

N/A

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