# Decide Which Eduction Product to Use

Micro Focus provides three main ways for you to use Eduction: Eduction in ingest, the Eduction SDK, and Eduction Server. The one you use depends on your use case, and your preference.

## Eduction as Part of an Ingestion Process

The IDOL ingestion components, IDOL NiFi Ingest and Connector Framework Server (CFS), allow you to incorporate Eduction as part of a document retrieval process. You can use connectors to retrieve documents from your repositories, and perform Eduction alongside any other document processing.

This method is very useful if you want to automate the process of retrieving and tagging documents. In particular, if you use IDOL NiFi Ingest and CFS to index into IDOL, you can use Eduction to add extra fields to your IDOL documents to make it easier to search for the entity values that you extract.

However, this method is not appropriate if you want to provide text directly to Eduction as part of an application.

## Eduction SDK or Eduction Server

The Eduction SDK provides APIs to allow you to run Eduction directly. This option is most suitable for OEM environments, where you want to embed Eduction into an application that you distribute to your users.

The Eduction ACI Server also allows you to use Eduction as part of an application. In this case, you must host the server (and a license server), which makes it less suitable for OEM environments. It might be the most suitable option if you want to use Eduction in a web application, particularly if you want to use other IDOL services.

In other cases, you can use either option, depending on your personal preference. When you choose, you might want to consider the following points:

- The Eduction SDK has a larger initial learning requirement as you start using the SDK.

  Eduction Server accepts HTTP requests and returns XML, so it might be a quicker method to get started with. In particular, if you already use the ACI API in other applications, you do not need to learn how to use additional APIs to run Eduction.

- The Eduction SDK is available only for C, .NET and Java. If you want to create an application in a different language, you might not be able to use the SDK without using additional methods to call out to shared libraries.

  NOTE: To use Eduction Server, you can use any method for making HTTP requests and parsing XML. There are also IDOL SDKs available in C, .NET, and Java.

- To run Eduction, both Eduction Server and the Eduction SDK must have access to the required grammar files.

  In the case of the Eduction SDK, the easiest way to include the grammars is to install them with your applications. You can also embed the grammars in your application. Installing or embedding the grammars increases the size of your application.

  For Eduction Server, you include the grammars with the web server, so this does not add any overhead for your end users.

For more information, see Eduction SDK and Eduction ACI Server.

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