Category Archives: Technology

Technology related items.

The SharePoint effect

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‘SharePoint is ubiquitous’. Ubiquitous (adj.) is defined as ‘Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent’.

Microsoft has certainly invested heavily on marketing SharePoint, but they have also invested heavily in Zune.  Why is SharePoint an unbelievable success and Zune….well, isn’t?

People might dispute when SharePoint truly became a legitimate ECM offering, but I would have to say that 2010 was a sincere “coming out” party for Microsoft SharePoint Server.

First, from the product development perspective specifically, Microsoft released a major overhaul of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 with SharePoint 2010 this year which incorporated many of the ‘must-have’ features for a true ECM solution such as List Validations and Document IDs.  Basically, and you would think this should have been obvious, List Validations means that administrators can enforce metadata rules with commonly used document capture techniques such as hidden columns, no duplicate values and column validation conditions.  While Document IDs are basically a persistent/permanent unique identification number assigned to a documents in SharePoint.  Meaning that if they are moved around within SharePoint site collections they can always be accessed by a special URL.

Secondly, Microsoft has done a wonderful job of building their SharePoint Ecosystem and, therefore, has the support of many complimentary software and hardware vendors to promote SharePoint ECM.  Generally speaking, I think just a few short years ago SharePoint was being wrongly promoted as the ‘the one-stop ECM shop’ for everything content management.  This was clearly misguided as SharePoint has many good qualities, but from an ECM perspective had many more deficiencies than it did useful features.  One obvious major deficiency even to this day is there is no native document capture, or scanning directly, into SharePoint without third-party document scanning solutions.  It’s clear that Microsoft has changed their tune on the promotion of SharePoint and now embraces the SharePoint ecosystem.  It seems that ‘enhancing the SharePoint’ experience by enabling integration to the SharePoint platform is more of a priority than it originally was as evidenced by the major turn-out and interest at the “SharePoint Partner Pavilion” at AIIM 2010 earlier this year in Philadelphia.  Complimentary vendors offering best-of-breed applications such as document capture and BPM (Business Process Management) to the SharePoint platform were nearly stampeded in their respective booths and kiosks with customers interested in product demonstrations or eager for more information about their respective offerings.


No longer do traditional ECM software vendors dismiss SharePoint as a weak solution.  Rather these long-standing ECM vendors now have complementary product development and marketing strategies because of the overwhelming interest in SharePoint is real and to deny the SharePoint effect.

I think in years past we’ve certainly heard more and more discussion about the practicality of using SharePoint for ECM but I believe for the most part it was early-adopter IT departments or organizations on a tight budget that were actually using SharePoint.  No longer is this the case.  Organizations and businesses of all sizes from small companies to large enterprise are deploying, investigating and building upon the SharePoint/Office platform.  But what is driving this demand?

Simply-put, if you make something accessible and ease to use then whatever it might be, it stands a good chance of adoption.  This is especially true when it comes to technology.  For users to learn SharePoint is not too unlike software applications they are already familiar with using such as Internet Explorer, Word, Excel or Outlook.  Since users already have some level of comfort using these applications, extending the capabilities of these desktop applications to now store electronic documents in SharePoint is probably one of the most effective ways to get users to accept and, more importantly, embrace change.

As always I appreciate the time you’ve spent to read this posting about ‘The SharePoint effect’ and how a major IT company such as Microsoft being involved in our once niche industry is helping drive adoption of technology we all know is good for business financially, terrific for the environment and improves our lives through more efficient processes.  I welcome comments, feedback and/or constructive criticism.  Please feel free to click either “The ‘No Folder Zone’” graphic below to read about one of the first trends that changed the Document Capture landscape forever of click the ‘Trends towards Network Scanning’ graphic below to read about the third trend witnessed in 2010 that changed the Document Capture landscape forever.

-Kevin

Three significant trends we witnessed in the year 2010 that is changing the Document Capture landscape forever

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The ‘No Folder Zone’

Despite tremendous improvements in document capture technology and ease of use becoming more prevalent, the fact of the matter is that document capture is not totally automated and often involves human intervention.  Therefore, careful considering the pro’s and con’s of your document capture strategy is imperative to ultimately create better operational efficiencies within your organization or, unfortunately, cause unnecessary burden within your business process.


Technologies such as Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) or Automatic Forms Processing to automatically identify documents and extract information from scanned images are fairly amazing and perform highly automated functions if the system is designed with well-known document types.  In other words, the information on the pages such as a invoice number is in a fairly consistent part of the page (i.e. always in the upper-right hand corner of the page).  But when more and more document types are introduced to the capture system, the complexity of the system becomes exponentially more difficult and chances are that the automation accuracy will decrease.


The truth is that these capabilities are not complete magic (yet) and require system administrators to carefully develop capture strategies that assist the capture software in making intelligent decisions about documents.  If you are in the document capture or document scanning business you’ll often hear the phrase similar to, “Oh, I’ll just use my existing multifunction device to scan to a folder and let my capture software process the scanned images from the folder.”  While this approach of document capture is certainly an option that works, this road to document capture is littered with potential potholes, possible dead-ends and a lot of downstream work that should be carefully considered.


The idea of scanning images into a folder and then performing data extraction from these images is certainly not new.  In fact it is probably the most commonly used method to get images into document management systems, however there are certain considerations to take into account when using this capture technique.  Just because it’s simple to configure, cost effective and works, this does not mean that it is necessarily the most effective.  For some of the reasons I will elaborate below the year of 2010 saw a dramatic rise in The ‘No Folder Zone’.


A truly integrated document capture strategy has some of these qualities that scanning to folders may lack:

  • Reduce complexity of the capture system through centralized control
  • Enforce business continuity from the repository, not desktop
  • Eliminate the need for rescanning and ensure optimal image quality

While there are several methods to get an image into a document management system (including scanning to a folder), what is just as, if not more, important is getting the properly associated metadata or index values with that image into your repository for search and retrieval purposes.  Otherwise your document management system is nothing more than a glorified publicly shared folder on the network where retrieval of these images is done by memory or found by file name only.  Scanning to a folder is not necessarily a bad thing based on your organizations particular requirements, however when many people are contributing scanned documents into a system this creates honest mistakes such as lack of consistency, decreased efficiency and potential security or retention risks.

The “Twilight Zone” is defined as “the ambiguous region between 2 categories, states, or conditions (usually containing some features of both)”.  This is a also a good description of The ‘No Folder Zone’.  While scanning to a folder, then importing might give the appearance of an integrated solution, the truth is the region of connectivity (integration) is ambiguous between capture and ECM repository.  A solid document capture system will contain the following certain qualities:

  • Changes in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system should immediately be reflected in your document capture solution
  • Mapping of capture software index fields to ECM index fields is dynamic
  • Affords the system to be modified, changed or enhanced easily as organizational requirements change


My main point in writing this blog post about the ‘No Folder Zone’ is not to bash all that is wrong or point out potential pitfalls with scanning to folders.  In fact this is a great solution if this is truly what a particular organization requires.  However, far too often taking the simple approach of scanning to folders is the easy way to offer document scanning to users and many of the other issues this causes are not carefully considered.  As system administrators become more aware and truly understand some of the incredible advanced in document capture technology then hopefully they can appreciate that a well-designed document capture system can drastically help reduce labor costs, improve quicker access to information and be a strategic business advantage, as well as, improve adherence to compliance or regulatory standards.

The ‘No Folder Zone’

As always I appreciate the time you’ve spent to read this posting about The ‘No Folder Zone’ and how this trend is influencing the Document Capture business.  I welcome comments, feedback and/or constructive criticism.  Please feel free to click ‘The SharePoint effect’ graphic below to read about the second trend witnessed in 2010 that changed the Document Capture landscape forever.

-Kevin


iPad updates

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…and endless supply of “supporting applications” just to get your iPad updated!

WordPress updates are sooooo simple

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I have to say (knock-on-wood) that using the WordPress Automatic Update feature is awesome.  So far I have experienced no technical difficulties by simply pressing the “Automatically Update” button, then after a few seconds, performs the steps below and “viola!”, it’s done.  Why can’t other software be so simple to upgrade?

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0.3.zip…

Unpacking the update…

Verifying the unpacked files…

Installing the latest version…

Upgrading database…

WordPress updated successfully

Actions: Go to Dashboard

A “cloudy” future for document capture

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Hearing a phrase such as “cloudy future” immediately conjures up bad thoughts and gloom-and-doom scenarios.  However, in the case of document capture “cloud computing” is bringing extremely positive change.  In this post I would like to break down the basic components of “cloud computing” and explain how document capture into “the cloud” is appealing for several reasons including scalability, interoperability and usability.  Simply put, the “cloud” = Infrastructure + Content + Users.  Using cloud computing is not magical or mysterious, yet it is a topic of great discussion and, might I say, confusing. Accessing data “in the cloud” is not too unusual from what most of us do every day;  E-mail, accessing web sites or even contributing scanned images to an ECM system.  While I don’t want to dive too deep into the general benefits and appeal of cloud computing, in each of the sections below I hope to describe a unique way in which utilizing the cloud as it relates to document capture and ECM can be beneficial for organizations of all sizes.



Existing Internet Infrastructure

Probably the easiest understood component in “Cloud Computing” is the existing infrastructure that most of us are familiar using with whether we consciously know it or not.  The fact of the matter is that data still needs to reside on a computer server somewhere.  In other words, it’s not technically stored in some magical cloud.  This data still needs to be hosted somewhere on high-powered servers.  Typically in a data center with a climate controlled temperature, backup generators in case of power outage and high security.Ever use Hotmail.com for e-mail?  Or, browse to www.KevinNeal.com using your internet browser?  Access your Blackberry messages on your handheld device?  These are all examples of hosted applications.  What is somewhat unique about hosted “cloud” applications, as opposed to traditionally hosted applications, is that at their core most cloud applications offer industry standard communication protocols to enable a wide range of open interoperability.  Basically it’s two completely different systems talking the same language.  To illustrate my point let’s use the HTTP protocol as an example.  What was probably the single most reason for the explosive growth of the internet over the past few decades?  It most likely was the fact was that two systems (your computer) and a web site (hosted/server application) had a common language to communicate by the means of an internet browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.  Look at the top of this web page you are viewing now.  See the “http://” prefix before the KevinNeal.com address?  This is an example of you accessing hosted information via the HTTP protocol and using advanced technology that was completely transparent to the you as the user. 

To over simplify things, my point is that cloud computing is really nothing more than a collection of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of applications available on the internet.  The truly powerful concept of cloud computing and what has peaked the interest among users and vendors alike is the opportunity to “mash-up” or bring together the best-of-breed technologies from various sources to build powerful applications.  As it relates to document capture, many organizations are considering “cloud” for their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Customer Relation Management (CRM) portal or even their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories.  Scanning documents, with relevant metadata data extracted using document capture technology, into these various systems helps drastically improve efficiency.


Content Creation

There is an unbelievable amount of content available in the cloud.  Believe it?  Anything you can access over the internet whether it be public content or private content should be considered part of the available cloud-content.  What information an organization chooses to include as their available content is certainly up to their specific requirements but do not underestimate the value of these resources.  From a document capture and ECM perspective, the most valuable content to businesses and organizations, of course, is their intellectual properties and not just random data found doing an internet search.  Specifically, this could be their internal customer contacts, an accounts receivable database or their inventory management system.  All of this data is unique to the organization and the value of sharing among other employees and/or other departments helps to greatly improve process and the “cloud”, over the internet, represents a low-cost means to efficiently share this information.When organizations embark on a cloud strategy content is created in a wide variety of ways.  The content could be electronic files such as spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, video or even e-mail.  Additionally the content could consist of scanned images and metadata extracted from these scanned images.  Regardless, the challenge is to make this content available via search in order to find exactly what a user is looking for as quickly as possible.  This is the reason organizations should carefully consider a well thought-out taxonomy and metadata strategy for all of their content.  After all, just dumping a bunch of scanned images and other content into the cloud is not an effective strategy when making it easily accessible to users is tremendously effective.

UsersUser interaction with data in the cloud can be a significant benefit for cloud applications.  Anyone that has any level of computing experience can use a web browser and this is the means (user interface) that most cloud applications utilize to deliver content to users.  Not having to install software, do any special configuration and the ability to have quick user adoption/acceptance of this new technology are all major benefits.For users that need to create content to be utilized within cloud applications there are several document capture methods including Manual Indexing, Automatic Indexing and Network Scanning which can be deployed depending on an organizations specific requirements.Cloud computing can offer extremely powerful and innovative applications to users and there is a lot of advanced technology behind the scenes.  However, from the user perspective, whether they are consuming information within a web browser or whether they are contributing scanned documents and relevant metadata, this advanced technology should be completely transparent to the users themselves in order to be effective.

Emerging Cloud Applications & ServicesHopefully I’ve done a decent job of demystifying the “cloud” and broken it down into it’s core components in a easy to understand way in this quick cloud overview.  Now I would like to briefly elaborate on the opportunity of document capture for Emerging Cloud Applications & Services.  In essence, everything described above was logical, had structure and most people are familiar with how to use.  Internet applications and services such as e-mail, browsers and social networking sites all make sense and are easily understood.  What is not easily understood or defined by most is how to implement an effective a cloud strategy.  I can appreciate this struggle because the cloud is new, emerging and dynamic.  What a cloud application might be today can be drastically different in just weeks for sophisticated integration/functionality or literally minutes for simple expansion or additional functionality.  This is because adding new functionality or capability to an open cloud platform is far easier than in the in the past using standard communication protocols as were described above in the HTTP example.  Most cloud applications utilize HTTP, Web Services, XML, SOAP, REST and other common standards to reduce development time, decrease costs and eliminate unnecessary complication.Cloud applications and services are developing quickly and will become exponentially powerful as different technologies are collaborated.  As more and more organizations rely on the cloud to reduce on-premise IT infrastructure there will still be a need for scanning hardware to digitize documents into the cloud.  Therefore, the near term future for document capture and scanning into cloud applications is extremely bright.If I was vague about what a “cloud application” is and you are looking for a definition, well, I would suggest there are many opinions that can be found with a simple internet search.  I, however, once read an article about how an industry expert was asked to define “the cloud”.  After he pondered the question for a bit he finally came to the most appropriate definition he could think of and it was just one powerful word;  Innovation.
Putting it all together

Cloud Computing presents a great opportunity for document capture.  For organizations that are convinced a cloud approach is in their best interest, hopefully they can realize that in order to maximize their investment to the fullest all the important information still trapped on paper documents in file cabinets and desk drawers must be added to their cloud applications available content.The most important and relevant data in the cloud is your organizations intellectual property and an effective document capture strategy can contribute greatly to providing quick and accurate access to information.
I’m predicting a “cloudy” forecast for document capture…..and this is a really good thing.  As always, I encourage any constructive feedback or comments.Sincerely,Kevin