Document Management Talk

Apologies for the lack of blog content last week. I was working onsite for a few days with one of our long standing customers (involving 2.5 hours drive each way on top of a full day’s work!), so didn’t get much time for the big picture or for blogging.

I spent a few days working with one of our most experienced and knowledgeable customers. They are in the Insurance industry. We were reviewing their use of our document management software with a view to identifying and addressing possible process improvements and suggesting where new features in the DM system could be of benefit to their business. They also wanted to standardise the use of the DM system among their various departments and across their multiple business sites. 

Despite their excellent team knowing our product absolutely inside and out, it is still really surprising what a fresh pair of eyes can see. One very small change to their existing working processes, which was implemented while I was there, has reduced the time taken to allocate their incoming post by about 50%. It will also reduce the chances of errors occurring during that process. 

Despite all the driving it was an enjoyable week. It is so important in this type of role to take the time every now and then to work at the front lines, remind yourself of the real world challenges being addressed by the DM software, and also share some of the very latest product information with the people in the field.

Tim

Happy New Year to all my reader(s).  Well, here we are, already up to our armpits in 2010. Some of us used the holiday period to catch up on all the lovely things we wanted to do in 2009 but for which we didn’t have the free time. Some of our customers however didn’t realise it was a holiday and we actually took a support query at 8pm on new year’s eve! That is dedication that I find both inspiring and depressing in equal measure.

Anyway, my team and I did spend some of the quiet time optimising the code in our 2.6 product, in particular for remote / WAN access and we managed to achieve some staggering performance improvements. We reduced the login time by about 50% and we more than halved the time to open a document. The system user can now open a 1000 page document in just a few seconds. So it was a productive holiday!!

The Silverlight Document Manager product is pretty much there, our new Tech Author has just completed the 2.6 documentation so he now knows all there is to know about document management software (I hope) and can get started on the Silverlight documentation. The installer is nearing completion so we can deploy some more Silverlight Beta sites in January so everything is looking promising for a good 2010.

My very exciting new year’s resolution, or at least the one I can tell you about on here, is to keep this blog up to date. I know a growing number of you rely on it as a reference point for Document Manager development progress and milestones. So watch this space. And hound me if I haven’t said anything interesting to you for a few days.

 Tim

Well, it is that all important moment of the document management year again when we lift the company’s bonnet and let the quality inspectors take a look at what we build and how we do it all. To cut a long story short, I’m very happy to let you know that Infonic Document Management Ltd has passed the BS EN ISO 9001:2008 audit. The ISO 9000 series of standards are adopted by 951,000 organizations in 175 countries worldwide! So it is a nice stamp of approval for us. Good work team!

Tim

One of challenges faced by anyone working in the mysterious world of software development is trying to keeping yourself aware of and motivated by the bigger picture. Stopping yourself from seeing only whichever little technical problem you are focused on at the time is very difficult. You sometimes forget what it’s all for. We sit here month after month with our noses deep in the code and we often totally miss the big picture – which is the huge value that our creativity, vision, expertise and hard work deliver to our customers.

But every so often a big ray of light finds its way into the development team that lights the place up and re-energises everyone. This is usually when a massive milestone or achievement is reached by the team – and today was such a day. This week the Dev team deployed the new Infonic Andromeda (aka Silverlight aka .Net) product for the first time into a live customer document management environment. Fingers have been crossed all round all week. We thought we knew it was a very good product. The best we have ever produced, but there was a lot of cutting edge user interface that remained totally unproven.

So it was with massive excitement today that we received the first email of feedback from the Beta user after a week of intensive use across multiple sites. The excellent feedback from this first customer has been so rewarding for everyone here. For the first time we can all breathe a huge collective sigh of relief. Our baby is a success – so far. The customer’s diverse team of users love the product!                Wooo!!! hoooo!!!

With comments coming back to us like: “So far I have to say the experience has been excellent” and “Performance for users in Nottingham  on the LAN is excellent” and “at our EMEA HQ in Watford the performance is nothing short of superb” and “from my initial tests I think everyone over there will be amazed by the performance”  this is the first time we can all be fairly confident that we have got it right. We’ve designed and built a very robust and high performance next generation document management system that end users love using.

There will of course be teething problems with the new product. But (this is going to feel like I’m just bragging now) the customer even covered this off in his email with the following “as for teething problems;  they are of no concern to me because you turn the fixes around lightning fast, your agile approach is comforting to me”

The client went on to finish with “Great work…you should be very proud of your Silverlight baby, from what I’ve seen I can honestly say it’s a winner and you should be commended for your efforts with a hefty pay rise (yes, I am being serious).” Now this is the kind of constructive feedback we like!! 

So thanks to our customer for that excellent feedback and thanks to everyone here in the team who has worked so hard to produce such a high quality software solution. We are certainly not done with Andromeda yet, but feedback like this doesn’t come every day. So let’s all enjoy it!

Tim

Microsoft have announced the Beta release of Silverlight 4. How dare they, we haven’t got our Silverlight 3 release out of the door yet, although we’re doing our first install into a client environment this week. Silverlight 4 addresses some of the frustrations our developers have had with Silverlight 3, although the workarounds have pretty much been developed already, version 4 offers some nice enhancements and gives us some good roadmap opportunities for a future release. Don’t worry, we’re not going jump into version 4 until we’ve actually shipped the version 3 product !

 So what are these nice enhancements?

 One of the biggest is the ability to run ‘out of browser’ in a trusted mode. Version 3 allowed out of Browser running ( the application doesn’t run within the web browser ) but it had all the same restrictions on interaction with the host machine as the ‘in browser’ mode. The new Trusted mode allows the Silverlight app to access the local file store, interact with other applications using .COM and other standard features taken for granted by normal applications. For document manager this opens the door to richer integration capabilities and less user interaction requirements to confirm simple things like file saves (normally considered a threat for Web applications).

 Users can now open and save documents on the local machine using a file open / save dialog. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but try writing a document manager without this capability!

 The Silverlight application can now access the local machine printers so we can print documents. Again it sounds obvious but quite a challenge for the developers without it.

 Files can now be dragged onto the Silverlight application from the windows desktop. Another feature taken for granted by non web app users, but highly desirable for something like Document Manager.

 Right Click. This was one of my biggest bug-bears with Silverlight 3, the fact that we could not present a context sensitive right click menu and that right click always provided the default Silverlight menu. Well with v4 we now can, so the familiarity of the rich client users can now be reproduced in the Silverlight version. Hooray.

 For the non technical of you reading this it probably sounds like I’m getting over excited about what appears to be relatively minor features, but they will make a big difference to the functionality and usability of the Silverlight Document Manager, and re-enforces our decision to adopt Silverlight as a platform for the product.

 For more details on Silverlight 4 Beta take a look at http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

Tim

One of the drawbacks of any client server software product is the overhead of maintaining the client side installed components when changes are made, particularly in environments where the client workstations have restrictive security policies in place. Too often we have heard the cries of pain when an upgrade needs deploying to 100+ workstations. 

So the good news is that our 2.6 release now includes an update service which will automatically upgrade the client components whenever newer versions are available, and this will happen invisibly to the user.

Of course for a really hassle free deployment the new Web based Document Manager 2010 is the answer, but I feel client server apps will be with us for some time to come.

Tim

I have been working on data capture projects for some 13 years now and seen the software gradually evolve over that time.

But still it seems that there is not an off the shelf solution to invoice reading that can be quickly installed and configured to work for most businesses without spending days of consulting time of fine tuning and customising.

We have undertaken about 6 such projects in as many months and each one is different. Even when customers are using the same finance system, each seems to somehow contrive odd exceptions to what would be considered ‘normal’ and all customers seem to think their way is most obviously the best way to operate. Good news if you’re providing the configuration services, but the associated costs of doing this must be preventing the uptake of the technology and holding back the industry.

Maybe as companies switch their financial systems to SaaS models things will stabilise and there will be some more consistent practices around Accounts Payable.

Consistency of operation would enable vendors like ourselves to reduce the entry price of this technology and make it available to businesses for whom it is currently out of reach.

Tim

Every week someone speculatively asks me to ‘look at this product’ with a view to integrating into our Document Manager. If we looked at all of them we’d never actually have any time to write the product software, but last week one caught my eye.

It was some PDF compression software from CrispDocuments (http://www.crispdocuments.com/) that claims some amazing size reductions for PDF documents which to be honest I was very sceptical about. So I took 4 sample documents of different types, monochrome text, a mix of mono text and colour titles, a greyscale photo and a mono invoice with a colour logo and compared the files sizes before and after their compression. The results were quite amazing with reductions in size to between 14% and 50% of original with no degradation of quality, and still viewable with standard PDF viewers. As you can imagine the resulting benefits are huge, smaller file sizes mean less storage requirements and faster transmission times which in turn mean faster document loading / viewing times. As a consequence it means Document Imaging can start working with colour documents with the same speed as current monochrome ones, whilst the user gets to see all the additional colour information not normally apparent, like the colour of ink in a signature. 

I have seen compression levels like this before but they required specific decoding software drivers, this is a solution compatible with existing viewers. I shall be talking closely with these people about using their technology in our product.

Tim

As preparation for my presentation next week at the NCC Annual Conference on Disaster Recovery (sorry that should read Business Continuity to be thoroughly modern) I’ve been researching what else is being said about the subject on the Web. Surprisingly very little. Nearly every Document Management vendor makes reference to it somewhere but it never really features highly in the compelling reasons to buy.

I find this strange as some of my other research showed some interesting statistics, like 40% of businesses that suffer a disaster fail, approximately 32,000 businesses a year suffered fires, 90% of a business’ ‘knowledge’ is on paper and 50% of businesses agree that losing that paper would be critical to them!

We ourselves are being asked to provide evidence of our Business Continuity Plan on ITTs, especially by local Government and Health Care, and many of our customers are being told by regulatory authorities like the FSA that they MUST have a DM solution for DR purposes. That said there is a British Standard BS25999 (who dreams up these numbers?) ‘Business Continuity Management Standard’ that exists as a guideline for businesses to consider all aspects of BC.

Finally a thought to close on… The Business Continuity Plan is most likely a document, and when do you need it most?

Tim