Document Management Talk

Another busy week in the Document Manager engine room, this time finalising the details of the new SMB product we’re launching in the new year. SMB (Small to Medium Business) is aimed at making Document Management more affordable and easier to deploy for the smaller business ( typically up to 15 IT users ). The product is aimed primarily at our growing channel of resellers.

Many of the obstacles to deploying Document Management are because of the perceived complexities and intricacies of configuring a myriad of optional modules to specific business processes, which is beyond the abilities of many smaller IT providers. However for many small businesses they do not need this level of complexity, so SMB is all about taking that away and providing a simple pre-configured solution, offering the key benefits of document management but without the days of consulting and configuration normally associated with it.

So after months of deliberating internally about what is and what is not included we’ve finally reached a decision and all we have to do is deliver it! So the propeller heads in Milton Keynes are now busy coding away at the new simplified product, making sure we end up with something that even my mother could install (well maybe not that simple).

And for good measure we’ve included a couple of new developments, a “Filing Assistant” which monitors a file location for new documents and files them for you, and a new Office Addin with a few extra features and support for the Office 2007 applications. The basic SMB product is actually our 2.4 Document Manager with some changes to the licensing mechanism to make for easier installation and distribution of licenses.

Most of the last week I spent getting trained by TopImageSystems who produce a document capture product eFlow which we are going to be OEM’ing for resale with our Infonic Document Manager. eFlow is a very capable award winning document and data capture system particularly suited to Invoice capture with back end integration into high end ERP systems including SAP and Oracle. It is a really good solution when integrated with Document Manager for post capture business processing, workflow and compliance. We are increasingly finding ourselves competing in the larger enterprise environments and eFlow will enable us to do this.

Document capture and management combined with Workflow in the accounts payable process provide a very compelling business case and rapid return on investment, which in todays economic climate is forefront of many peoples minds. This probably explains why we remain so busy in times when you may expect things to be slowing down.

Oh well, training over, so back to the real world and time to catch up with all the day to day issues from the myriad of ongoing customer projects.
Tim

I am Tim Cowell, one of the original founders of the Document Management arm of Infonic back in 1996 and responsible for the first development of the product, then known as TokOpen which we launched in 2000. A lot has happened since then, both with the product, the business and with the Document Management industry, and some 8 years on I find myself still facing the same challenges that we did when we started, namely delivering efficient solutions to peoples document related business problems.

So what’s changed? Well both the business problems and the software has gotten a lot more complicated, in 2000 simply providing a digital image archive solution was considered leading edge and a huge business advantage. Today we’re faced wither ever more complex workflow requirements, integrations with an ever increasing number of business applications, distributed environments, legislation, compliance and much more.

Life is never dull in this business, every week we are faced with new challenges, requirements to deliver new functionality, stay one step ahead of the competition, predict what the product needs to have in the next 12/18 months, improve the existing product for existing users, add new features for new prospects, keep current with Microsoft’s latest technology etc…

So this blog is to share some of that with you, to give you an insight into what is actually going on behind the scenes with Infonic Document Management, share some of the good success stories with you, or at least the ones we’re allowed to talk about, and some of the new stuff you’re going to see being released in the near future, or even just the items we’re considering.

I hope you will find this interesting, I certainly do.