Document Management Talk

Infonic are a sponsor  of the National Computing Centre NCC and  have recently commissioned some research into management and security of documents which has now highlighted some interesting facts: for example less than 50% of businesses surveyed had an overall corporate IT strategy to define how information should be held and who has access to it; less than a third included paper documents in their business continuity / disaster recovery plans, although more than 50% admitted that not doing so would have a serious effect on business operations in the event of a disaster.

This whole question of business continuity and disaster recovery is an interesting one for us, because we hardly ever promote this as a reason to implement Document Management, the usual reasons being productivity improvements and legislative compliance etc… But the spin off benefit of comprehensive DR is huge, and it seems one that is overlooked by many businesses.

Surprisingly approximately 22% of those surveyed had already suffered some serious loss of paper documents, and not by disasters like fire or flooding but mostly due to simple negligence, and when asked what action they had taken as a result, the prize for funniest response has to be ‘found a scapegoat’.

For my sins, and probably because everyone else is conveniently away at the time, I shall be giving a short presentation on this subject at the NCC Conference on 15th October at the Cumberland Hotel in London. http://www.nccmembership.co.uk/POOLED/ARTICLES/BF_EVENTART/VIEW.ASP?Q=BF_EVENTART_310771

I shall be covering some more interesting results from the research, and also raising questions that should get people thinking about the value to their business of the paper documents and the effect of losing them. Something that seems to have been largely overlooked by so many.

Tim

Viewing image documents in SharePoint has always been a bit basic. Until now. The Infonic Document Management Silverlight Web Part for SharePoint allows a user to view and annotate image documents retrieved from the Infonic Document Manager Server.

Our existing customers will now have a choice of platforms when viewing documents in the future.

Developing for SharePoint proved difficult and so most work was carried out outside of the portal. Silverlight applications have the ability to display full screen which we can use to optimize the display to give users the maximum screen viewing experience. Later versions could include more advanced features such as image scanning and printing using Click-Once deployed applications called by the Silverlight client.

Peter

A lot of work appears to have been done to alleviate problems developers were coming up against  with the UAC in Windows Vista.

There are however  some gotchas which can still trip us up.

Impersonation is one to be aware of to avoid some extremely hard to debug situations. If your Windows 7 application is running with standard user privileges (which it should be) any other processes such as Shell API calls will also be running under standard user privileges. If you need to make API calls with elevated privileges you may need to start your app with these privileges or request an elevation of privileges.

So, bearing that in mind,  we press on on with developing our document management software release for Windows 7!

Peter

 With the forthcoming release of Windows 7, we attended a Microsoft seminar on Windows 7 compatibility last week.

Thankfully after a day listening to all the “new” features that may break our application, we discovered that we have covered over 95% of them in our efforts for making Document Manager Vista compatible.

Simon

 Quick Newsflash.

Infonic Document Manager Silverlight version now works in most browsers including IE7, IE8 (With compatibility Mode turned on – Microsoft don’t you just love them), Firefox 3, Chrome, Opera and Apple’s Safari.

 Wow it just gets better and better.

 Peter

Programming with Microsoft’s new RIA platform (Rich Internet Application) can be very frustrating. Functionality which would possibly take a few minutes to code in Windows Forms quickly becomes a 2 day marathon. Multiple document interface applications are not supported out of the box and therefore must be coded from scratch. Window management then becomes an issue and tiling and cascading windows must also be coded. There are some simple samples available on the web but they fall way short of real world requirements. Many Control development companies are now releasing Silverlight toolkits but you may find as I did, that these are simple eye candy wrappers around existing intrinsic controls. 

The Silverlight version of Infonic Document Manager development continues at speed despite the short comings of the intrinsic controls. The Wow factor is plain to see and should draw great interest from both our existing and new clients alike.

 Peter

 This week I’ve been starting the update to the user documentation for the new 2.6 Business Edition. It’s completed the first round of QA with no major issues so things are looking good. The not so good news is the QA plan for the 2.6 enterprise edition is looking larger than expected due to the additional product features and the release of Windows 7. The Silverlight product test plan is going to be even bigger.

We were talking about ‘tips and tricks’ for Document Manager the other day, and someone said you can use ‘today’ as a document search for date created. I didn’t believe them so I tried it and wow..it works.  This really surprised me as I believed I knew of every bit of functionality in the product and having designed in various abbreviations for dates knew that ‘today’ was not one of them. So you really can teach an old dog new tricks. Especially when it comes to document management!

Tim

Sharepoint is usually the focus of attention for our GR (Geo Replication) business which provides Sharepoint replication solutions over very limited bandwidth communications links, but this time Document Management is getting a slice of the action. As well as our replication product we are going to be exhibiting our new Silverlight web product, complete with Sharepoint Web Parts at the Microsoft Sharepoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas from 19-22nd October.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com

This is an early glimpse of our Silverlight 3 based document manager 2009 which can present the Document Manager functionality via a web part into your corporate Sharepoint portal, so if you want to see the future of Infonic Document Management make sure you drop by the Infonic booth. Infonic are sponsoring the event so if you’re around the night before the show starts drop in for a welcoming drink and a chat with our Kim Kuykendall.

See you at booth #409!

Tim

In an earlier blog posting I made reference to us implementing the Tesseract  OCR engine and that this had given us a couple of additional significant new features, one of them being the enhancement of our Screen Scrape technology to enable us to read other applications screens which we previously could not.

The other nice feature we’ve been able to add is ‘on the fly’ OCR of documents for indexing. When the user is profiling the document (defining the indexes to subsequently locate the document) they can now select a part of the image by dragging a rectangle over the desired text; this is then OCR’d and the resulting text used to populate the index. The next index is then presented and the process repeated. This essentially semi-automates the indexing of documents making the process more efficient – and making document management even easier for end users!

We are including this in both our Business Edition, Enterprise and the new .Net Web versions of the product.