Document Management Talk

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

When I was asked if we could exhibit our new Document Management (EDM) product at the SharePoint conference in Vegas ( 19-22 October ) I was at first sceptical about the merits of this, after all isn’t SharePoint supposed to be able to provide much of the functionality associated with Electronic Document Management software? So I started enquiring about what type of businesses already using SharePoint would consider using a non SharePoint solution for their Document Management. The response was quite surprising. 

Many enterprise organisations have deployments of SharePoint but look to more focused departmental level solution for scanning, indexing and workflow of their paper documents. This can be achieved more quickly and cost effectively outside of SharePoint whilst still providing access via the SharePoint portal, thereby leveraging the investment already made. 

Anyway. If you want to learn about all this, get yourself along to the conference where some of our EDM software people from the US office will be happy to discuss and demonstrate the solution. We are also, I hear, sponsoring some free drinks called “Epsilons” at the SharePoint conference welcome reception. From what I hear these are quite an interesting blend – so go easy on them!   (the drinks, not the Infonic staff).

See you at booth #409!

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