Document Management Talk

Continuing on from where I started a couple of weeks back, here’s another of the new features of our recently announced 2.6 release of our document management software.

Searching for documents using structured fields like ‘Supplier Name’ or ‘Invoice number’ provides a quick and efficient way of locating specific documents that you know you should have, but what if you want to find documents based on criteria that aren’t in the structured indexes?

Using the new full text search capability you can search on document content as well, so for example if you are writing a proposal for something to do with ‘widgets’ you can now search for existing documents that contain ‘widgets’ AND ‘proposal’. This will list the relevant documents which you can then review with the key words highlighted.

Unlike some other document management products we can combine content with structured index searches, so we can search for things like ‘Customer Name = ACME’ and Content contains ‘widgets AND proposal’ so we can limit the documents to those where we know the Customer Name etc…

The searching works for both application documents like Microsoft Word and scanned images which are OCR’d to provide the searchable text. It will even accommodate OCR errors to a certain degree.

Tim

Despite our best efforts Microsoft managed to release Silverlight 4 before we got our Silverlight 3.5 based Document Manager released. 

Now I know we insisted we would not take advantage of the tempting new features that Silverlight 4 brings on the basis that we will never release the product if we don’t put the stake in the ground, but this time we made an exception.  

Any application built with Silverlight 4 (and there are many already) will automatically install Silverlight 4 when it runs, which will also replace the Silverlight 3.5 runtime. This means our Document Manager has to work with Silverlight 4 and that being so, our developers could not resist picking at some of the quick benefits. 

For someone who doesn’t understand the constraints of developing Web applications this is going to sound really lame, but we now have direct printing support for image documents so we have full control of the printing, page selection etc… all within Silverlight. Previously we had to deploy a ‘click once’ application which was not only a little clunky it also excluded us from non Microsoft platforms like the Apple Mac. Another nice feature is we can now drag and drop files from the Windows desktop straight into Document Manager, something which everyone takes for granted in desktop applications, but so nice to have on the Web. And lastly we finally get support for the right-click pop-up context menus.  I actually remember when we wrote version 1 of the product in 1999 and had trouble explaining to users they needed to right click to get a context menu. Now everyone just expects it, so I was dreading launching a product without it.   

See, I said it would sound lame, because these are things a normal end user would just expect to be there, but it’s a big step in terms of giving users the desktop feel to a web based application.

Tim

We have been a bit quiet on the blogging front because we have had our heads down getting out the new 2.6 release of our document management software. It’s been a sweat, but it has been worth it. Not only have we introduced new features in the software, but we have completely rewritten the documentation and have spent more QA time on it than any other previous release, making it the most reliable release we’ve ever had.

2.6 addresses a number of issues where we have been wanting in the past, like Active Directory and Windows 7. There are still a couple of restrictions regarding deployment on 64 bit servers but these will be resolved very shortly. There are some nice to demo features in there like OCR assisted indexing and a new full text search which apparently works !

Here are some of the important new features we’ve added:

•             Active Directory integration

•             Enhanced Full Text Search

•             OCR Assisted Indexing

•             Enhanced Screen Scrape Integration

•             Infonic Print Driver ( Print and Store from any application )

•             New MS.Office Addin ( Open/Save from Office Applications )

•             Infonic Filing Assistant ( Monitor folder for new files and Save )

•             Supports Windows 7

•             Email ‘Send’ adds Outlook signatures to emails

•             Speed improvements in searching / displaying result lists

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll take you through the new features. So I’ll start at the top of the list.

Active Directory Integration.

For larger organisations with more than just a dozen or so users it can be quite an overhead to initially configure and then maintain the lists of users in Document Manager.

With 2.6 we have the ability to integrate with your Active Directory to import selected groups and their members. The group permissions must still be defined in Document Manager but this is a one-off exercise and then membership of the groups can be managed in Active Directory.

It is still possible to have non Active Directory users so you can (for example) have external users defined in Document Manager.

Active Directory also brings the option of Single Sign On making the process of logging on much easier for your users.

For existing installations there is a synchronisation process that allows Active Directory users to be ‘mapped’ to existing Document Manager users, thereby preserving the audit records and permissions and preferences etc that already exist.

 Tim