Document Management Blog

After nine months of planning, coding, QA testing, and Beta evaluations… the big day is finally here: Today ColumbiaSoft released its ninth edition of our document management software - Document Locator Version 5.2. For those who are interested in:

• Email compliance, discovery or retrieval,
• Document delivery (file hand-off),
• Adobe Acrobat integration and digital signatures, or
• Improved document workflow

… This release will be especially interesting to you.

Check out our Web site to learn more about the latest version, and also read today’s Document Locator v5.2 press announcement.

Written by: Jim Kemp

For employees whose job dictates that they regularly create new documents, having access to an intuitive and easy to use version control system is a major advantage. Early in my career I distinctly remember the struggles I experienced creating specification documents, training guides, and other business related documentation. Authoring the content was challenging enough, but the issues were compounded by the processes associated with saving revisions, routing the documents for approvals, and distributing the final version to the intended recipients.

Version control is defined by Wikipedia as “the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” While that definition is accurate, I think my brother put it best when he said “version control is akin to having unlimited edit-undo.” When creating documents using a version control system, the author has the capability of recording snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle. Having access to snapshots of the document is especially helpful when the author needs to rewrite or remove a section of a document. Prior to working with a document management system, I am embarrassed to admit to the number of times I removed entire sections of a document without saving off a version of the file. Deleting sections from a document inevitably leads to rework and it did for me countless times.

The symptoms of a business needing a version control system are easy to recognize. The primary symptom is when users have file names saved with special extensions detailing the file version’s “something” (date, editor’s initials, or internal revision number). Experienced document authors compensate for not having a document management system by developing their own naming conventions for each document revision. As a result, their ‘My Documents’ folder is littered with countless revisions of documents using specialized file naming conventions such as filename – date – revision.ext. Modifying file names can partially address the individual author’s version control needs, but invariably leads to wide-scale confusion across an organization. The confusion is exacerbated when versions of files are emailed to others in the organization responsible for editing and/or approving the documents. Often the email recipients save a local copy of the file using yet another naming standard before performing their edits. When the files are returned, the original author now has a trail of dissimilar named files that require manual consolidation and cannot be easily audited.

In engineering and software departments, version control systems have been commonly used for decades. One Tree Software, in the early 1990s, developed the most prolific version control system for application engineers called ‘SourceSafe’ for Windows. One Tree Software was subsequently purchased by Microsoft and the SourceSafe application became integrated as part of Microsoft Visual Studio (Microsoft’s software development application suite) since 1995. Visual SourceSafe (VSS) became a widely adopted tool for managing versions of source code files, but never gained popularity with users outside of the engineering and software development teams.

The document management industry recognized the benefits that engineers were experiencing with version control and sought to bring equivalent functionality to the rest of the business community. Before that vision would be realized, a new breed of intuitive, integrated document management system needed to be developed that supported how document creators produced content. Business users required the essential version control features that engineers had come to expect such as saving revisions of documents, notes for detailing specific versions of the file, and the capability to promote historical versions of a file. However unlike the engineers, the business users also demanded advanced document management functionality including integration into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat applications, electronic workflow for routing documents, electronic review and approval, digital signatures, document retention schedules, and profiling with metadata indexing.

Today business users have the opportunity to deploy a document management system that provides their users with robust version control functionality. Document creators from diverse industries gain notable efficiencies by utilizing a version control system for maintaining revisions of their documents. The benefits they realize include having access to all historical data associated with the document being generated, a complete document log detailing who and when a document was accessed, and the assurance that all of the versions of the document are stacked in the document’s version history and not concealed through varied naming standards. Can your organization afford not to provide your document authors with the tools they need to efficiently and confidently create the documents that drive your organization?

Written by: Scott Zieg

Document management systems provide users the capability to index documents using metadata attributes. These index attributes, when applied in a consistent fashion, can provide users with the capability to quickly find and retrieve associated documents. The question is… how do you enforce consistent metadata indexing for all of your documents? Relying on free-form text to index documents in an environment consisting of multiple locations and numerous users will not work.

A classic example is when a user is prompted to enter a business name. Even a household name such as Dell has numerous potential spellings, like: “Dell”, “Dell, Inc.”, “Dell Computing”, or “Dell Corporation”. In each of the representations, the good news is the name Dell is consistently included which allows for semi-efficient LIKE searches against the system. For more complex company names such as Pfizer, simply ensuring a portion of the name is entered correctly is a challenge. Finding 100% of the related documents requires ensuring the attributes used to represent the same entity are entered identically each time.

The easiest approach to ensure consistent metadata is to provide users with intelligent drop-downs that allow them to quickly select from a list of approved entries. There are interface designs that people use on a regular basis that utilize drop-down tools. For example, when purchasing online, often there is a drop-down list containing all of the abbreviations of the states/provinces in the United States and Canada. Living in Oregon, I have learned that if I press the ‘O’ key 3 times, Oregon usually gets selected and I can quickly move on to the next field. Entering metadata for documents should be a comparable experience. The key is to provide users with the ability to enter accurate data with the “least amount of strokes” – golfers should love that analogy!

So the next logical questions are “where does the list of allowable index variables come from?” and “how does it get maintained?” In the state abbreviations example, the available list is small and rarely changes making storing and maintaining the list a simple assignment. However, with most implementations the indexing requirements include much larger populations of dynamic data including customer information, document categories, and project attributes. For most of my customers, this data already exists in one or more of their computer systems such as the CRM system, the ERP system, and/or the project management system. By leveraging the existing business applications’ existing data, users performing the role of indexing documents can get intelligent, real-time dynamic drop-downs without maintaining redundant sets of data.

Ensuring that index information is consistent across the repository is only half of the equation. The remainder is to ensure that the indexing information can be applied to the document in the most efficient manner. To that end, a robust document management system provides the capability to automatically index a significant portion of the metadata information using what ColumbiaSoft refers to as “nested profile properties”. Imagine if the process of indexing documents required only entering a customer’s identification number and the remaining index attributes such as customer name, region, and account manager were automatically populated. By linking attributes using ODBC connections and applying business intelligence rules, the data can be quickly and accurately indexed allowing your entire company to efficiently manage documents.

Efficiently applying consistent index information to your documents using a document management system will improve your organization’s ability to find, leverage, and manage your critical business documents. The first thing I hear from recent document management converts is the remarkable time savings and efficiencies their organizations realized by having properly indexed their documents. For example, time-intensive activities like responding to customer inquiries are minimized to quick tasks, which frees up resources to work on core business activities.

Written by: Scott Zieg

Included in Document Locator v5.2 are several enhancements to the workflow system. One enhancement already generating enormous fanfare in the user community is the overhauled notification system. Previous generations of Document Locator dutifully rendered and distributed email messages to the appropriate users notifying them based on the required task. These notifications included relevant information such as workflow task details, file index information, and user entered comments.

What ColumbiaSoft heard from our user community was that the existing messaging solution worked. The notification messages contained the appropriate content and were reliably received by their intended recipient notifying them of subscription events, pending workflow tasks, or user initiated notifications. As with anything, however, there is always room for improvement. Many customers told us they wanted to have the capability to design custom notifications.

The result: we designed a configurable email notification template architecture in v5.2. The new HTML-based template framework allows users to merge variable data from Document Locator into pre-configured HTML-based email templates. This architecture enables customers (maybe with help from their graphic designers) to create templates based on the company’s own brand or look and feel. These templates can include embedded images, CSS styles, table formatting, confidentiality statements, and more. Because the templates are HTML-based, any standard design tool can be employed including graphics-based design tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

One of the 5.2 beta customers “test drove” the new email notification system and created a report-style email for customer distribution via a workflow process. The notification system uses tokens to dynamically merge metadata attributes into pre-configured HTML templates. The design also supports one-to-many data relationships as it loops through sections creating multiple lines. This enables the report-style email notification being tested by the customer. In their example, the email report included their corporate logo along with detailed information pertaining to all of the files being distributed through their workflow process.

Configurable email notification templates are included as part of Document Locator v5.2, so note to DL customers… get ready to brush up on your design skills and start gathering your thoughts about how configurable notifications could benefit your organization. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories about implementing the configurable notifications and how it impacted your organization.

Written by: Scott Zieg

When considering new enterprise software, demos are almost always a step in the process. Very few people ever buy an ERP system, or deploy a CRM system, without first kicking the tires. Document management usually falls in the same category… And we agree, it’s good to see and learn before you buy. That’s why we hold at least two live, regularly scheduled web demos every week where people visiting our web site can simply register and attend at their convenience. Our document management demo expert is Mary, and she guides each audience through the ins and outs of version control, searching, document workflow, scanning paper documents, and even remote access. If you are interested in watching one of Mary’s document management demo’s, please feel free to register anytime.

Written by: Jim Kemp

An interesting poster arrived in the mail today. A galactic map of the Silicon Forest Universe. And right there, not so far, far away, was ColumbiaSoft’s own galaxy nestled between the 4th and 5th rings of the massive Tektronix universe.

The poster is a second generation of the map to result from research by Virginia Tech University and Portland State University. The first map of Northwest technology companies was published in a 2003 edition of the universe poster. ColumbiaSoft was a much smaller company back in 2003. Our galaxy was still forming then, and we were too small to be seen yet by the naked eye in the universe sky. So, now we’re more than a little excited to know that we’ve introduced document management to the universe.

Written by: Jim Kemp

I recently read that product managers categorically receive the most emails in the company. Reading this brought a grin across my face - misery loves company. My email inbox gets bombarded daily with product enhancement ideas, consulting proposals, internal questions, meeting requests, and industry articles. For me, it’s an imperative that our employees have a means to organize and manage their entire volume of emails. Without these tools, we could never leverage the wealth of reference and historical data contained within the email archives.

As Product Manager at ColumbiaSoft, I speak with managers and executives from a number of industries including AEC, pharmaceutical, facilities management, legal, health and manufacturing that are inundated with emails and need solutions for managing them. It is clear that there are differing needs across an organization based on a person’s job responsibility. With employees working in a project-based environment there is tremendous value in having the capability to store and manage your emails in the same directory structure as the bulk of your project documents. For IT and corporate executives, the capability to provide fast and accurate e-Discovery, to meet regulatory compliance, and to allow employees to restore their own lost emails is exceedingly important.

Email has a number of inherent shortcomings. It is de-humanizing, riddled with unscrupulous SPAM, and seeps beyond the regular work day. Unfortunately, many of those issues are beyond my control. (My only advice is to avoid those invasive handhelds that beam email communications to you 24 hours a day. ) But, there are real world issues we can confront such as providing solutions for employees to help organize emails alongside their project documents in addition to providing IT staff tools for managing the backend email archive.

In a project-based environment, one of the most endemic problems is gaining access to emails that are siloed in a project manager’s inbox. Non-email documents associated with a project such as contracts, schedules, and specifications are typically stored on a shared file server to promote collaboration across the project team. Project-related email storage is not. A manager’s inbox will contain critical information that affects the direction of a project, yet the data is trapped on an island. Even though the information contained in these emails normally gets disseminated to the team members, when unexpected contingencies arise (and they do) the team does not receive critical information. This costs money, time, and credibility. Imagine if the project manager had automated email rules configured in MS Outlook that stored and indexed project related documents in the same directory structure as the other critical documents, thus providing the entire team access to critical information regardless of the PM’s availability.

Dealing with the volume of email in your inbox is difficult enough, but let’s not forget the struggles that your IT staff has dealing with maintaining the servers 24/7, providing for disaster recovery, and dealing with the constant requests for retrieving lost or deleted emails from backups. To lessen the load on the IT staff, I recommend migrating older emails that are bloating the MS Exchange server to an email archive solution. Leading email archive software packages offer a variety of solutions that expedite many labor intensive tasks that burden IT departments. One such task is handling e-Discovery requests. Unless you have ever been involved with an e-Discovery process, it’s difficult to imagine the complexity of aggregating all relevant data across your organization and from dispersed systems. With litigation so frequent in many industries, IT teams are too often dragged into e-Discovery without the benefit of tools that simplify gathering and distributing the data. Having an email archive tool capable of providing instant search results based on sender, recipient, body content, and attachments along with associated emails tracked through threading information can shorten e-Discovery processes significantly. Another common time drain for IT is handling requests for copies of lost or deleted emails. Imagine if all of the company’s inbound and outbound emails were stored in an email archive solution capable of providing secure access to the archive so that IT staff could enforce smaller Exchange database size limits while providing emails 24/7 access to emails they either sent or received.

Regardless of whether you view email as a blessing or curse, it’s here to stay. The question is now how best to deal with managing and archiving emails along with the myriad of other documents amassed in your organization. With the software packages being offered by several document management companies focused on integrating email management and document management into a single solution, I think they are worth investigating in more detail.

Written by: Scott Zieg

We talk a lot about Document Management here, without a lot of particulars on how to get it, or as importantly, how to explain its value to others. That’s intentional, because we are not “salesy” in this blog, rather just informative. But, something struck me in a meeting with a finance company the other day that seemed would be helpful for the “internal selling” job most of us must to do when we find just about any new technology we want… but first have to get others in our company to buy-in. So, only in the interest of education, I’ll point out an interesting fact that just might help you in your task of internal selling.

There is something called IRS Section 179. I’m not a tax guy, so I won’t pretend to know the details. But, this year as part of an economic stimulus package that Congress passed, companies may be able to deduct double the amount of previous years - up to $250,000 - for qualified purchases. The short of it is, it might be worth mentioning to your accounting department, who may need to talk to your tax people, and so on. In considering technology purchases for the year… especially if you are a small to medium size business - Section 179 benefits are probably something to be aware of.

If you are interested in learning a little more, here’s an announcement with FirstCorp that came out of that meeting I mentioned above.

Written by: Jim Kemp

The term ‘document management’ has been employed by marketers to describe a broad spectrum of business functions including document scanning, version control, document retrieval, document creation, electronic and paper archiving, document retention, and more. Despite the multitude of definitions, at the core of a robust document management system is an indexing system that is configured to easily capture metadata attributes that map to a customer’s business process.

When introducing document management concepts to people for the first time, I recommend beginning the discussion with an overview of how metadata attributes are used to index documents. While the idea of indexing documents is new to many workers, the concept of structuring data for search and retrieval dates back centuries. As far back as records were kept, hand written documents such as birth certificates were stored in folders and boxes based upon an agreed upon structure designed for easy document retrieval. Shelves, filing cabinets, boxes and folders were used to implement a logical sub-structure system for bulk storing documents. An early example of the records storage process was used by governments for maintaining birth certificates. The storage of birth certificates could be maintained in a filing cabinet labeled by the Hospital’s name, in a drawer marked with the year in a folder named by the month. In the birth certificate example, Hospital Name, Year and Month are metadata attributes designed to allow for efficient document retrieval.

With the evolution of affordable shared file servers, everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. Workers are now producing exponentially more documents (thankfully most are electronic), yet the process of storing and retrieving the documents is similar to existing paper-based storage techniques. Despite the advances in technology, most businesses are storing and managing documents on shared file servers using folder structures that essentially mirror the paper filing process. With the paper-based birth certificate storage example above, would the storage and retrieval process be different if all of the birth certificates were digitally scanned on to a shared file server? Probably not. There would be a folder named Hospital with sub folder of Year containing a child sub folder for each month of the year. Within the individual month folders would be the birth certificate records with a naming convention like “social security number – last name.pdf”.

Digitizing manual processes can generate great efficiencies, especially with what I refer to as “sneakernet” – people running around retrieving and moving documents by hand. When a request is received for a copy of a birth certificate on a shared file server, a clerk would easily be able locate the original records from their PC instead of physically rifling through a filing cabinet. Storage based exclusively on a folder hierarchy fails when there is a requirement to retrieve information not represented by the folder structure. Imagine, for example, an immediate need to gather all birth certificates with Dr. Smith as attending physician over the last 9 months. If the doctor’s information is not associated with the folder structure or part of the file’s name, manually opening and reading through the content of all the documents throughout the storage system is the only option for gathering the required records.

When properly implemented, document management systems allow users to store documents in a logical folder structure while also including useful metadata attributes and full-text indexing capabilities. The combination of a logical tree-based folder structure and metadata provide users the ability to quickly navigate to documents or to perform detailed searches for the information they need. The additional metadata associated with each document generally allows for a flatter (fewer sub-folders) storage hierarchy meaning easier navigation and fewer misfiling of documents because the metadata attributes are displayed on the screen along side of the files as sortable column values. In addition, metadata attributes and full-text indexing allows for searching that breaks the bounds of a folder structure eliminating costly labor intensive searches when the search criteria doesn’t match the folder structure format.

Written by: Scott Zieg

Developing software applications that solve real-world problems requires getting to know your market space. For software companies this typically involves aggregating data from a number of sources including customers, support personnel, enhancement requests, sales staff, and post-mortems from consulting engagements. While there is no doubt that normal requirements gathering techniques help, there is no better way to understand your customers’ needs than to “walk a mile in their shoes.” When working with companies in the AEC industry, getting a firsthand glimpse into how your software is being used can be an eye-opening and memorable experience.

Recently Robie Lewis and I had the opportunity to tag along with the lead Quality Examiner at an oil sands refinery construction site near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta (Canada). At this facility, enormous reactors and miles of piping are used to process oil sands rich with bitumen into a wide range of synthetic crude oils. The construction project is part of an overall plant expansion designed to double the capacity of the facility. Luckily for us, our visit was on a sunny, warm day in July. I understand that this area of Canada can see temperatures as low as -40 degrees during the winter – BURRR!

In visiting the site, we were warned ahead of time that certified steel-toe boots were required, along with various other safety gear. Before being permitted on to the job site, a safety orientation program/test was administered which is mandatory for all visitors to the facility. The safety orientation program depicted the various dangers we would encounter. The reality of man vs BIG machine was very intimidating. Imagine staring straight up from the base of a 150 ft tall reactor which resembled one of NASA’s solid rocket boosters while a crane not 15 feet away is hoisting a 20-ton structure in the air.

Spending time with the Quality Examiners on the job site wearing their steel-toe boots, hard hats, safety goggles, and a fluorescent safety vest brought to life how they perform their inspection roles while interacting with a document control process. Taking the time to understanding the people, the process, and the environment is important when implementing valuable solutions. I know the information gathered from this experience will improve the overall solution for this customer and will undoubtedly influence future Document Locator implementations.

Photo: Robie and I suiting up for our tour of the construction site.

Written by: Scott Zieg