Imaging Experts

What To Do with Those Legacy Documents and Images?

There are whole industries rising today dedicated to the premise that when you upgrade your ECM system, you must also convert all your corporate documents, if stored in legacy formats, to a new, more modern format. These recommendations are made partially because the old format may not be readable or can’t be manipulated by your new ECM system and partially because you are told the new document formats are better.

In principle, that makes sense. All of us worry about obsolescence. Additionally many of the legacy formats were modified versions of TIFF or IBM’s ImagePlus (MO:DCA and AFP) format that could not be opened by standard software. So when your new vendor recommends you convert to the current standards of unmodified TIFF and PDF, it’s because they are pretty much universally accepted and trusted. If you had to take bets on what would survive the next 50 to 100 years, other than .txt files, TIFF and PDF would head the list.

So what’s the catch? None, if your document repository is small. But if you have terabytes of stored data, like many companies do today, it’s not a simple matter. For those situations, the process is most likely expensive, time consuming and disruptive to your business processes.  And for many companies, the reason those documents are in the repository is because they’re not needed often or at all. So how much sense does it make to spend large sums of money to analyze, convert, verify and store data that may never be needed again.

Is there another way? Sure. Get a system that can read your archived data directly. The nice thing about software systems is that they don’t wear out. The hardware may break but the software will continue to run as before. So, if the system can read your legacy data now, it will do so forever (or at least until that vendor discontinues support and you can’t get hardware with that OS any longer). You gain several advantages:

a) You save on conversion costs

b) You save the time and effort – this translates to big savings on top of the conversion cost savings. Some companies that migrate large amounts of data have 10 year planning horizons.

c) You can utilize your old system, even after migration, to access that data. There are many times that functions from the old systems aren’t carried over to the new. Significant economies could be achieved through continued use of the old system if some members of your staff don’t require the new system’s features.

d) Migration to the new system is far easier and quicker if you don’t have to wait on data conversion

e) You’re not as dependent on the new vendor. Worst case, you can fall back to the old system because the data is still accessible and usable.

Snowbound is in the enviable position of providing products to both sides of the fence here. We read the old stuff or we can convert it to the new. Take your pick.

Why Microsoft Sharepoint is turning the ECM industry on its ear

Given Microsoft claims well over 80 million Sharepoint users, no one in the business computing world is unaware of Sharepoint and how popular it’s become.

Microsoft has cleverly used its virtual monopoly power, its ability to give things away for free (at least to start), and leverage of its familiar user interface to leapfrog into a powerful position in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space. Though the word Enterprise may be an exaggeration for most of the users, who are thought to be storing departmental documents, it is easy to see and project scaling upwards.

A recurring theme from Microsoft is to capitalize on its strengths and position. They can afford to give things away, they can afford to take the long view (to when they can make money on it), and for almost any product they create, they can get instant mindshare by bundling it with Windows.

Clearly Sharepoint is a hit. Cheap entry, familiar interface and easy installation lead to instant utility. Some of our customers already have thousands of Sharepoint installations that are spreading virally – with very little control by central IT.

What should you do? Well, if you’re not in the mood to budget for large steps into ECM, this is any easy way to get started. You simply need a Server 2003 or higher platform and MS Office clients. Basic Sharepoint including database is a no charge download for that audience. So it’s free, it’s effective and it’s easy to use. It may not be compliance ready but for many departmental scenarios, that’s irrelevant. If you need to scale, there’s a higher-end Sharepoint available now and more features will be coming.

And because the established vendors can’t ignore this phenomenon, they offer integration to their higher-end enterprise oriented systems, and that will also get better with time. Meanwhile Microsoft is offering an enterprise growth path as well …and competition is good for you.

So why am I writing this blog? Well it’s exciting to see such change and such rapid acceptance of a new product, but it’s also an opportunity. No ECM vendor does it all. If you need Sharepoint to access more than MS Office documents , you can use our Virtual Viewer to scale up to a greater range of documents including MS Office, PDFs, TIFFs, JPEGs and legacy IBM Plus documents. Other needs that we satisfy include universal tools for annotation and page manipulation functions or for dealing with very large or confidential, repository documents that shouldn’t be transmitted to the client. Specialized viewers like ours and those from other companies fit that niche. And because we can be more nimble than a Fortune 2000, we can be responsive to your special needs.

Comments or suggestions? Pres2008@snowbound.com

How Do You Know Whether the Product You’re Buying Will Work for You?

Over my entire career, as a technical, non-engineer selling to engineers, I’ve always been in a quandary on how to evaluate the products my company has either bought or sold. Too often how a product suits a specific application is at least a partial mystery until you actually implement it. Industry-wide, 50% of all new projects fail; either because the product didn’t work, didn’t suit the application or the engineers didn’t implement it adequately.

Those kinds of statistics make most people cautious when embarking on a new project. But you can’t remain in your cave, you have to act to get things done. Technology does improve and there are many products out there that will help your company and you in your job. If you’re buying a product new to you, what should you do?

Well, nothing beats industry acceptance. I become a believer when users tell me a product is good. You, as a buyer, can benefit from the same approach. With so many products out there, and so many differing situations, it’s still not an easy or certain process but there are ways.

What do I recommend?

• Check industry acceptance by reading white papers, talking to references and product reviews by analysts and reviewers.
• Take your own test drive – whether an evaluation or simply reading through the documentation. Are the product features, documentation and support truly there and not just on a page on the website?
• In today’s world, where websites and emails can be created by anyone, you really need to make sure there’s an entire company behind the website. Does the customer list look real, do other companies know of this company, are they an approved vendor to your company, is the copyright on the website up to date, do they stand behind their technology, and do they tell you who the executives are?
• When you have a question, does someone answer your phone call, do you get a quick reply to your email, and does it feel like it isn’t the first time they’ve dealt with a customer? When you have a problem, do you get a quick, correct answer or at least a thoughtful question back?

Every company and product has good and bad things to relate – do your homework. Never make a decision on the basis of one data point.

In Snowbound’s case, we have twelve years of experience solving problems for demanding developers with challenging requirements. When we can point to so many that have successfully continued to use our product for all these years, we know we’re doing something right.

Why Does Helping My Daughter Take an Imaging Expert?

My daughter, an aspiring journalist currently interning for New York Magazine, called us in a panic. She needed to resubmit her resume for next summer, and her clippings were needed. But we were in Boston and she was in New York – and she needed it right away.

What’s a father to do? I had been hoping to go for a run before work that morning – it was surprisingly warm – but this had precedence. My wife got out the clippings (I had kind of hoped everything was available online) and I could see it wasn’t going to be easy.

The clippings were pasted two sided on cardboard and they had color elements. They were also larger than 8.5x11. And I knew that they couldn’t just be legible, they had to look pretty good, but they had to be sized appropriately for email.

I took a first stab with my standard scanning software on my Epson flatbed scanner. File size for one page – 22 MB! That wasn’t going to do it. I decided to try a PNG conversion and realized why it had never really gotten popular – the text didn’t look good. Finally I resorted to the tried and true JPEG. First file size was only 200 KB but it didn’t look good. So I went back and forth on JPEG compression values until each page was readable and looked pretty good – around 1 MB each. Ok, those I could email. Success! And only about 30 minutes – fortunately because I was familiar with the trade-offs.

So what did I learn? Well, most people wouldn’t have checked the initial image size and would only find out it was too big when the email bounced. Others would have gone for a smaller file size and learned too late it printed poorly. So success requires knowledge, speed and adaptability. Sort of Snowbound’s motto…

And if you think this isn’t applicable to business, I disagree. The intricacies of handling the multitude of imaging requirements out there in an efficient manner is not trivial and it is quite hard if you don’t understand the issues. It is not uncommon for customers to take a multipage mixed color/black and white document, run it through the scanner and only realize after a while that their repository is getting full way too quickly and processing these documents is taking minutes instead of seconds. Persondays might be wasted before it’s realized that mixed color documents can very quickly put your process in jeopardy if you don’t distinguish between them and black and white documents.

So, as above – success requires knowledge, speed and adaptability.

Customized Tools That Gain You a Competitive Advantage!

Though many of our customers buy our standard, off-the-shelf RasterMaster tools or FlexSnap universal viewing solutions, a surprising number have special requests. A great motivation for these requests is to embed capabilities within their product that their competitors can’t offer.

Requests come in for configurable viewers that can be easily modified to the needs of a particular client (for example - data entry versus administrator) without requiring the purchase and maintenance of two different applications. Other queries come in for special enhancements that allow our viewers to duplicate an existing viewer in look and feel. This allows an easy replacement of legacy products without requiring re-training the “troops.” Other features, like our FlexSnap virtual document support, came about because a customer wanted to dramatically increase the speed of their insurance claim form processing.

Some of our recent PDF vector display and annotation improvements came about because a customer wanted to reduce the time it took to review blueprints when using their current the paper method. By duplicating the look and feel of their approval and review stamps but enabled online, they could get rid of paper and pencil and all the issues inherent in handling physical media. Dramatic improvements in throughput resulted.

For customers who have even more extreme demands of operating systems or hardware platforms, we have created down-sized or ported versions of our RasterMaster libraries that satisfy their specific market or customers. Sometimes download size is an issue or perhaps it’s a particular platform – for example an AMD 64 bit processor – that helps that customer compete. Our products are designed to be portable and maintainable while maintaining their performance benefits, even when customized. 

We win when you win! Give us a call.