Imaging Experts

Why This Job is So Much Fun

My wife teaches special needs pre-schoolers and finds she can make a huge difference in their lives from what they learn from her. I can’t say what I do has quite the same impact, but the combination of creating exciting technology and making a difference in the way the world operates gives me a sense of pride. Our customers truly value what we provide. When I compare my job to many others, I consider myself lucky.

The best indicator that a company provides value to its market is through its business success. If customers are willing to pay for what you create, it is a true endorsement for what you do. Over Snowbound’s 12+ years, we have provided value to over 1000 customers. And in most cases, it’s not pencil or paperclip value but technology that’s critical to the customer’s success. Without our product, they could have not have achieved what they needed.

And unlike some of my former companies where the technology is buried under the hood and isn’t explainable to your neighbor, the results we provide are viewable and appreciable. We literally are responsible for showing you the photograph, the mortgage papers, the insurance form or the medical record.

I welcome all our readers to submit their most interesting uses of our technology to me. We would love to highlight your innovation!

Some real world examples of how our technology is used:

• Capture of TV images to a computer image format
• Viewing massive airplane blueprints created before CAD
• An online editor for your cell phone photos
• Document conversion for cell phone viewing
• Mortgage application review – speeds the process by 2x over paper handling
• Insurance claims processing – we allow the claims adjuster to review your entire claim with you, without carrying tons of paper around
• Massive conversion of check images to more useful image types
• Presentation of your online photos as thumbnails for quick download and selection
• Viewing and processing freight bills of lading,
• County government letting you see your property titles documents online
• Fast retrieval of your archived medical record for your physician to review

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.

Can You Ignore Microsoft’s Office 2007 and its XML content within your CMS?

Microsoft’s office 2007, besides having a different look and feel, has also taken a major step toward international document conformance by storing document contents in XML format (within a ZIP file). This is an improvement in many ways but if you thought things were complicated before, they have now doubled.

XML, as a text based format, is much easier to open and examine. Having it stored within a ZIP is now old hat (Java programs are done this way all the time) and it saves space.

But processing these files is now harder. Not only do these files have to be split apart, any software available before that could handle them now needs to be updated. You will need, in general, new software to handle the files. And it will be hard to issue edicts against the generation or dissemination of these files because they will often be created and transmitted without the user’s knowledge. How can that be?

Microsoft, in order to promote the adoption of this new standard, has provided free plug-ins into old versions of MS Office that automatically and pretty much invisibly handle these new file formats. A simple, free download from within Office will accomplish that. And all new versions of MS Office generate these new files by default. The only obvious difference with these files is that the extension has the letter x as in .docx. And if you receive and edit one of these files, guess what extension it will have when you’re done? It’s a bit like a virus.

OK, simple fix. Have everyone go to the Microsoft website and update your MS Office components. But if you’re an organization with say 500 users of MS Office, are you ready or willing to upgrade them all, even if it’s free. Don’t you think there might be a few problems in that process?

So these files are coming, and it’s very hard to stop them. Right now, in dribs and drabs, but soon major torrents. Can you ignore them? Not if your business depends upon MS Office documents.

What’s the answer? Get informed. Keep informed. Talk to your suppliers. Monitor how you’re impacted. Stay tuned. Maybe a universal viewer will be the answer for you?

100, 200, 300 document formats – how many are enough?

If you're an OEM selling to a wide audience or servicing the needs of a large organization, you want to provide the broadest possible document support. When you see a claim for 300 or more image and document formats – your eyes must light up. You don’t have to think or survey your customers or the industry – this package must have it all!
… Think again.

What if you have a narrowly defined audience that you need to provide document support? That 300+ format package will work for you too, right?
… Think again.

Unfortunately there is no product substitute that nullifies the need for you to understand what your customers and you need.

All the vendors in the imaging tool business play the numbers game, but it doesn’t really help you make a rational decision. Numbers don’t equate with quality, they don’t equate with support, they don’t equate with platform choices, they don’t equate with performance and they don’t equate with providing what you need.

When a vendor mentions hundreds of formats, you might ask how many are still in use. If Wordstar and other obsolete word processor formats make up that list, does that help you? A better question to ask is whether the formats my customers or my organization use are supported? Are AFP or MO:DCA documents (popular within the IBM ECM world) included? How about Adobe Acrobat files or PCL files? In truth, because of the consolidation of the software industry, there are only 10-20 popular document and CAD formats.

And not only do you need to know if the right formats are supported, you need to know whether they perform. Is the rendering fast enough for you? Speed differences of 2x-5x are commonplace. Is it robust – does it support variants of the specification that commonly exist for formats like TIFF or PDF?

And lastly, you have to make trade-offs. Sometimes number of formats for speed, sometimes numbers for platform support. If you need it for Java or .NET or Unix, your choices narrow down. And if you need it for several platforms …you can only get it from Snowbound. :-)

Simon

Viewing Your ECM Documents on your iPhone using AJAX – what do I have to do?

Any article mentioning the iPhone is guaranteed to pique interest …but this isn’t a cheap trick, there is substance here as well.  Many of our customers find they need to deliver documents or content via several different methods to a variety of users – from power users and administrators to engineers and lawyers to retail customers.

Due to security concerns and potential support requirements, the rule of thumb nowadays when delivering content is thin client (usually a browser) for retail users and fatter client for internal or power users.  For example, you can’t presume or expect retail customers to download ActiveX controls or Java applets, even if they provide greater functionality.  The results are too variable and customer support can be demanding.  So an HTML thin client is a reasonable solution if it offers enough functionality.  Here is where AJAX comes in.  This increasingly popular browser technology allows you to create, among other things, HTML pages with dynamically updated image areas.  A good example is Google Maps.  Not a huge amount of functionality but enough for many document and drawing viewing purposes.  Response is quick because only the image area is updated; the rest of the page remains unchanged until you need to make it change.

And AJAX doesn’t require anything but Javascript which is standard in an HTML rendering engine like a browser.

So where does the iPhone come in?  Well, the iPhone runs the Safari web browser.  This web browser is fully functional, so it supports AJAX pages.  So if you want to view your bank statement or insurance claim without a computer, fire up your iPhone and start working!

Of course, a lot is happening behind the scenes.  The server based application, which can be a .NET server component or a Java servlet or some other technology, is opening up the documents,  rendering pages and sending down the appropriate images and HTML content down to the client.  Because most operations (rotate, zoom) on the client require a re-download of the image, it is critical that the server application be fast and powerful and that the data connection be fast.

And what if you’re a more traditional or a power user, and you need to have more functions?  Well, if properly designed, you can use a .NET client or a Java applet or some other “fat” client to communicate with the same server component to access your documents and work with them.  In those scenarios, you can perform document manipulation right on the client so rotation, zooming and even cropping can be done without re-downloading.  In this ideal situation, with the correct architecture one system can satisfy multiple platform technologies and multiple levels of users – how nice is that?

Consolidation of ECM Vendors – Is this Good or Bad for You?

Over the past couple of years, the Enterprise Content Management industry has been radically transformed by rapid consolidation. IBM* has purchased Filenet, EMC* has purchased Documentum and others, Open Text* has purchased Hummingbird and Oracle* has purchased Stellent. In fact, these companies have made many more acquisitions as well, heading in the direction of providing you all the services and technology you need to store, secure, retrieve and manipulate your electronic document content.

There is no mistaking that ECM has made it to industry’s mainstream. The only question is how quickly will all your content become electronic. The significant advantages are now understood by many –

• Requires your organization to create well documented processes that are controlled via the ECM system, allowing you to ensure compliance and audit ability

• Gives you the ability to get away from fragile and ephemeral paper documents for safety and convenience

• Provides easier and far faster methods of handling your work documents through central storage and retrieval

• Allows you to disperse your workforce, taking advantage of geographic cost differences to improve your bottom line and get disaster redundancy, without compromising your ability to get the work done.

So does this consolidation of vendors help you? Well, the famous one cheek to kiss, one throat to choke comes to mind. One vendor of substantial size that is responsible for the entire document stream is definitely a benefit to you. Though individual smaller vendors can provide expert solutions for their niche, it’s very difficult to tie many disparate systems together. It’s hard enough even when all the components are under the same roof. If you’re betting your company on this kind of solution, you want to deal with a company of comparable scale.

As important and beneficial it is for you to have one vendor responsible for your entire document processing workflow, there is a downside. When you could mix and match components, you could “customize” a solution. Now you may have to hope your new, very large “partner of choice” isn’t so big and preoccupied that they can’t handle your special needs.

That’s why a very special niche remains for expert system integrators and companies like ours who know the systems you’re buying and are experienced in making them work for companies like yours. Every Fortune 2000 customer of ours depends on such integrators who can work with them, with the ECM vendor and with us.

So what do we bring to the table? As much as we would prefer every one of our customer acquisitions was an easy one, our reputation rests on the opposite. So many of our loyal customers have been won over by the success we’ve had in solving their problems. And what were these problems?

The issues that most commonly relate to our core competency are as follows:

• You need to view a document format that isn’t supported by the ECM system

• You work with documents that are very large and slow to retrieve from the repository

• You want to tailor the look and feel of this new system to emulate the old one so you don’t have to retrain your entire staff

Our value-add in these situations is our unique expertise in dealing with multiple document types and understanding how to most efficiently work with them. We can provide one common interface to all the users who need to work with documents. Rather than having to open up multiple applications when dealing with disparate documents (from faxes to scanned letters to PDF documents to color photos), our universal viewer approach streamlines the ability to work with all these “papers”. We have saved untold millions of dollars for our customers by tailoring their ECM systems in this way.

Be prepared – verify that all your important document handling needs will be met – and ask for proof. If they tell you it can’t be done, or you have questions, call us.

Call 617 607-2010 or pres@snowbound.com

 

* - All companies listed are customers of Snowbound.