Imaging Experts

AIIM and OnDemand – Great Venue for ECM Technology

What could be better? The biggest trade show of the year for us comes to our home town for two years, in a brand new, awesome convention center near the waterfront. So what if someone didn’t tell the event organizers that April isn’t Boston’s best month, and that March next year can’t be better.

This was a great opportunity for us to announce a lot of different things, from our annual version upgrades for Windows, Unix and Java to new features for our FlexSnap Java document review systems. New capabilities like multiple document handling, improved annotation security and powerful page manipulation have been very enthusiastically accepted by our beta customers. 

We also started to show off our FlexSnap .NET viewer, also very eagerly anticipated, and due for general release in this quarter.

The show was also a great opportunity to meet with many of our customers including 18 exhibitor customers. I think it says a lot when you satisfy that many purveyors of commercial ECM systems. 

There was also a lot of buzz because of the recent acquisitions in the ECM world. IBM purchasing Filenet is an interesting opportunity for us to further expand our reach in the Java viewer space. And with the purchase of Stellent by Oracle, many of Stellent’s customers have to reassess whether they can work with Oracle – who competes in so many verticals.

For the enjoyment of our customers and friends, we also offered free handwriting analysis and a party on opening day at our booth. If you made it, I hope you enjoyed it.  If not, plan on it for next year – in early March. 

But if you’ve got a need for some high performance imaging products/technology, don’t wait for next year – tell us now.

-Simon

Document Archiving – It’s Not So Simple

Many of our customers are now being driven by Sarbanes-Oxley regulations as well as a variety of other internal and external guidelines to archive their documents, memos, slide presentations, emails and even Instant Messages. With these documents stored safely away, a company can provide regulators and customers with proof of what was communicated to their customers.

For example, if a financial planner used a Powerpoint presentation to recommend a safely diversified stock portfolio to a client but the client remembers that he was told simply to buy Vonage, that’s an opportunity for a lawsuit. Since lawsuits can take years to come to court, it is imperative that companies store their marketing and sales literature for long periods of time, and that when the time comes to present the material, there’s an application that can read it. Additionally if it relates to a court battle or some other hotly disputed issue, it is important to be able to prove that the document was not altered while stored.

We all know, however, that companies sometimes generate new versions of their applications that become incompatible with old documents and can’t be read. (Did you know that today NASA can’t decipher the magnetic tapes on which the plans for the Saturn moon rocket are stored? There are no tape drives that read those tapes and no software that will decipher the data if you could read it.) Some of the customers who come to us for archiving requirements need to be able to guarantee they can read archived documents for 100 years or more.

Though it might seem reasonable to presume you’ll archive the application that created the document along it, that’s not a sure thing. Applications depend on operating systems and hardware architecture.  Will there be an Intel Pentium type chip 50 years from now that will support today’s applications? Will there be an OS that runs on those future chips that will run that application? The current thinking is that for proper archiving, you will need to convert all your documents to a standard format that has greater likelihood or surviving the test of time.

Though there are no fully accepted standards for document archiving, there are several strong possibilities.  TIFF is the strongest contender because it has been around the longest time, no vendor considers it their format, and it is hard to edit. A new variant of PDF intended for archival use is another contender, but because Adobe owns this format, many companies remain concerned.

So if you want to archive today, what’s the best bet? We think it’s to use powerful conversion programs that can read and convert your PDF documents, Word documents, HTML pages, emails, Spreadsheets, Powerpoints, MO:DCA docs, CAD drawings and JPEGs to TIFF. Then in the future, one TIFF reader will allow you to deal with all your archived material. Just make sure that the conversion software is accurate and comprehensive enough to deal with all your archiving needs.

I’m sure many of you have alternate or differing opinions. Be sure to leave your comments here.

-Simon

Why Should You Care about Check Imaging?

A group of us recently attended the 2007 BAI show in Orlando. In addition to being a great excuse to get away from the cold Northeast (and have an opportunity to get mired in the Jet Blue Valentine’s day misadventure), it was a fascinating conference about the current state of check imaging. Given many of the leading banks and financial institutions as well as bank software vendors use our products, it was also a great opportunity to meet with some of our largest customers.

The pace of replacing checks with images has radically accelerated in the past six months as the Check 21 Truncation Act has seen more widespread implementation. At this point, more than 50% of all checks in the United States are scanned at or near the point of deposit. Thereafter the paper checks are stored and only the images are transmitted between the banks and their customers.

Benefits

The benefits to the banks are reduced handling costs because the burden of transporting checks in Leer jets around the country to be cleared has been radically diminished. Additionally they’ve achieved greater security and redundancy since check images are relatively easy to centrally protect and archive. The benefits to their customers are faster processing and access to funds and the ability to receive their bank statements on-line, including images of the checks they’ve written.

How does this apply to you?

Well, whether dealing with checks or other records, replacing paper documents with images is now the mainstream. If documents as critical as checks can be replaced with electronic facsimiles then most other documents can be as well. The future is here.

Is your organization doing all it can to incorporate paper and electronic documents into one system that provides easy but secure access to all such data? Systems now exist to allow you to seamlessly work with both scanned documents and electronic documents such as MS Office and Acrobat files.

What to Avoid?

One overriding theme of all the financial institutions speaking at the conference was that choosing the right vendor for their imaging needs was absolutely critical. All of them had stories of being held back by vendors who weren’t ready for their latest requirements or who created partially or wholly erroneous images.

Avoiding Bad Data

Like most scanned documents, check images include metadata. This metadata includes various kinds of fields including account information, scan date, scan location, type of document, type of image, indexing data, number of pages and other kinds of information. There were many stories of vendors that scrambled data, placing information in the wrong fields. (Our own experience at Snowbound over the years bears this out – we discover many images corrupted through misinterpreted specifications.)

Other stories were passed around about vendors who may have been specialists in scanning but not in image manipulation and who generated poor quality or incomplete images. Looking at some of the images from an imaging expert’s perspective, it was obvious to us that many suppliers didn’t use or know how to apply tricks of the trade that make images more readable.  And if you’ve ever looked at the back of the check after scanning, that’s critical.

Conclusion

Not all vendors are created equal. Select carefully for a vendor who fully understands what you need and has the experience and expertise to provide you with the best possible solution. It’s a competitive marketplace – choose the best vendors and tools to insure your success.

-Simon

The Importance of Contracts

How to control delays in purchasing your product

The entire software industry has been dramatically affected over the past year with tougher and tougher requirements for protection on software purchases. Corporate legal departments have received a mandate to make demands of their software vendors for greater protection from patent infringement and/or third party (or open source) code that may not have a clean pedigree. Greater demands have also been made for insurance protection for all kinds of risks including data theft as well as property damage and personnel injuries.

Additional demands have been made for source code escrow and code examination for Trojan horses, time bombs, viruses and deactivation routines.  Some companies are even demanding the right to examine a software company’s engineering development process, QA procedures and even emergency planning. They may ask to examine the company’s financials in order to determine whether your vendor will be around much longer. Background checks may be demanded of support and development personnel who might be viewing your sensitive data.

How does this impact the engineering department when procuring software products? Certainly it can cause significant delays in getting your purchase approved.  You may have to do more research to be able to explain to your legal department why you need this product and how much risk the company may incur by its purchase. You may also discover that your legal department has created new policies that your preferred software vendor won’t accept.

What can you do?

Find out as much as you can with regards to your company’s software license policies early on. If there’s going to be discussion over a lot of details, get it started early. If you can discover where your company will bend on licensing requirements that can shorten the cycle. Many companies have a one size fits all license policy that may work for licensing from a Fortune 500 but will not when dealing with a smaller, privately held firm. Talking to your corporate legal staff about the differences will make the accommodation process quicker. You may also be able to give your vendor a heads up to start looking at the agreement sooner, so they can work with you.

Some vendors may be too small to deal with your company. They may not have the legal staff to work with your corporate attorneys or have the experience and knowledge to address your company’s requirements. The sooner your find out, the better prepared you will be.

-Simon

Creating Powerful Web Services Applications

".NET is the Microsoft Web services strategy to connect information, people, systems, and devices through software. Integrated across the Microsoft platform, .NET technology provides the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions with Web services. .NET-connected solutions enable businesses to integrate their systems more rapidly and in a more agile manner and help them realize the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device."
From Microsoft’s website (http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics.mspx)

Some of Snowbound’s success in the past several years has been attributable to our focus on providing solutions to customers who recognize that they need to be able to access their corporate content over the web. Whether it’s been our ActiveX objects or our unique Java imaging technology, many of our customers have implemented powerful and flexible Web-oriented OEM or corporate applications that dramatically enhance the user’s ability to access documents and images anywhere in the world, with a common web interface.

Rest assured Snowbound plans on keeping you well supplied with cutting-edge products for your Web Services needs with respect to images and documents. Look to us for several new products in the coming months including complete .NET applications and applications that allow you to mix Java and .NET. And, of course, you will continue to be able to obtain development tools that will permit you to create your own document manipulation Web Services scenarios.

-Simon

Tell Us What You Need – We're Listening!

As a customer driven organization, we are always trying to learn from our customers what they need, as well as anticipate their future needs. Many of our most loyal customers joined us because we solved a problem for them. However, many of you are too busy dealing with your immediate issues to give us a sense of what you are going to need coming up. So I thought I’d try a new tactic this month. Contact me at pres(at)snowbound(dot)com and tell me what you need or what you’d like to see us develop.

As a prompt, here are some categories:

Our products already live on Windows, any Java platform and most Unix systems. Do you need our RasterMaster Libraries or FlexSnap Document View/Review Systems on other platforms?

We support more than 100 image and document formats, including the very popular PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and AFP formats. Are we doing enough? Do you need us to provide more formats?

What about enhanced features in our Libraries, our SnowBatch converter or our FlexSnap Document Review System? There are never enough features in applications for some people – others complain the product gets too complicated. But application features make your people efficient and we have ways to configure our products to keep them simple but powerful. We listen – what do you need?

-Simon

The Tradeshow Season

As I'm sure you all are aware, September has been a hectic month. Besides being the end of the quarter, there were simultaneous trade shows for us in Germany (DMS) and in Los Angeles (Momentum by EMC). Additionally we continued to perform a lot of planning and development activity as our customers continued to challenge our development team with requests for new features and platforms.

In Europe, attendees of DMS 2006 in Cologne showed strong interest in our .NET and Java products, particularly for our Microsoft Office and Acrobat options as well as our FlexSnap document manipulation and viewing products.

At Momentum, the EMC user group event in Los Angeles, we met with well over 60 customers eager to discuss the latest enhancements to our FlexSnap application. There was strong interest in features like enhanced thumbnails, faster performance through page manipulation on the server, support for new PDF document types, and new configuration options.

We also had the distinct pleasure of participating in a joint presentation with Countrywide Financial. The focus was on their mortgage purchasing process into which our FlexSnap: SI document manipulation application was recently integrated. Through our cooperative efforts, they were able to increase mortgages processed per day and to approximately cut in half the time to fully process each application. Greater throughput translates directly to larger profit margins for them. Our unique server-based document rendering technology quickly streams individual pages of large documents to the client. We thereby were able to meet their extremely difficult requirement of providing a document's first page and thumbnails to Countrywide's users in less than 2 seconds, with subsequent pages served at sub-second speeds.

In just the first few months of "going live", Countrywide's throughput saw dramatic improvement, and gained wide acceptance with the business unit, a critical element in supporting their projected growth.

-Simon

Selling to Perceived Need

What happens if you offer a product that you believe everyone should have, but no one sees a need? Simple – it doesn’t sell.

Can you educate your market to create a need? Most of us can’t afford to – it’s an expensive and lengthy process. It’s much better to learn from your customers, and then provide a product they want.

This is not always an easy process. Selling in the software development space, many engineers are very busy, working under tight deadlines. They often evaluate available solutions with a cryptic “Does your product do this?” Answering only that question does neither your company nor your customer any good. What really needs to be done is to address that need in the context of the entire task or requirement. So how do you do that?

Often the request for a widget comes to a salesperson. Though salespeople are generally smart and talented people, they are not typically engineers by background. Their job isn’t to delve into the arcane technical details of an engineering solution. A smart company supports its salespeople in those situations with sales engineers or R&D engineers. These people are qualified and motivated to understand the customer’s requirements in the context of their technical environment. They assist in finding a full solution that ensures the customer’s success.

This is exactly what Snowbound attempts to do with every special customer request. It’s a free service but surprisingly, not everyone utilizes it. Many of our smart and successful customers have realized the benefits of allowing our sales engineers to assess their situation. Why don’t you join the club?

-Simon

When Doing It Yourself Isn't the Best Answer

Snowbound Software began by offering high-powered development tools for engineers who wanted to embed imaging technology into their applications. Justifiably these companies had already made the decision that their core competency was their application and not imaging technology. Display and conversion of various image formats such as TIFF, JPEG, MO:DCA, AFP, and PCL was better left to an expert — like Snowbound. When tabulating the cost of in-house development (if they could find the expertise) and comparing that to investing in and partnering with Snowbound, with our 'in the trenches' tested technology, the decision was a no-brainer.

Because we build developer-to-developer relationships, we speak the right language and we understand an engineer's requirements. Many times we’ve added new capabilities at a customer’s request — helping them meet their needs and helping us create a more powerful, more useful product.

So what’s different today? Well, time-to-market and cost concerns seem more pressing. Everyone is in crisis mode. The digital age has arrived! People are truly using ECM, DCM, DAM and other systems because they are cost effective and an absolute requirement for staying competitive. There is more demand for our products, our support and our enhancements – and people can’t wait. (Some people don’t even have time to read the manual.) We have a new department for that — Professional Services. We’ve organized and expanded what we’ve always provided, a professional team assigned to your project from specification to implementation. A group of imaging experts that can distill your requirements (often better than you can yourself), recommend the right product and, if needed, seamlessly integrate it with your system.

If you want to support your system yourself, what then? Simply contract us to create the integration layers for you to own. Then, with the purchase of our imaging tools, you can get a quick start and retain full control of your application.

We can implement our imaging solutions for you, saving you time and money to better focus on your core business. We’ve solved imaging problems for hundreds of companies world-wide — this is what we do, let us be your imaging team.

-Simon

Writing Viewers is so Much Fun, and so much Work!

Snowbound originally offered only our imaging toolkits from which our customers created all kinds of interesting applications. These applications ranged from viewers to back office server-based applications for document conversion to comprehensive document management systems that embedded our image manipulation technology.

That remains unchanged through today. Many of our customers continue to use our imaging expertise to enhance their applications, while still being able to deploy their own custom solutions, designed for their specific needs.

But as the technology changes, and many of our customers migrated to Java or established a need for web-based viewing and document processing, we moved with them. So for the past several years we have offered powerful Java imaging toolkits as well. In the process of creating demo programs and samples to make life easier for our customers, we found ourselves exceedingly expert in not only developing imaging functions and tools but also in creating powerful viewers and client-server web imaging applications. And as our customers discovered these powerful products, more and more they realized that it didn't make sense to develop their own web-based document processing systems.

And that's how our FlexSnap family of products were born. Sure, we're here to provide the world's best imaging tools but we also now offer the world's best web viewers. Our experience, our knowledge of our imaging libraries and the years spent developing these products all come together when we create our customizable web imaging systems. Now you can jumpstart your development and still get a unique application that is specific to the needs of your customers and your business's needs.

-Simon