back in the cloud June 9, 2009

A long, long time since my last post…and why so you may ask?   As a contractor working as a Project Manager I get the opportunity to work for a wide variety of companies and their use & maturity levels with regard to technology influences how and when I use technology.
Take for example my most recent project.  I was working in the IT division of an outsourcer in the life & pensions industry.  As is often the nature in this industry sector, the technology was a few generations old and had grown organically over the years leading to a complex and hard to manage solution. As is typical, there is a high dependency on key individuals who know the system inside out.

So how does that effect my use of technology for social networking such a blogging, twittering etc.?  Well firstly, as many of these sites were locked down, that ruled out using them!  For the purists (and the not so pure!)  among us, this is a short sighted strategy – how can an IT organisation evolve and ensure long term gains if they are not willing to let their staff access the latest technological innovations that will change (and are changing) the way people work and interact.
Could I have picked up my blogging time out of the office? No doubt yes, but my motivation for social networking is mainly business driven so when I’m out of the office, I’m doing other stuff. 
So now that I’m back in touch with the technology, I can get back into blogging and hopefully my next contract will enable future blogging.
I’m back!

SharePoint and Document Scanning II October 24, 2008

Following on from my previous post on this subject, I promised an update once I’d seen the Kofax demo.

Kofax works in a similar manner to the other more advanced solutions I’ve looked at.  I did learn a thing or two from this demo though that I thought I’d mention:
1. To improve the metadata on the document, use a reference database to ensure you’ve got the correct information.  So for example, if the Client Number is a piece of metadata and you have an Access database with all your Client numbers, you can connect to this db and retrieve additional Client information (e.g. name, address or whatever else you want to map from the db)
2. OCR is possible but limited.  For the forms my client wants to scan, all of the information is handwritten.  While the various advanced solutions I’ve looked at all use OCR, there is a lot of work to get it right and it’s only 60-80% correct at best.  So this is not suitable for bulk scanning on the scale I’m looking at (200,000 pages).  The one case in which the accuracy of OCR could be improved is where the data on the document is written in cells or boxex.  OCR has a better chance of determining this.

For bulk scanning, we’re outsourcing this to a 3rd party who will bring scanners & people to get it done.  All we need to do is ensure that the metadata used during the scanning is mapped into SharePoint correctly….but that’s a post for another day.

SharePoint and Project Management October 22, 2008

As with much of the ootb functionality with SharePoint, when it comes to project managment it provides you with about 60% of what you need.  Once you’re not trying to do anything too complicated, you could get away with SharePoint as your project managment tool.  So what does it give you ootb? Here’s a few examples:

• Tasks – you can set up tasks and view them in a Gantt chart, assign tasks to people with target dates and % complete fields.
• Issues – you can record issues for a project and again give them assignees, dates etc.
• You can of course have a document library for your project to store any relevant documents
• Email correspondance – set up a Discussion site and you can start storing your project related email in this area
• Team Member – provides a list of the team member and their presence information (if you have Messenger working)

Of course there are lots of other webparts you could add (Calendars, etc.) but essentially the key thing is that the project team can collaborate easily.

Having worked with a number of Project/Portfolio managment tools over the years e.g. Business Engine (now part of Planview), Mercury Interactive (now part of HP) and of course MS Project, I can safely say that SharePoint has a long way to go to come near any of these solutions.

I’ve used SharePoint and Project and that solution looks very good.  I was impressed by the ease of integration with SharePoint and the sites it created with out much user intervetion.  I see that this combination could be very powerful and would be interested in hearing from anyone who’s use these two solutions.

So in short, for simple project collaboration use SharePoint (with an added bit of creativity) and for more complex stuff (e.g. portfolio management, resource managment) go for a higher end solution.

Connectivity…if it’s not working, you’ve lost the game October 16, 2008

I am working with a client on a pilot implementation of SharePoint and connectivity is rearing its ugly head as a major issue.  The client is a small engineering firm and many of the users are off site, often in remote locations with little coverage.   Even in those are where coverage is available, the use of 3G dongles are not reliable and there is nothing worse from a user’s perspective than losing a connecting half way through uploading a document to SharePoint.
We are going to do some testing over the coming weeks on this, but I’m getting a sense that with this, as with other SharePoint projects, it is often the non-SharePoint issues that cause the real headaches.

SharePoint in the Legal Industry October 16, 2008

There are a number of SharePoint for legal firms solutions on the market and one of the top ones is XMLAW. I met with these guys for a presentation in London a few months ago and was impressed. Then can expose data from a number DM solutions for legal firms on the market as well as a number of Matter Management systems and financial systems. Well worth looking in to.
On the DM side, Interwoven, Documentum and Opentext are the main players as I understand it on the legal side.

p.s. Lexis Nexis is another DM solution in the legal space.
p.p.s. Other legal solutions based on SharePoint include
Metastorm
Macroview
Workshare
Handshake
Opentext

SharePoint and Document Scanning October 15, 2008

The number of opportunities using Sharepoint and document scanning software that I’ve seen has increased of the last short while.  With this in mind, I’ve been looking at the solutions out there that provide document scanning into SharePoint in a simple, streamlined manner.  As you might expect, there are a number of solutions out there, some better than others.

The solutions I’ve reviewed are all based on the same principle:
a) Scan the document
b) Use the software to attach metadata and SharePoint document library location
c) Publish to document library

Some of the packages I’ve seen are more integrated that others.  The more integrated ones expose SharePoint doc libraries content types & metadata within the scanning software so it’s easier for the user to allocated the correct identifiers to the document. 
I’ve also seen solutions for use with Multi Function Devices where the user can interact with the LCD screen at the MFD.  Here the user can state where the document is to be stored in SharePoint and input the metadata.

For many clients I talk to, there is almost always a need for an initial bulk scanning process of existing paper documents, followed by an ongoing smaller volume of scans.  For volume scanning, again most of the solutions I reviewed have similar methods of doing this.   The use of OCR is important here to capture the metadata of the documents (this is of course used for non bulk scanning also).  If the documents are hand written (the case with one of my prospects) then the solution involves the use of barcodes. 
Most of the solutions enable you print off barcodes that will identify each document library and metadata for  a document.  The barcode print out is used as a cover page for each document and the software reads the scanned barcode page and directs the document to the correct location in SharePoint.  This is a tedious task when there is a large volume of documents (about 70,000 in the case of my client!).

Here’s some of the packages I’ve had demo’s of are:
Websio - I’d call this a cheap a cheerful solution but will do the job….and I’ll like their innovative approach (who ever thought we’d see barcodes within SharePoint!)
Dark Blue Duck - A solution that caters for most scenarios.  There is a Desktop version, Server version and a plug-in (similar to Websio)
Psigen - The most integrated solution I’ve seen.  One package fits all – no need for a separate desktop and Server versions. Does the most basic to complex stuff.
KnowledgeLake - Again another good solution, but not as integrate as psigen in my view

Other one that I’ve yet to look at:
Kofax

Will update once I’ve had a look at Kofax.

Happy scanning.

It’s a start September 11, 2008

As this is my first blog I am likely to get things wrong.  As with all the other blogs I’ve seen out there, an introduction is probaby required….or maybe if you just hang around my blog for a long enough time, you will get to know who I am through my posts.  What is my reason for blogging?  It could be for theraputic reasons, to be self depricating, to be humourous (or at least attempt to be), to comment on things I’ve seen, heard, discovered, experienced or simply to promote myself as an all round nice guy (first give away – I am male. Did I need to spell that out?).  I certainly hope that no one thinks that what I post is of value or life changing.  There’s enough rubbish out there in the world that can deal with that.   I see this post as nothing but purely egotistical with the thought that there are lots of people out there who will read my every world and think that I’m actually interesting.   I’m thinking that this could be a lot of fun after all (exclamation mark). 

Topics I hope to tackle to give a further reason to my post:
Technology (easy to write about)
Working as a Contractor (which I do)
France (I am a francophile)
SharePoint (maybe)
Innovation
Other stuff that I will write about with authority

I hope not to blog every day but it may not be possible.