Clayko Group Company Blog

KnowledgeLake 2010 feature update

Clayko Group — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:11:32 GMT

Author - Phil Duffy

With SharePoint 2010 becoming more in demand since it's official release and extensive marketing campaign by Microsoft bringing the new and improved features to the attention of more people. I've been running through a number of scenarios with the KnowledgeLake product suite around its 2010 compliance and future feature releases to enhance that support.

Capture Products

The two client based capture products are both currently SP 2010 compliant, which means you can scan and index documents sending them straight into SP 2010 and also support the 64 bit environment if needed on the server for testing purposes. This allows you to use the full features of the latest Capture and Connect including;

Microsoft Office integration to capture full office documents or screenshots
Added barcode recognition and image enhancement features to the directory watcher option, which has always been there for the usual scanning process - which offers a simple level of automation, reducing reliance on end-users remembering that there are batches waiting to be indexed
Advanced engines for barcode recognition and image enhancement that offer more features for advanced processing

Australian SharePoint 2010 Conference

Clayko Group — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:41:12 GMT

Author - Phil Duffy, Clayko SharePoint Architect

Several of the Clayko team from the Perth and Sydney offices attended the Australian SharePoint 2010 Conference(AUSPC), which was held at the Hilton, Sydney over June 16 and 17. It was a very good event for technical and business users interested in everything SharePoint and related technologies. The event was very well planned and some of the best food I've had at an event, especially the afternoon treats.

Presentations

There were four presentation tracks and a lot of SharePoint experts presenting from all over the world (including the keynote from Arpan Shah):

VOC - Voice of the customer, presenting real-world case studies
Business Track (concentrating on the end user of features) - the best track overall I think for the overview of features that will provide the most impact to the people who use SharePoint everyday (but then I am biased!)
Technical 1 and 2 - based on the code level or more in-depth technical review

A couple of us (myself and Clayton Dorrington) from Clayko also presented on day two of the conference based around a customer case study (Community Mutual Group) and how we helped design, plan and implement a document management solution based on SharePoint and KnowledgeLake.

Designing and Planning a SharePoint Solution

One of the topics we concentrated on in our presentation was using content-types, which is not just relevant to a document management focussed implementation of SharePoint, but also useful for the scanning projects we work on to categorise and re-use the key metadata and document types.

There were some useful related presentations around the Information Architecture and Design aspects of a SharePoint project which I feel is still one of the most underplanned and least understood areas which can greatly benefit a project and increase end-user uptake.

Summary

All told a very useful couple of days and with the introduction of SharePoint 2010 and increased uptake across the industry I'm sure next year should be even better. So would recommend anyone currently using or thinking of SharePoint to take a serious look at.

2 Important Benefits to Document Hosting

Clayko Group — Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Do you know if your documents are secure? Do you have a disaster recovery system in place? Have you had a niggling concern your business is exposed but just haven’t had the time to address it? If any of these questions sound an alarm bell, you’re not alone.

While it is easy to get excited about things like collaboration, improved efficiencies, and moneysaving technologies, none of it really matters if you have left your data and your business exposed. It may feel like one more thing to add to your pile, but data security may be one of the easiestbusiness cases to make for expenditure of software as a service.

Unless you’re a very big company, the complexity of managing a sophisticated enterprise content management system (ECM) might not make sense. Every year, more and more opportunities are being presented for small to medium enterprises to experience the benefits previously reserved for larger organisations.

Document Hosting

In part or in whole, a hosting solution can solve many problems including:

All records, files and documents are securely stored
Disaster recovery processes and procedures are constantly tested and upgraded
The latest versions of software are always available providing current technologies and compatible versions of integrated systems
The burden of cost and administration is shared

Real Benefits

Loss of data, especially in small to medium-sized enterprises can cripple or ruin a company. Additionally, increased regulations and governance issues are making expensive demands on business processes. While losing business intelligence can be devastating, not adhering to legal requirements for your industry could result in legal proceedings.

Essentially, document hosting provides two real benefits:

It allows your business to continue operating as it should.
It gives you peace of mind.

If you have any questions about how you can ensure the viability of your company, please Contact us for more information. Often the most painful part of the process is worrying about what to do. We can help alleviate your concerns and it will cost less than you think.

What is keeping you awake at night?

An Overlooked Benefit to Document Scanning

Clayko Group — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:00:00 GMT

As I discussed in an earlier post, the idea of a paperless office has been around for a long time. I’m sure everyone understands the concept of document scanning – capturing an image on an electronic device and storing it for future reference. I wonder if people know one important side effect to this practice?

Scanning every document in your office is going to save you storage space and eliminate the need for clerical staff. Obviously, your paper and printing costs will be greatly reduced. Maybe the most cost-effective aspect of document scanning is the organisational efficiencies available to businesses that make the technology leap.

Case Study

Let’s take a common scenario involving the customer invoice. When you make a sale, you produce an invoice and send it to the customer. Months later, your customer calls and asks if you can forward them a signed copy of the invoice and the associated purchase order. They’ve had a change of personnel and can’t find their records. You locate the invoice - properly filed in the customer folder - only to discover it has two purchase orders and neither of them are in the file. After a big of digging, you locate all the documents required by the customer. You scan a copy of all three documents and send them off. An hour is gone from your day but your client is happy. The documents are shuffled on your desk and are accidently misfiled creating a future problem to be discovered at a later date.

Intelligent Results

A document scanning system would allow you to access an electronic copy of the invoice along with all attached documents immediately. It would also allow you to see a complete history of all invoicing for that particular customer, payment history and any outstanding issues. By capturing and storing your critical business documents, you’re also giving yourself a massive amount of business intelligence available for use any time you might need it.

Yes, green technology and the paperless office is getting a lot of attention lately. Solving the age-old business problem of increasing the efficiency of your staff is a very welcome side effect to going green.

How has a document scanning helped your business?

Achieving Innovation in Outsourcing

Clayko Group — Mon, 24 May 2010 03:42:25 GMT

I read with interest the other day an article from CIO titled “IT Outsourcing: 3 Reasons Your Vendor Won’t Innovate” by Stephanie Overby. At first, I thought, here we go, another article bagging outsourcing. I had to bite my lip and read on.

The article referenced research performed by Forrester Research. It has credibility. It showed 38% of customers expected more innovation from their outsource vendor, and customers wanted more than just cost savings. Okay, point noted, I thought. But we offer the latest technology and are always open to our customers how we can use it to solve their business problems. So why does this sentiment still exist?

Forrester Senior Analyst Chris Andrews puts it quite simply, its you, the customer! Now, i’m the first to realise that one should never blame the customer; that’s really bad business. But I think the point here is how do you communicate with your vendor to make the most of your investment. It’s not all one-sided thought, so I’ve also extrapolated where vendors are to blame, which I’ll later touch on. But for now, let’s have a look at the 3 reasons why customers don’t get enough innovation from their Outsourcing Vendor:

You don’t know what you want. Innovation comes from innovative people. If you have an innovative idea for your business, let your Outsource vendor know about it. We love this kind of stuff! Unfortunately, we’re not too flash in coming up with market leading ideas for your industry, but give us a bit of an idea of what you want to do and our imagination will run wild with how we can help you achieve this.
You chose the wrong provider. You need to figure out what innovation means to you, and then find a vendor that aligns with that. So you need to understand whether you want to simply cut costs or whether you want to form a strategic relationship with your vendor. Ultimately, if you’re not happy, take it to management, and if it still can’t be resolved, it’s time to look for a new vendor.
You didn’t set up effective innovation metrics. You need to establish your desired outcomes, and incorporate them into a service level agreement. More often now, we see this as the delivery of specific business requirements such as processes and workflows, that provide our clients with a positive ROI, say within 12 months.

So summing up the Forrester Research, outsource vendors aren’t the primary reason you may not be seeing innovation in your business. It is a factor of understanding what you want to achieve, selecting the vendor that will help you achieve this, and ensuring your objectives are being met.

Now, as promised, let’s look at where the vendors are to blame for lack of innovation. The lesson to me is that outsource vendors need to understand their client’s businesses thoroughly and continually present new technologies and discuss ways we can help improve your business. I know that I already do this to some extent, but rest assured, my intensity will be amplified.

I’m also pretty sure that our outsource model enables innovation better that most other vendors. I believe we achieve this by having one of our staff members assigned onsite to each customer. Generally it isn’t a full-time role, just one or two days per week, however it provides regular face-to-face contact, an opportunity to discuss how your project is progressing and a chance to note new requirements and discuss how we jointly can resolve this. All the while, we offer this at a lower cost. Isn’t this the exact point of outsourcing?

The Wish List

Clayko Group — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We talk to a lot of people who feel frustrated because they don’t have the time, budget or resources to run the sort of ICT environment they would like. Often, it’s a combination of circumstances preventing small and medium-sized businesses from having the ideal installation. In talking with our clients and prospective customers, we hear a recurring list of wishes. How many of these apply to you?

Do you wish:

You could have all the new features from your software without having to upgrade?
You didn’t have to worry about finding and keeping good people to run your platform?
You could put your best ICT people to work on your business instead of having them support your software environment?
You could predict your IT costs from month to month, quarter to quarter, or even year to year?
You could bolster the security and reliability of information in your installation?
You could offer your employees more functionality without impacting their time?
Take advantage of cloud computing?

Clayko have long been offering products and services to alleviate some of these problems. We’re excited to announce a new offering designed to alleviate ALL of these problems in a single solution. Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions by Microsoft consisting of:

SharePoint Online
Exchange Online
Office Communications Online
Office Live Meeting
Exchange Hosted Services

Combining software and services allows users to control their IT deployment while reducing costs and the administrative overheads usually associated with a sophisticated software environment.

Using BPOS, you can now:

Extend your tools and platform into the cloud
Utilise multiple devices in your environment
Experience the best service level agreements (SLA)
Enhance your position on IT governance

The good news is Clayko is now able to offer BPOS for as little as $16.95 per user, per month. We’re excited about this because we know it’s something our customers have wanted for a long time. Contact Us to learn more about BPOS. We’re ready to start granting wishes.

What do you wish for?

5 Ways to Reduce Risk with a Document Scanning System

Clayko Group — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Did you know implementing a document scanning system reduces risk in your business? Much has been written about the benefits of document scanning. The business world has accepted that keeping electronic copies of documents is less costly and more efficient. Implementing a paperless office and trying to “green” your environment has become a common practice, as well. While document scanning helps to achieve the goals of reducing costs, improving efficiencies and helping the environment, a hidden benefit to a document scanning system is risk reduction.

Governance and the GFC

Governance requirements for even the smallest of businesses are becoming more stringent. The GFC motivated governments all over the world to tighten their requirements for reporting. Transparency of data is vital to all of these new regulations. It’s no longer good enough to capture and store data, companies must now be able to retrieve it from a variety of different angles. Retention periods are becoming longer and disaster recovery is also being examined closely.

Reducing Risk with Document Scanning

How can document scanning help reduce risk? By implementing a strategic document scanning service, organisations can assure their business is not at risk from a governance view. The necessary components of a complete document scanning system include:

A central repository – Storing all your document images in one place is a key point of difference in risk management. When your documents are scattered in different places, indexed different ways and with no common access method, your ability to manage those documents diminishes.
Integrated products – Document scanning has been around a long time. Many companies have built their EDM holistically. It’s not uncommon to have disparate products involved, as well. To improve efficiencies, it’s important an organisation adopt document scanning solutions that work together and operate as a single entity.
Outsourcing – Employing a company to manage document capture and storage increases efficiencies and instils consistency across your enterprise. While best intentions often accompany in-house document scanning operations, the reality is these functions are often pushed aside for tasks that are more pressing. Good intentions are not considered when governance issues are at play.
Security – Your information holds your intellectual property (IP) and, quite likely, confidential customer data. While you obviously want to protect your IP for competitive advantage, you are also obligated to secure confidential data of your customer including payment details, medical information or legal issues. You will be liable if sensitive data is exposed due to your neglect.
Disaster Recovery (DR) – The best document scanning system in the world is worthless if you don’t have a comprehensive DR system in place. Corporate governance responsibilities mandate your information in protected at all times, in all situations.

Risk reduction is a very real benefit to document scanning systems. While the technology has been around in some form or other for many years, new government requirements are driving the need for a more strategic implementation and management of these systems.

How has document scanning helped reduce risk in your business?

What is Organice?

Clayko Group — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:04:53 GMT

Want a quick “One Pager” about what Organice is, what it can do for your business and what the various components are? Here’s a nice little summary for you. For further information, check out the Organice product page of our website.

Cadac Organice is a software suite for engineering document management and document control and is fully based on Microsoft SharePoint. Cadac Organice helps project driven engineering organizations to manage and share their (project) documents and to control their document distribution and tracking.

Cadac Organice Explorer is a smart SharePoint client providing all the fundamental document management functionality to create, store, search, retrieve, view, check in, check out, edit and revise documents. The user interface has a Microsoft Outlook look & feel, making it easy to use for everyone. It integrates with Microsoft Office, Outlook and various CAD applications, including AutoCAD, Bricscad, Revit and MicroStation. It provides reference file management, title-block, e-mail and document properties linking with SharePoint metadata, and Advanced Document Creation. Users can view, redline and compare documents through an integrated viewer, and user can work offline, where changes are automatically synchronized when back online again.

Cadac Organice Transmit distributes multiple documents efficiently to multiple recipients at once and offers management information to document controllers who need to keep track of transmittals. A distribution matrix specifies exactly which recipient needs to receive which documents, and how many, and a distribution tracking list in SharePoint keeps track of who received what and when. Users can easily create distribution matrices by querying documents and recipients. When documents are updated, Cadac Organice Transmit automatically notifies the document controller which recipient needs to receive the updated documents.

With Cadac Organice Workbox you can build productive serial and parallel state workflows in SharePoint to automate your business processes. Using the friendly graphical interface, users can simply drag and drop workflow states between the start and end point of the workflow, and define the routing from one state to another. Actions with activities will route the document or item to a next step in the workflow. Users or groups are assigned to an action, including their role and permissions. Workflows can be executed automatically or manually and the user gets visual feedback on the status and history of the workflow.

With Cadac Organice Scan incoming correspondence and other hardcopy documents can be scanned and stored into the SharePoint document environment, making all documents centrally and digitally available to all users. Cadac Organice Scan can be used in combination with any scanning device, including small format and wide format scanners, standalone scanners and multifunctional devices.

Cadac Organice Publish can publish SharePoint documents to another library or site. Documents can be published in their native format, but they can also be converted into an independent format (e.g. PDF), so that they can easily be opened, viewed and annotated by others without the native application. Published documents can easily be distributed, accurately printed and securely archived for many years. Cadac Organice Publish can be initiated at any time through a custom SharePoint workflow, for instance to publish documents to any document library or SharePoint site for distribution, printing, archiving or to an extranet for external access.

9 Easy Things to Improve your SharePoint SEO and 6 to Avoid

Clayko Group — Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Do you know if the search engines are finding your SharePoint web content? If your pages are not optimised, the search engines are going to have a hard time finding you. As a result, your website won’t rank as high as it could and you might be losing valuable business opportunities. Improving your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t hard and can have many benefits.

Microsoft Recommends

A nifty article from Microsoft titled, “How to Optimize SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) Sites for Search Engines” provides a goldmine of hints and tips to help get your MOSS content more visible to the search engines.

Make sure to include plenty of keywords and key phrases throughout your page.
Include a description that reflects the contents of the page. This might seem like redundant information but the search engines crawl descriptions.
The higher your content is on the page, the more likely the search engines are to pick it up. Don’t bury your good stuff at the bottom.
Search engines prefer hyperlinks but make sure they have descriptive text.
Ensure your Meta tags accurately reflect the content of the page. The search engines have become perceptive and are now comparing content to the Meta tags. Too few or too many keywords act as a warning signal to search engines.
Create descriptive page titles.
Use the Robots Exclusion Standard.
Take the time to utilise the proper codes to identify the elements of a page such as headlines, subheadings, titles, and lists.
Make sure you have a sitemap

Fair Warning

While there are many things you can do to improve your SEO, there are also some things you should avoid doing.

Don’t give all your pages the same page title. This makes it impossible for the search engines to rank you.
Don’t try to trick the search engines by stuffing your page with keywords.
Don’t use complex URLs or bury your pages in a site. The search engines will have a hard time finding you.
Keep your pages simple. Too many elements confuse the search engines.
Do not use hidden text visible to search engines but not your visitors.
Avoid using temporary redirects.

New for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

One nice feature of SharePoint 2010 is web analytics allowing you to monitor search terms and site usage. This will be particularly useful for companies wanting to remove unused sites. Additionally, it will give business valuable insight into how employees are using SharePoint.

With a little effort and some attention to detail, your MOSS 2007 WCM will provide rich content to the search engines improving your website rankings. SharePoint 2010 provides useful web analytics helping to improve the design and implementation of your site. For more useful hints, tips and techniques, visit our Tricks & Tips page.

What things are you doing to improve your SharePoint SEO?

Clayko adds Organice to the SharePoint service offering

Clayko Group — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:48:07 GMT

"I have a problem managing documents or CAD based drawings around a project, especially with external contractors or vendors?"

"We just don’t know which document or diagram is the latest version and who within the project is working with that version?"

These are the kind of issues we have been coming across when talking to businesses that deal with varying sizes of projects or managing who has what version of a document at any given time frame. This can have an enormous impact on managing the business internally and externally as well as implications around legal or audit needs.

We were tackling these issues with several of our SharePoint implementations and although there are ways to configure and customise SharePoint to handle this we felt there must another good solution that could perform that role. So after investigating the markets and looking at several third-party vendors we decided that Cadac Organice fit our needs and the needs of our clients, as well as providing some further excellent features to extend SharePoint for 2007 and the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release.

So, Clayko is excited to add the Organice product suite to the services we offer to businesses across Australia. The product diagram (Figure 1) shows the major components with the Organice Explorer being the core piece providing a familiar “windows explorer” view onto your SharePoint repositories. With Organice Explorer 2010 just being released to integrate with the new Organice Workbox product providing an easy-to-use interface to create and track workflows within SharePoint.

Figure 1 – Organice product suite components

Organice with SharePoint

Organice is 100% based on Microsoft SharePoint and will provide project based or enterprise wide Document Management features that will really help you make the most out of your SharePoint investment. Organice provides a host of extra features, most notably the transmit functionality to help businesses share and track key documents and CAD drawings with external vendors and contractors, as well as internally.

Marketing Organice

As part of a Marketing drive to promote Organice we ran several breakfast briefs in Perth and Sydney to demonstrate the major features of the product and discuss the benefits for your business.

Guus Weitzel, International Marketing Manager was available to run the demonstration section of the sessions to support Clayko as a local Reseller.

The breakfast events were a great success based on the excellent turnout of people from many verticals who were looking for a way to improve upon their existing document management system or were drawn to the transmittal functionality to manage sets of documents with external parties.

For more information on the Organice product suite or to attend the next breakfast session, please contact us.

3 Big Benefits of SharePoint 2010

Clayko Group — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Are you ready for more collaboration in your SharePoint environment? We hope so because that’s the direction we see Microsoft moving.

SharePoint 2010 has launched and the early reviews have been positive. The Microsoft strategy for SharePoint is concentrated on making it a more collaborative platform for users and businesses. While much as been written about the new features, it’s useful to examine how those features benefit your business. Microsoft identifies three key benefits to SharePoint 2010.

Connecting People

By all accounts, Microsoft scored a big win by making SharePoint 2010 friendly to social collaboration. Getting people sharing data and communicating across more mediums is a key feature of the 2010 release. Welcome improvements in usability include consistent usage of a rich text editor employing the SharePoint Ribbon user interface. Among other things, SharePoint 2010 provides new or additional support for:

Document collaboration
Wikis and blogs
RSS support
Discussion boards
Project task management
Contacts
Calendars and tasks
Email storage and management
Offline support for SharePoint Workspace 2010

Integration

SharePoint has suffered from all the hallmarks of good software. The business applications for it grew faster than the product could develop. As SharePoint became a strategic platform in many organisations, Microsoft struggled to keep up, until SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 contains a scalable services architecture centralising services such as Search, Records Management and Metadata. Managed through a Central Administration, all content within SharePoint 2010 in now unified eliminating the tendency for departments to build their own silos of
information.

Importantly, these new content management features are persistent throughout the content lifecycle whether they are documents, web content or records. This helps with regulatory compliance, auditing, reporting, retention and governance issues.

To make this all the more attractive, Microsoft has improved their search technologies making it significantly faster to find your data.

Customisation

SharePoint 2010 is more open than ever. Behaving more like a platform than an application – an important distinction for this release – Microsoft has given more control to the user and third party applications. The main thrust is to allow end-users to customise the out-of-box platform making changes based on their required business tasks. SharePoint 2010 has tools and capabilities for nontechnical people that will allow them to address specific business needs more quickly and eliminate dependency on IT.

Expect to see more third party applications being developed due to increasing integration and social media support.

Early Days

The real power of SharePoint 2010 will be revealed as companies start to roll out the release and exploit the new features. Microsoft has been very clear the future of SharePoint is based on a model of collaboration. This will only increase the efficiencies and cost savings attached to document management, records management and EDM using a SharePoint solution.

What benefits do you anticipate SharePoint 2010 will provide to your operation?

10 Reasons to Adopt a Document Management Strategy

Clayko Group — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:41:05 GMT

Have you ever considered how much your information management strategy is costing your business? More importantly, have you ever considered how much it’s costing your business if you don’t have an EDM system in place?

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) reports staggering figures associated with no solution. In a recent blog post titled, “10 Fast Facts About Document Management”, interesting statistics point to the hidden costs associated with document management.

Companies spend $20 in labour to file a document, $120 in labour to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labour to reproduce a lost document.
7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.
The average document is photocopied 19 times.
There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone, growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.
Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).
A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.
The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.
The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

Keep in mind; these figures are specified using American currency. The cost in Australian dollars is higher.

It’s no secret automating business processes saves time and reduces cost. Many offices already have pieced together bits of manual and automated document management systems. The explosion of data and information is beginning to make “doing nothing” or hobbling along with disparate systems economically unattractive. Implementing a strategic document management system will alleviate financial burden on an organisation while providing governance and compliance benefits.

Put an EDM system in place requires careful planning and thoughtful consideration. Clayko Group are experts in Document Management and can help you construct a solution for your business. Contact Us for more information on how you can increase your productivity while reducing your operating costs.

Are you seeing an increase in the amount of data being handled in your business?

In what way?

6 Benefits of the Paperless Office: Automation and Global Warming

Clayko Group — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:12:57 GMT

Do you know where the idea of a paperless office originated? You might be surprised to learn the idea was not conceived as part of the green movement. It was introduced in a prediction about the impact of office automation.

The Roots of the paperless office

The term “paperless office” first appeared in a 30 June 1975 BusinessWeek Magazine story titled “The Office of the Future”. Subtitled, “An in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office”, reading the article feels a little bit like jumping Back to the Future. The big players of the day were IBM and Xerox. The acronyms in heavy usage were WP (word processing) and EDP (electronic data processing). The largest part of the report dealt with making a better typewriter and getting more efficiency out of the secretarial pool. The fantastical idea of having TV screens on every desk was bounced around and a description of networking - without using the actual word - was part of the mix. The FAX machine was in its burgeoning infancy. A quick exploration of microfilm, microfiche and electronic storage was quickly dismissed for not having sufficient quality to support commercial applications. The article predated Microsoft, Apple and the widespread introduction of the personal computer.

The impact of global warming

It’s interesting to consider the roots of the paperless office started as an automation exercise. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, focused the world on the need for a paperless office with both his book and movie. With the world population focused on the problem of global warming, business and industry have no choice but to adhere to the increasing demand for environmental compliance. Document Scanning and Enterprise Document Management (EDM) systems are increasingly attractive ways for companies to contribute to environmental initiatives.

Why should you be concerned about a paperless office?

Regardless of your politics or your technological pedigree, the best reason to adopt a paperless office is that it makes good business sense. Document Imaging is a mature technology and the quality problems with microfilm, microfiche and electronic storage devices were resolved long ago. The mass adoption of digital technology means everyone is using electronic copies, from your “C” level executives right down to the temporary office staff. The realisation of corporate networking and cloud computing means your documents and data can be scanned, shared and secured easier than ever before. The advent of mobile technologies mean getting your business documents in an electronic format is increasingly important.

What are the benefits to a paperless office?

Overall reduction in costs of paper, storage space, filing cabinets, printing and mailing
Electronic retrieval of files is quicker and can be accessed from anywhere in the world
Security of sensitive material is far easier to control
Collaboration between multiple offices is possible
Company growth is no longer hindered by the manpower needed to manage files
Payroll costs are reduced as less clerical people are needed

Old ideas, new meanings

These are some obvious ways a paperless office system improves efficiency and reduces cost. Whether your company focus is on office automation or your environmental footprint, the old idea of a paperless office is taking on new meaning.

What other benefits do you see in having a paperless office?

HOSTING vs INHOUSE: The Real Cost of IT

Clayko Group — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:48:10 GMT

Author: Clayton Dorrington, 6th April, 2010

Cloud computing, Software as a Services, Hosting; call it what you like, online services has taken off in the last 6 months. But the question remains, is it time for you to switch? You’ll be pleased to know there is an answer for you, but it really depends on your unique circumstances. First let me put online services into context by giving you some background information.

At Clayko Group, we have been providing hosted solutions since 1999. That’s right, back in the days of dial-up modems and 24k speeds, we were hosting cloud solutions for national companies with 500 or more users logging on daily. And these weren’t dickie little spot solutions either. These are full-on solutions with invoicing, document management, client management and mailhouse capabilities. These are still in use today.

Did these people know something in 1999 that people are only just catching on to now? The answer is no. They just looked at a comparison between the actual cost of IT for an in-house solution vs a hosted solution. And guess what? An online solution worked better for them. Since that time, various companies we host for have saved countless thousands of dollars.

What could you do with those kinds of savings?

Today, I was excited to see an article featured in CIO newsletter by Scott Stewart who is Chief Information Officer at financial management firm Wilson HTM Investment Group. His article “Cloud Exposes the True Cost of IT” http://tinyurl.com/ydoew4v is one of many similar articles kicking about. So what makes it standout to me? Well, it addresses some items we at Clayko have been preaching to our customers for years, but to date, many companies and authors have failed to ignore.

Key points of Scott’s that are commonly overlooked are:

Your IT budget is not your cost of IT
You need to obtain your full supplier list and outgoing costs to determine which ones are attributable to IT
Add staff costs plus on-costs (we generally work on 30% – 40%), depreciation and asset write-offs
Include CAPEX you no longer need to spend

The key is spending the time to recognise how far reaching the costs of your current IT solutions are and capturing all the various costs associated with this. At Clayko we actually go well beyond this to find the true cost of IT.

For example, what impact does freeing up finance, which would otherwise have been tied up in CAPEX, have on your businesses ability to generate income? Maybe by freeing up that $200k that you were going to spend on hardware, you can use that money to invest in the core of your business to drive growth and increase revenue.

The key is to peel away the layers and to look in both the obvious places and those that are a little more obscure to find where your costs are and where the savings will occur.

If I were to add a few extra points, I suggest that you:

Compare your medium to longer term IT strategy as this prompts you to consider future costs and savings
Consider every impact IT has on your business (Peel away the layers!)
Consider your IT departments ability to respond to your requirements (online service providers generally have strict Service Level Agreements SLA’s that ensures your business is not impacted)
Look beyond costs only. Business Strategy needs to be key in your decision

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Silverlight integration with KnowledgeLake

Clayko Group — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:31:51 GMT

With the introduction of new versions of the major components of the KnowledgeLake suite it has not only provided new features and functionality, but improved on the interface with the introduction of Silverlight. This comes in the form of an updated KnowledgeLake Viewer with added ability to utilise Document Encryption included with the Imaging Server, as well as an additional component the KnowledgeLake Indexing Client provided with the Capture Server tool.

KnowledgeLake Viewer

The Silverlight viewer provides increased performance for viewing, annotating and printing any supported file. While expanding the supported file types to include the MS Office suite (Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint) as well as extending the annotation capability to .PDF as well as .TIF file format.

Figure 1 - Silverlight viewer in document edit mode

The interface itself uses the industry standard Silverlight browser component which will already be installed for many people or available from the official Silverlight site (http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx).

Doc Encrypt

The Doc Encrypt technology added to the new viewer allows users with the correct permissions to mask key sensitive parts of a document, rather than restricting access to the document completely. This allows for the sharing and re-use of information without having to duplicate entire sections of a document just to make it available to a different audience.

Figure 2 - Showing encrypted section of document

KnowledgeLake Indexing Client

Capture Server provides a powerful set of automated processes and activities which are often used to process large amounts of documents, whether they are scanned paper or existing electronic format. While the entire operation can be automated, there is often the need for some level of manual intervention to add indexing information to describe the document correctly, greatly increasing the findability of that content within the SharePoint environment.

Previously this indexing and manual intervention was provided through a centralised web interface to allow any authenticated users, no matter where they were based the ability to perform that role. This stage has been enhanced with the introduction of a local client software product based on Silverlight. This product communicates directly with the Capture Server to provide a more feature rich interface to perform this same indexing process, while introducing a new QA activity allowing for the review and approval of the documents and their related indexing information if necessary.

Figure 3 - Indexing batch from Capture Server with Indexing Client