My article demystifying enterprise content management pages 12-14

idm.net.auSeptember/October 2009A$8.80 NZ$11.00inc. GST

Prin

t Pos

t App

rove

d: P

P 25

5003

/072

38

ISSN 1320-176X

9771320176003

07

ecm checklist for successsharepoint and the lawintegrating sap & sharepoint

RECORDS MANAGEMENTBOEING DEFENCE AUSTRALIA’S

HUGE ARCHIVING CHALLENGE

TURNING DATA INTO EVIDENCE EMAIL AND THE LAw

THE MAGIC BOXCOnTEnT STRATEGIES PUTTInG EnTERPRISE BACk In COnTROL

one search to find them all?face to face with google

enterprise’s vijay koduri

fullpage

adUpgrade to more efficient document management.

Canon’s Therefore™ Document Management software helps you manage your business documentation and information fl ow more effi ciently and cost effectively. You can scan, save, view, edit and collaborate across multiple documents, all without unnecessarily printing the same document multiple times. Designed to seamlessly integrate with your current applications and workfl ow Therefore™ is sure to help save your business money in more ways than one. Call 1800 444 199 or for more information, visit canon.com.au/solutions

CAB3172_Software_280x186_AUS.indd 1 5/6/09 4:29:33 PMProcess CyanProcess MagentaProcess YellowProcess Black

FEATURES4 INDUSTRY INSIDER

Basware $5.7M Govt sale, Centrelink’s digital backoffice rollout

6 ENTERPRISE SEARCHGoogle Enterprise’s Vijay Koduri

10 BLOGWATCHWhat the smart set are saying online.

12 ECM ESSENTIALSJill Nehrybicki sets out the case for enterprise content management.

16 CIO IN PROFILE

John Pittard, Chief Information Officer, News Limited, examines the media giant’s challenges in managing content on both sides of the firewall.

18 ECM CHECKLIST FOR SUCCESSHow to establish the framework for a successful ECM project.

19 UNIVERSITY CHALLENGECurtin University CIO Peter Nikoletatos profiles a leading Alfresco ECM initiative.

20 TOP OF THE CLASSSchool’s in for SharePoint at Brisbane Catholic Education, as CIO Warren Armitage reports.

22 SHAREPOINT IN ACTIONThree very different examples of SharePoint at work in Australian organisations.

26 SHAREPOINT TUTORIALFrank McKenna explains how to implement federated search

32 A LEGAL PERSPECTIVEWhy are law firms rushing to embrace SharePoint for managing collaboration?

30 RECORDS MANAGEMENT

How Boeing Defence Australia is tackling its legacy archives and the move to digital.

32 EDISCOVERY INSIDERTurning data into evidence, the difference between archiving & backup, understanding email & the law

Inside this edition

SECTIONS2 Editor’s letter

10 Blogwatch

12 Enterprise Content Management

26 Document & Records Management

32 Ediscovery

36 Enterprise Applications

42 Network Storage

44 Tools & Tech

48 People & Events

Image & Data manager • idm.net.au

e d i t o r ’ s l e t t e r s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 2 ][ 2 ][ 2 ][ 2 ]

Publisher/Editor

Bill [email protected]

Art Director

Paul Mirtschin [email protected]

Contributing Writers

Jill Nehrybicki, Laurel Sanders, Frank McKenna, Andrew Charlesworth, David McGrath, Jennifer Padman, Allison Stanfield, Matthew Lodge, Tim Mortensen

IDM Subscriptions Telephone: (02) 9043 2943

email: [email protected]

Published by: Transmit Media Pty Ltd ABN 631 354 31659 PO Box 392 Paddington NSW 2021, Australia Telephone: (+61 2) 9043 2943

Fax: 02 8212 8985 email: [email protected]

All material in Image & Data Manager is protected under the Commonwealth Copyright Act 1968. No material may be reproduced in part or whole in any manner whatsoever without the prior written consent of the Publisher and/or copyright holder. Editorial contributions are welcome.

The Publisher/Editor bears no responsibility for lost or damaged material. The views expressed in Image & Data Manager are not those of the Editor. While every care has been taken in the compilation of editorial, no responsibility will be accepted by the Editor for omissions or mistakes within. The Publisher bears no responsibility for claims made, or for information provided by the advertiser.

Audited Period three months to 30/9/08 10,094 copies average circulation.

Printed in Australia by The Quality Group Distributed in Australia by QW Mailing ISSN 1320-176X

PRINT POST APPROVED PP255003/09418

Meeting the content challengeEnterprise content management (ECM) technology is

moving into the mainstream. However, it's the factors impacting enterprise information that are changing so

rapidly.

For a long time, it was hoped that there could be one repository that could hold all of an organisation’s unstructured data, also known as content. However it’s now widely acknowledged the answer is more complex. Many CIOs face quite a tangle of departments, policies, information silos and systems, including legacy equipment

Deploying enterprise content management solutions is difficult when there are so many interlinking elements in the chain, and nobody really owns the overall process from beginning to end. Information does live (and hide) in various areas within the organisation.

Electronic records are twice as likely to be unmanaged compared to paper records, according to industry researcher AIIM, with 26% of organisations admitting that no records management disciplines are applied to the majority of their electronic records.

AIIM also found that only 56% of organisations have a procedure for placing a freeze on electronic records in the event of pending litigation, compared to 71% for paper records. In addition, IT staff rather than records management staff are expected to carry out records management processes on electronic documents and emails.

SharePoint's suitability for a multitude of tasks has made it Microsoft's fastest-growing product. But its growth has been largely unchecked, resulting in some headaches for both users and IT administrators.

Companies considering SharePoint need to understand its functional strengths and weaknesses. Some have drawn the analogy with the VHS/Betamax video war of the 70s, with SharePoint portrayed as the modern-day VHS, lacking some of the functional sophistication of its traditional ECM competitors but boasting unstoppable momentum in the marketplace.

Inside this month’s edition of IDM we learn from Australian CIOs working with SharePoint in their organisations how to succeed.

The explosion of SharePoint and other collaborative technologies that allow people to interact digitally is helping reduce the amount of paper that flows around an office.

By converting incoming documents into electronic format and backscanning existing files as needed, how many filing cabinets will you be able to get rid of?

How is your organisation winning the war against unmanaged content? Let me know at [email protected]

Bill Dawes is Publisher/Editor of Image & Data Manager.

fullpage

ad


i N d U s t r Y i N s i d e r s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 4 ][ 4 ]

Basware lands $A5.7M sA Govt dealThe South Australian Government is embarking on an ambitious state-wide program to automate the processing of more than two million invoices annually, using technology and workflow from Basware and Readsoft

It has already begun the implementation of Basware's Purchase to Pay solution in a deal worth $A5.7 million with a 12-month schedule to complete the the rollout to all 19 agencies by December 2010.

"We are extremely happy to start working with such an important new customer in Australia right after our recent acquisition in Australia and to further extend our presence on the continent.

“Basware Enterprise Purchase to Pay solution will unify the processes across the State of South Australia resulting in cost savings for the State", said CEO Ilkka Sihvo, Basware Corporation.

The Finnish company recently announced the purchase of local reseller and integrator TAG Services.

ReadSoft will be supplying a $US800,000 package of optical character recognition (OCR) software as part of the Basware solution.

"We are pleased to be able to support our partner in helping this Australian government organization to improve the efficiency of their accounts payable processes," says JanAndersson, President and CEO of ReadSoft.

"More and more government organizations are seeing the benefits of document automation solutions. This cooperation demonstrates once again ReadSoft's commitment to both building strong relationship with its partners as well as strengthening its position in the Oceania market."

Canon Managed document servicesCanon has announced the launch of a common global service designed to assist in managing document input-output environments and document processes.

Canon Managed Document Services (Canon MDS) is optimised for Canon’s latest imageRUNNER ADVANCE Series of colour multifunction office systems, featuring improved remote-management capabilities.

Canon MDS will be launched initially in North America and Europe and expanded globally to include Japan, Asia and Oceania with the goal of achieving sales revenue of over 100 billion yen for the entire Canon group in 2012.

open text partners with Fuji XeroxOpen Text and Fuji Xerox Australia have announced a strategy to offer an end-to-end solution for content capture, delivery, processing and archiving.

The joint solution is an offering combining Open Text eDOCS DM with Fuji Xerox multi-function printing technology.

“Many companies still have standalone fax machines that operate on separate phone lines and require middleware applications to integrate with business systems,” said Chris Petersen, Director of Channels, Open Text.

“At the same time, people typically think of document management as a standalone desktop application. By partnering with Fuji Xerox, we can offer organisations a comprehensive solution for the integrated management of business-critical documents from capture to eventual archival or destruction.”

Open Text and Fuji Xerox Australia are already engaged in working together on a project for the Victorian government aimed at bridging the gap between standalone devices and document management.

“While the partnership will be a mutually beneficial relationship for both companies it will also will help our installed base extend the benefits of their Open Text investment,” said Petersen.

objective heads west with HCNAround 650 staff at Western Australia's Health Corporate Network (HCN) are now tackling their shared services role for the WA Department of Health with an Objective CMS.

HCN processes up to 6000 transactions daily for all employees working for WA Health.

Simon Watts, Director of the WA Health Corporate Applications Program, HCN, said: “99% of the documents we receive at HCN are a transaction request. The inefficient legacy processes affected all areas of HCN’s operations, it was challenging for our staff to process transactions in a timely manner. It was an inefficient use of our staff and resources.”

Objective is used across most business units of HCN. It is used by all transaction staff in areas such as payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable and purchasing. HCN made a conscious effort to minimise and prevent any backlogs that could occur during the project rollout and adjustment period.

With Objective, the HCN project team have created group workflows for

each business unit to streamline and automate HCN’s business processes. The workflow enhances the productivity of the organisation and as a result there has been a visible improvement inHCN’s service delivery.

“The time taken to process invoices has been significantly reduced and improved for HCN. Once an invoice is received by HCN, it is now processed into the Finance system within two days. Prior to Objective, the processing of an invoice within HCN could take up to 30 days,” said Watts.

Objective provides HCN with the capability to report on KPIs such as when transactions are received and processed into the HR and financial systems. This has provided management with increased visibility on the performance of each area and assisted with managing the workload of staff and business units.

Staff are able to prioritise transactions or escalate processing requests, meaning less stress and frustration as they can focus on doing their jobs.

“HCN has seen many benefits as a result of implementing Objective. Our staff are able to create, organise and share documents within a single repository. We have almost totally replaced our manual paper distribution system, with only 13% of inbound documents still being distributed as paper.” said Watts.

Objective has also enabled HCN to better measure the quality of the incoming transactional documents. For example forms those have not been completed properly, or have been delayed in delivery to the organisation.

readsoft adds imaging smartsReadSoft has acquired image processing and document handling technology for an undisclosed from Spear Solutions AB and Spear Imaging Inc.

The company says the patents and software it has aqcquired will complement the company's own solutions.

"Spear has, among other things, developed software which improves the quality of scanned images, which is of great importance to document handling solutions.

“Spear also has technology for remote image capture and web-based solutions for document processing."

"Spear has developed software which is in line with our own intentions and ambitions," comments Jan Andersson, CEO at ReadSoft.

"This acquisition enables us to move faster and we will now integrate Spear's software into our own which will strengthen and broaden our offering to the market."

j U l Y / A U G U s t 2 0 0 9 i N d U s t r Y i N s i d e r [ 5 ][ 5 ][ 5 ]

.Centrelink opens digital backofficeCentrelink has announced the first phase of a push to digitise paper-based forms across its Australian network of 316 city and regional offices.

The installation of Fuji-Xerox ApeosPort multi-function devices (MFDs) in each office over the past two years has allowed for the first wave of digitisation of paper-based forms.

There are more than 400 forms regularly submitted to Centrelink by Australians receiving family payments, pensions and unemployment benefits.

In the initial phases just two of the forms will be accepted into the digital workflow established with software from Fuji-Xerox and Australia's Ezescan.

Centrelink is using CentreWare Flow Services software from Fuji Xerox as well as the Ezescan document scanning product suite for its digital workflow.

This will enable Centrelink offices to direct forms to locations where there is the capacity for swift turnaround, and enable OCR/ICR to check information on forms against client information in Centrelink's central database. Correspondence scanning will not be included initially.

Minister for Human Services, Chris Bowen MP, said, "Each year Centrelink receives more than 370 million pages of paper-based forms and correspondence from customers about payments and services.

“Processing, transporting, and storing this volume of paper involves a significant investment of time and resources - therefore any way to streamline how this is done has considerable benefits for Centrelink customers and also for Government.

Mr Bowen said “In the first five weeks of digitisation operating in Centrelink’s Customer Service Centres more than 370,000 pages – or 35,000 forms - for Family Assistance services have already been processed in this manner.

“Although it is still early days, this is a major transformation in the way Centrelink manages paper-based information and processing."

With the roll-out of the system to all 316 offices now complete, the range of forms and correspondence that can be digitised will now be expanded.

CsC Australia takes on organiceOrganice, a SharePoint based solution for Engineering Document Management, will now be offered by CSC Australia, the consulting, systems integration and outsourcing company.

Organice is a software solution for engineering document management and document control, and is fully based on Microsoft SharePoint.

Organice is designed for project driven engineering industries, providing tools for engineering document management, document distribution and tracking, and project collaboration.

These industries include Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC), Facility Management, Government, Process Industry, Manufacturing (build to order), Transport & Distribution, and Utilities & Telecommunications.

CSC already provides SharePoint based services around document management and project collaboration. One of their market segments of focus is Chemicals, Energy and Natural Resources (CENR).

APs Commercial tackles Gis marketDistributor Alloys has announced the

appointment of APS Commercial as a dedicated reseller of Canon technical large format printers to the Geographical Information System (GIS) market.

APS Commercial has over 35 year experience in the commercial industry reselling films and chemicals for aerial imaging, surveillance and printed circuit board applications.

The agreement is part of Canon’s strategy to boost its channel coverage in the technical large format printer market, and supports Alloys strategy to leverage specialist market networks and expertise.

“Adding Canon large format printers to our portfolio will strengthen our overall customer offering for the GIS market significantly,” said Paul Arthur, director at APS Commercial.

Success is a journey, not a destination

digital evidence

• Overwhelmed by huge numbers of documents?

• We can help with digital archiving

• We can assist with electronic data processing including electronic discovery

• Call e.law now 1300 136 993 or visit us at www.elaw.com.au


i N d U s t r Y i N s i d e r s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 6 ][ 6 ]

IDM: Vijay, Google last year had revenue of $21 billion and 99% of that came from Adwords. It has to be asked, why does Google bother with the Enterprise when that huge revenue stream just keeps getting bigger?Vijay: The easy answer is to say let’s just focus on what we do best and focus on Adwords. Enterprise software doesn’t have the same growth rate as ads did in the last 10 years. Let’s face it that was a once in a lifetime opportunity in terms of going from a zero to a 20 billion dollar company in 10 years. You just don’t see that every day.

But Enterprise is a strategic area for us, enterprise search specifically. Search is the front end for everything on the Internet, and we see that same phenomenon starting to take shape in the enterprise. We expected it to happen seven years ago when we started. We would have loved every enterprise to adopt it but we understand that it takes time. When you look at all the other enterprise apps that we have we are building our own platform for information management with a completely different philosophy. It’s a philosophy of you don’t need large IT departments spending months or years deploying the solution. All of our solutions are very easy to deploy, provide high value and low total cost of ownership.

IDM: Your licensing is defined by the number of documents that can be searched by the appliance, but documents these days can include a lot of multimedia elements such as video, animation and audio?Vijay: Our search results will link to the source document, so when you have a video it’s not important to have the entire video sit in your search index, what’s important is you have enough information about the video in your index. We have a ton of information in our index but you don’t necessarily have to have the entire file.

Google’s success is largely due to the page ranking algorithm on the Internet, but isn’t enterprise search a different set of challenges?Vijay: Page rank matters very little in enterprise search, less than 1% in terms of the algorithms that matter. We use dozens of algorithms that are specific to the enterprise in our search appliance. That’s why we have a dedicated team of engineers as part of the team of over 1000 within Google Enterprise that are looking at how you tell relevance for Word documents or other unstructured data, where you don’t have the benefit of page ranking .

What is your strategy with indexing email. If each email is a document, there are a lot of documents sitting on a mail server?Vijay: Yes, but typically you don’t see customers indexing entire mail servers . The most common case is where people have Outlook and Exchange and you work with Google desktop which is free to index all of your Outlook email, so people can get everything indexed on their desktop without paying anything extra using Google desktop. Most users don’t have access to other user’s email so you would be indexing quite a lot of data for no use.

The importance of enterprise search is a great opportunity for Google and others, do you think it indicates a fault of enterprise content management?Vijay: I wouldn’t say ECM is a failure but ECM will never be a single repository. At best ECM can be a central repository for a portion of your information, so enterprises end up having multiple central ECM repositories, multiple single sign-on systems. It’s the reality that we live in.

Is Google Search Appliance configured for ECM platforms popular in Australia and New Zealand, e.g. Trim and Objective?Vijay: Trim & Objective are not built in out of the box, but our local specialist Bluepoint has built them for some of their deployments and once you’ve built a connector to Trim you can very easily redeploy it. The best bet for Australian or New Zealand customers is to work with our local partner. We have a number in the region.

What do you think of Microsoft’s search strategy and does it provide your biggest competition?Vijay: Whenever someone has invested the money in SharePoint or any other ECM system it tells us that these guys are serious about thinking about their knowledge workers, thinking about their employees, trying to improve their productivity and willing to spend money to get the right tools. Unfortunately SharePoint just doesn’t have good search and that true for a lot of other CMS systems, so we see that as a great opportunity, they spend so much money on ECM, ERP CRM and just need to spend a little bit more

Our customers tell us that they are confused. Whether they are SharePoint customers or former FAST customers they come to us and say they ‘re not sure when FAST is really going to be integrated with SharePoint. Certainly a lot of our customers and prospective customers are asking us. We can’t be sure what Microsoft’s strategy is but since we launched our strategy hasn’t changed, the fundamental pitch has been the same. Any enterprise software vendor that is providing search as part of their platform is using a fundamentally different approach than we have. Our approach is lets bake it all into an appliance and let’s make it really powerful and easy to configure without customers being required to invest in a lot of IT resources.

Vijay Koduri is the lead Product Marketing Manager for Google Enterprise Search. In Australia to showcase the Google Search Appliance with local partners, he took some time out to talk with IDM.

GOOGLE’S GSA 7007 SEArCH APPLIANCE SuPPOrTS

SEArCH CAPABILITY FrOM 500,000 TO 10 MILLION

DOCuMENTS. PrICING BEGINS AT ArOuND $A60,000

search for the enterprise

“Analysts have estimated every knowledge worker produces one gigabyte of information each year , in email, on their desktop and across network

drives. So search is really the only technology that can bring it together.” - Vijay Koduri, Google Enterprise.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 i N d U s t r Y i N s i d e r [ 7 ]


[ 7 ]

Leaders in outsourcing for document intensive business processes

EXTENSIVE CAPABILITIES

• InboundMailProcessing

• DocumentScanning

• FormsProcessing

• DataCapture

• DocumentRouting

• SecureHosting

Australia: 1300 93 7226

New Zealand: 0800 7226 69

www.speedscan.com.au

Document Process Outsourcing

POWERFUL SOLUTIONS

• AccountsPayableSolutions

• ApplicationProcessing

• ClaimsProcessing

• ProofofDelivery

• Electronicstatement

presentment

SYDNEY • MELBOURNE • AUCKLAND • WELLINGTON • MANILA

telstra launches Microsoft cloudMicrosoft has launched its cloud platform on the Telstra T-Suite including Exchange, Office, SharePoint and Office Live Meeting as a subscription service on the Next G and Next IP networks. All four services are available from $A24.95 per user per month for businesses with up to 100 staff.

Group Managing Director for Telstra Business, Deena Shiff, said “This gives Australia’s small and medium sized businesses access to low-fuss and affordable collaboration and communication software formerly available only to large companies with well-resourced IT infrastructure.”

superchargedrFid for documentsFujitsu has unveiled new UHF-band RFID document management tags which overcome one of the drawbacks of conventional RFID tags, that could not transmit signals when stacked tightly together. It is now possible to simultaneously read the new tags even when spaced only 2mm apart in a stack of documents.

As a result, a handheld RFID tag reader can be used to efficiently manage tagged documents, even when they are stacked or packed in boxes. Moreover, whereas it used to take 3 seconds to read the signal from just one document, 100 documents can be read in just 4 seconds, dramatically reducing the workload of businesses managing large volumes of documents.

In addition, because the tags can be read while documents remain stored on shelves or in cardboard boxes, the document management tags help to prevent leaks of personal data, enabling secure document management.

The company claims signals from 100 tags can be read simultaneously in approximately four seconds when stacked 2mm apart. In the past, special

compartments needed to be configured to accommodate a fixed reader/writer, stationary antenna, and PC to read the RFID tags. The new tags, however, can be read simultaneously with simply a handheld tag reader. Signals from each document management tag can be read from up to a distance of approximately 2.5m.

Kofax strikes at invoice processingThe acquisition of 170 Systems for $US32.9 million by Kofax has broadened the capture company's footprint in the growing market for end-to-end invoice processing solutions.

Last year Kofax acquired OptiInvoice, a Scandinavian company that develops and markets electronic invoice and other document processing software

170 Systems’ flagship product, the 170 MarkView Financial Suite, is a workflow solution for invoice processing and related accounts payable (A/P) functions that is fully integrated and certified for use with both SAP’s and Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software..

By acquiring 170 Systems Kofax has achieved the ability to deliver a complete invoice processing solution that incorporates paper as well as electronic invoice capture and A/P workflow capabilities. Kofax’s management and Board believe this should allow Kofax to gain a larger share of the invoice processing market which, according to Paystream Advisors, is forecast to grow from $US1.1 billion in 2008 to over $US1.8 billion in 2012.

Less than 20% of 170 Systems’ customers currently utilise capture software. Kofax’s capture software is already integrated with the 170 MarkView Financial Suite and Kofax intends to market its capture software to those companies.

Most of 170’s Systems’ sales resources and customers are located in the United States. Kofax intends to market 170 Systems’ software on a global basis through its hybrid go-to-market strategy, which supports both

direct customer engagements and indirect sales through over 1,000 channel partners in more than 30 countries.

drupal Garden comes into the lightAttendees at Drupalcon Paris 2009, the user convention for devotees of the open source Drupal CMS, were this week treated to a preview of the software-as-a-service version due for launch in the first half of 2010. Based on drupal 7, Drupal Gardens is being developed by Acquia, the company founded to provide robust support capability for drupal.

“Simplicity is at the heart of Drupal Gardens’ value proposition and its easy-to-use features such as the Theme Builder are a critical component,” said Dries Buytaert, CTO and Founder of Acquia.

“Drupal Gardens will be a significant growth accelerator for the Drupal community overall, extending its reach to anyone who is looking for a beautiful web site to build thriving communities.”

Half exchange users still on 2003: surveyA survey of almost 800 IT administrators by, Metalogix Software, a US provider of email archiving solutions, found 50% are still using Exchange 2003.

The findings show that organisations have been cautious about migrating to Exchange 2007 and some will skip Exchange 2007 and await the release of Exchange 2010.

It also found that 48% of all Exchange users plan to upgrade their Exchange version this year, with 20% keen to make the leap to Exchange 2010 when it is available.

“Email has become today’s No. 1 business application and companies are hesitant to make any changes that might impact its performance,” said Chris Risley, CEO, Metalogix. “This has resulted in a relatively slow adoption rate of new versions of Exchange.”


i N d U s t r Y i N s i d e r s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 8 ]

Web 2.0 is so 2009Almost a quarter of firms surveyed by industry analysts

Hydrasight in their inaugural “enterprise web 2.0 in Asia Pacific (2009)” report have already kicked off Web 2.0 initiatives. Wikis, blogs, collaborative document management and Twitter are driving enterprise web 2.0 adoption in Asia Pacific, according to the survey which analysed data from 80 different corporate sites.

Hydrasight’s 2009 research concludes that business users are the most optimistic about enterprise web 2.0 opportunities, with only 10% of respondents in that group believing web 2.0 is more hype than reality compared to 20% of those in technically-oriented roles. John Brand, research director, Hydrasight, said, “Enterprise web 2.0 is a rich and complex matrix of cultural influences, sensitivities and considerations. This applies not only to individual regions within Asia Pacific but also in different organisations within the same or similar regions and industries. Adoption of the technology therefore varies as a result.

“Our preliminary survey results indicate that Asia Pacific organisations continue to have different views and drivers (compared to North American organisations) and that the cultural differences are both regional and organisation specific. Not all organisations will, or should, approach enterprise web 2.0 the same way.”

Almost half of respondents to Hydrasight’s 2009 survey stated that they have already deployed wiki technology within the enterprise with a slightly smaller number utilising blogs. While improved knowledge sharing within the organisation is a primary anticipated benefit, a reduction in overall data volume, due to fewer duplicated documents and through the removal of complex email-based approval processes, was also identified as a benefit.

“While interest and adoption in web 2.0 has grown in Asia Pacific over the past two years, organisations remain challenged by the difficulties in determining the appropriate application of web 2.0 technologies and suitable use cases.

”The most likely scenario is that enterprise web 2.0 will evolve in a similar manner to the adoption of email within business. It will continue to flower in spite of any attempts to contain or control it. By embracing enterprise web 2.0 philosophies and related technologies, Hydrasight believes organisations can improve their information management practices and actually enhance their compliance with record-keeping requirements,” Brand said.

Graham Pullen, Vice President Asia Pacific, Open Text, said “As people become used to web 2.0 within a public or social context, they are also beginning to realise that web and community content will soon become a compliance risk for the enterprise if it is not managed in an appropriate and reliable fashion. There’s still a healthy level of wariness in the market but with around 90% of organisations in the process of, or considering deployment, we expect to see some high profile projects with quantifiable benefits from enterprise web 2.0 in the near future, despite the challenges.”

ringtail QuickCull speeds up in-house ediscoveryFTI Consulting has announced the launch of Ringtail QuickCull, a new pre-configured hardware and software package for e-discovery. With rapid deployment and out-of-the-box functionality, QuickCull enables corporations to cull and analyse data on-premise prior to review by outside legal teams, providing earlier insight into data and dramatic e-discovery cost reduction.

Upon installation, users can immediately begin indexing data and quickly identify duplicate files, which are automatically tagged for efficiency. Hidden files and columns, tracked changes and other modifications are also available to view.

Reviewers can search for documents using a variety of search methods, including keywords and complex Boolean queries that can also be restricted to specific metadata fields. QuickCull then presents documents for preview, allowing reviewers to mark and tag individual documents in preview mode. These markings are saved for export into processing, review and analysis tools via the EDRM XML standard, an industry standard developed by FTI. QuickCull is also Unicode compliant to support international requirements.

QuickCull users can index, search, cull and preview datasets within hours of collection without sending data off-site. In addition, QuickCull searches the data by a variety of methods, including keywords, data ranges and custodians, providing an early view into the likely responsive documents. This enables in-house teams to understand the data better and earlier in the process, as well as providing significant strategic advantage.

Nuance snaps up eCopyThe company behind the popular Dragon speech recognition software has broadened its document management portfolio with the $US54M acquisition of eCopy. Nuance Communications says its own multifunction printer (MFP) desktop software fits well with eCopy’s server offerings to deliver a broadened network scanning solution.

eCopy’s network scanning software is offered by MFP vendors such as Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Océ, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox. They support document connectivity to more than 100 enterprise applications, such as SharePoint, EMC Documentum, Oracle and SAP.

The combined company will tackle the market for scanning software to support intelligent MFP devices and efficient document workflows.

eMC discovers KazeonEdiscovery specialist Kazeon Systems is the latest acquisition for EMC which will add the company’s litigation support solutions to its SourceOne product suite.

Kazeon allows organizations to quickly and reliably identify, preserve, collect, process, analyse and review information in accordance with the widely accepted EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) framework.

It is able to handle Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that resides anywhere in the enterprise environment -- including content on laptops, desktops, content management repositories (including, EMC Documentum), Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Lotus Domino, email archives and file shares.

The Kazeon offering is available as an appliance, enabling quick deployment, as well as providing fine-grained analytics, including concept-based search and analysis, and offering a collaborative review platform for distributed reviewers.

Advertiser’s correctionIn a recent paid advertisement in this publication, Kodak’s ad copy stated that “The Kodak Scan Station 500 is the only network scanner that allows you to send document images to multiple destinations simultaneously...” At the date of publication, network scanners from other vendors could indeed send document images to multiple destinations simultaneously. Kodak apologises for any confusion that may have resulted from the ad copy. To be more accurate, the Kodak Scan Station 500 can send document images to multiple destinations simultaneously-- including e-mail, FTP, print, fax, servers and USB drives. Kodak encourages prospective buyers of network scanners to compare the capabilities of the Kodak Scan Station 500 to any competing network scanner and

make an informed purchase decision.

The greatest challenge when implementing ECM is getting everyone to use it. Changing the way people work takes real commitment,from both your organisation and your ECM solution provider.

Objective understands the true value of commitment. We take responsibility for the delivery of your complete ECM solution - we use oursoftware and our people. There is no middle man. Your people have direct access to the same experience that's supplied ECM solutions to government and top 1000 companies around the globe. ECM solutions that people want to use.

Commitment.

Enterprise Content Management with an old fashioned feature.

When ECM is on your to-do list put Objective on your short list. www.objective.com

CL32073IDM 2/7/04 10:17 AM Page 1


B l o G W A t C H s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 10 ]

etiquette for the

social Networking Agehttp://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/

After a long day at the office, imagine logging onto Facebook to see what

your friends have been up to, only to have your boss or colleague message

you about an urgent work matter. Aside from the fact that you are officially

off duty, is it appropriate for your co-worker to reach out to you through a

social networking forum?

Was it wise to accept a colleague or higher-up as a “friend” to begin with?

And -- perhaps more importantly -- in this day and age, when people are

seemingly available around the clock because of smartphones and our

endless appetite for all things online, is anyone ever really “off duty?”

As Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour Blackberry access blur the lines

between business and personal lives, managers and employees are

struggling to develop new social norms to guide them through the

ongoing evolution of communications technology.

Wharton faculty and other experts say the process of creating rules to

cope with the ever-expanding reach of modern communications has just

begun, but will be shaped largely by individuals and organizations, not

top-down decrees from a digital Emily Post.

Generational differences in the approach to openness on the Internet

will also be a factor in coming to common understandings of how and

when it is appropriate to contact colleagues, superiors or clients.

securing documents in the Cloud Michael Vizard www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/vizard With Google, Microsoft, IBM, Zoho.com and any number of other services making it easier to store documents in the cloud, you can’t help but wonder how the way we think about managing documents is going to evolve.

Some of the more obvious shortcomings of most of the better known cloud computing services are their non-existent workflow tools and general lack of security. On the other hand, there are a number of existing cloud services, such as Intralinks and Mimosa Systems, that provide sophisticated workflow tools wrapped around some fairly sophisticated security policies.So the question is that as cloud computing continues to gain momentum among users of productivity applications, how long will it be before corporations look for more robust platforms that provide the economic benefits of the cloud without all the apparent risks?Intralinks, for example, has a cloud computing service for

managing documents that includes a search engine, robust programming interfaces and the ability to control access to documents that can be limited to specific individuals with certain roles within the company.None of these services are exactly new, but as cloud

computing continues to take off the odds are good that more IT organizations are going to find value in some of the richer services out there, as opposed to wondering when one of the larger providers is going to be eventually compromised.

[ 10 ][ 10 ]

New e-mail task Management Bill Pray http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collab oration_and_content/ E-mail task management tends to be anemic in its capabilities to help users track their commitments. Fortunately, new approaches in technology are starting to tackle this challenge.

In an effort to find ways to improve task management in the e-mail environment, The Science Foundation Ireland and the US Office of Naval Research funded research by Rinat Khoussainov and Nicholas Kushmerick of the Department of Computer Science of the University College Dublin, Ireland. Their research concluded:“Our experiments demonstrated that:(1) structured features in email, such as message subject

and send dates, can be very useful for identification of related messages and grouping them into email tasks;(2) the properties of related messages in the same task can

be used to improve the semantic message analysis. In particular, the features of related messages in a task can improve the performance of the email speech acts classification;(3) the semantic metadata in messages can be used to

improve the quality of task identification.”This research was published in 2005 and four years later start-up companies are just beginning to offer solutions that employ algorithms to perform the kind of analysis described in the research. One such offering launched yesterday – Liaise. Solutions like the offering from Liaise are attempting to push e-mail task management to the next level by surfacing the commitments in context of the user’s e-mail environment and, eventually, in any text-based communication.

digital Archiving - Protection of documents

Comes out of the dark Ages (Maybe)

www.scientificblogging.com

Paperless office? An optimistic pipe dream. We use more paper documents than at any time in

history despite the prevalence of the Internet and digital technology. Part of the reason is lousy

copy protection of scanned documents and storing them online.

But a new approach to archiving scanned documents that makes the text searchable and adds

a watermark to images for copy protection and validation reported in the inaugural issue of the

International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems may herald some forward progress.

That’s good news because additional demands requiring paper documents to be archived,

to be searchable, and to leave a virtual paper-trail for documentary providence are increasing.

Roumen Kountchev of the Technical University of Sofia working with Vladimir Todorov and

Roumiana Kountcheva of T&K Engineering Co. in Sofia, Bulgaria have a new approach for

efficient archiving and content protection of scanned documents, comprising texts and pictures.

Their approach takes the raw image of a scanned document and processes the text and images

in the document in two different ways. The images are compressed using an algorithm known

as IDP (inverse difference pyramid). This is used in a lossless manner for texts, graphics, medical

or biological images, biometric visual information, such as fingerprints and signatures. For

photographs where some loss is often acceptable the images can be compressed further using

“lossy” IDP. The text is compressed in a lossless way that allows optical character recognition

(OCR) to be carried out.

The IDP algorithm has the advantage of allowing the addition to the whole document of an

extra embedded and invisible layer that contains a digital watermark. The watermark is password

protected and can only be seen or removed by verified users, thus providing legal providence for

an authenticated scanned document.

The team points out that the watermark layer does not interfere with the scanned image or the

text, whether legal document, fingerprint, or photograph.

However, if someone attempts to change the image, the invisible watermark will also be

affected. Damage to the watermark will thus prove unauthorised editing of the document.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 B l o G W A t C H [ 11 ]

4 Ways in Which the recession has

impacted Accounts Payable

Susie West http://sharedserviceslink.wordpress.com/

In the past 18 months, the world economy has fallen and lifted. This has

arguably been a ‘good thing’ for shared services. Especially Accounts

Payable.1/ The significant emphasis on cost control during this period, in order

to protect margins, has made shared services an even more valuable

corporate asset today than it was during our stronger times. Shared

services is now seen in a new light, where appreciation has a place, and

internal customers and stakeholders regard shared services as a ‘survival

enabler’ rather than a ‘pain’.

2/ The Accounts Payable function is relied on much more to provide

the information which will drive business decisions. Not to provide

data. There’s pressure on Accounts Payable to provide the full liabilities

landscape in an accurate and timely manner.

3/ A symptom of this is that Shared Services Directors now have the

attention to push through required organisational change, which, in the

past, may have been blocked. Where there was serious resistance, there is

ample help in pushing down the road blocks.

4/ According to a recent paper by Deloitte within “many organizations,

opportunities are likely to abound for turning today’s increased appetite for

change into lasting improvements.” This means change. All these pointers

lend themselves to a massive opportunity for Accounts Payable – which is

to implement the much needed change, either through change behaviour

programmes or through the adoption of technology.

But there’s a risk – now that there’s a window to adopt AP automation

technology, which is much needed, there is a little bit of pressure on

ensuring that the ‘mix’ of technology supports your aims.


[ 11 ]


[ 11 ]


[ 11 ][ 11 ]

do You Have ecmaphobia? Lee Dallas http://bigmenoncontent.com Ecmaphobia(ek - ma -foh’ – bee – yah) noun. Fear of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).Symptoms :1) Denial of the existence or importance of content in an application2) Avoidance or unfounded criticism of others known to be proponents of

ECM3) Irrational belief that one can do everything ECM does cheaper, faster and or

better with no assistance.Causes :Causes for ecmaphobia are generally thought to be participation in or

even anecdotal familiarity with efforts whose failure were attributed to the implementation, integration or mere mention of ECM. Though scientific evidence for it is scarce, ecmaphobia is contagious and can spread quickly through a community.Treatment and Prognosis :Left untreated, ecmaphobia is a career long condition that can limit application

flexibility, promote loss of information, create anti-social meeting behavior and lead to job loss. Extreme cases have been known to cause litigation and incarceration. The condition may lie dormant for years until exposure to content requirements trigger an outbreak.Treatment options for this condition vary by subject but the most effective

course will include aversion therapy where the patient is required to spend forty hours per week (80 for contractors) on a well run ECM project for a period of no less than three months. Full recovery is possible but relapses are common when there is nothing else to blame for schedule delays. Pharmacological options have documented success but are not legal in most countries.


e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 12 ][ 12 ][ 12 ]

Its popularity shows that business and government is realising that staff will work more productively and at a much lower cost if with the help of a good ECM platform.

This has resulted in organisations both large and small acquiring SharePoint, with many taking the further step of adding expensive customisation to broaden its reach, for instance to handle file types not natively supported in SharePoint.

But is that enough to deliver a fully fledged ECM solution that will support your organisation as it evolves?

The answer depends heavily of a definition of ECM, which has been known by any number of acronyms and is severely misunderstood and generally under delivered.

My company Innov8 delivers ECM solutions across many industries which means I am passionate about this topic. However, the most important thing to take away from this article is that if you don’t have ECM, you will need it sometime soon to simply remain competitive against those that do.

Your solution needs to work the way you do, meet all the rules you need to work by, and be flexible to change as you do. It needs to be able to automate every data and document movement that can be replaced by technology in the hands of smart software engineers.

Put simply, ECM takes your current systems processes and software platforms, works within the competencies of your staff, and applies the rules required by your regulators. It then brings it all together and creates an operational environment that is the most productive it can be to deliver your product or service to market.

It relieves your staff and external parties from the burden of juggling information and pushing paper. When choosing a system to make this happen, find one that as much as possible ensures that everyone involved in the process has the exact data or document at their fingertips, when they need it, wherever they are, in the exact context they can most efficiently make use of it.

Firstly, what is “content”? Your content is every file and every record in any number of

internal and external databases that is available to you. It may be MS office documents, CAD files, sound files, X-rays, GIS data, ultrasounds, recipes, photographs, emails, text, voicemail messages etc.

Content is simply the result of the keying, capturing or as output from your existing systems. It incorporates every type of communication to and from all external and internal parties and systems that create a physical piece of data, document, file or simply put “information” that is relevant to your business.

The creators of this content are most often your staff, contractors, suppliers, regulators, competitors and customers. It is all in its own

way valuable to your business and will cost you time, effort and money if it is not managed and protected. Moreover, it needs to be made easily available in any context from creation to destruction for any reason your business may ever need to use.

This content creation and collection process is continual and ever increasing. Content is spread across your entire organisation in any number of databases, external drives, on desktops, on PDAs USB keys, email personal folders or on home PCs. Wherever it is, very often you simply can’t get your hands on it just when you need to.

A study by IDC a few years back concluded that there are currently 281 billion Exabytes of information in the Digital Universe. An Exabyte is one million million megabytes and studies show that it this figure is growing exponentially. Further, IDC concluded that 30% of this information is business related and is poorly managed and controlled.

Employees who say they are overwhelmed by the volume of information they must manage and who currently say they spend hours each day just dealing with email will need to manage much more in the near future.

How will they handle this tidal wave? Simply extrapolating the current tools and approaches to deal with this tidal wave will not solve the problem. A new approach was needed and ECM was created to answer the call.

What is ECM? At the most basic level, an ECM solution replaces any manual process, communication, transmission etc with code rather than key strokes. It ensures that all content is captured, compliant, and made immediately available to those that need it in the exact context they need it.

ECM also involves application integration. Simply put, this opens up the flow of information between all of your software

Jill Nehrybecki is a specialist consultant in all of the major areas of Enterprise Document, Data & CAD Drawing Management & Business

Process. Her company, Innov8 Asia Pacific Pty is an Australian partner for BlueCielo Engineering Content Management and Application Integration

solutions.

settiNG A CoNteNt strAteGY For CorPorAte sUrViVAlThe SharePoint juggernaut is delivering a challenge to traditional enterprise content management (ECM) solutions providers, writes Jill Nehrybecki, as well as a rare opportunity.

Content is spread aCross your entire organisation in any number

of databases, external drives, on desktops, on pdas usb keys, email

personal folders or on home pCs.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t [ 13 ]

platforms, ERP systems and databases that now exist as “silos” now in your organisation. It makes them share information or “talk” to each other.

It applies the required security to ensure your IP is safe and can only be accessed by those you trust to make the best use of it with the least effort or cost to your business. Most importantly, ECM and its business process automation reduce the cost and risks of your operation dramatically. It ensures that all document related processes are completed in the most productive and compliant way possible, and frees your already overburdened staff to do the specialised jobs they enjoy and were hired to do.

A good enterprise wide content management solution should very quickly return on its investment by its very nature in the areas of business productivity, risk, quality, and speed to market.

It is important to understand the real cost of mismanaging enterprise content.

Each time a piece of data or a document is created, it usually has an intended purpose. If you are regulated by any government or industry bodies the way it is used needs to follow strict rules and your own company policies would likely require specific approvals.

Most importantly, each file needs to be saved and stored in such a way that it is easily found and modified or reused as efficiently as possible.

Most of your documentation and records have specific retention requirements. For example, in a chemical plant a CAD drawing and all associated records relating to each part of the plant must be stored and available for the life of that plant plus 10 years. If there is an accident and records relating to that area of the plant are not available and can’t prove that the necessary safety and compliance, was in place at the time of the incident, you may be fined or jailed.

For a pharmaceutical plant, unless during an audit you can provide the actual documents that prove compliance to FDA regulations for each batch, you may be shut down to have your plant and processes revalidated and face huge fines and production delay.

How long would you say you spent last month searching for documents, email attachments, or for your USB in the bottom of your bag or under the seat in the car? Let’s say it was just an hour per week (although numerous studies place the number much higher than that).

Now multiply it by the amount of people in your organisation, your contractors, vendors and all of those that pass their time costs onto your business regardless of their use of it. Now you may begin to see the real cost of lost documents.

There are also costs to pay for poor revision/version control. How many times have you opened a document only to find that you didn’t save it after making your last changes? Have you ever sent out a document to a client only to find that you had sent the wrong one and they had received a quote that was meant for their direct competitor?

How did it go when you tried to explain the error to your client when they discovered they were paying more? Did you discount further, or even lose that client to your own competitor?

If you are an engineering business, have you ever issued a CAD drawing out for construction only to find that you had sent out the wrong revision? In your maintenance area, have you ever ordered parts and labour but later found that you had ordered from the wrong drawing, job card or BOM?

All of these examples are likely to have a significant cost to your business and market reputation right now that are often hard to quantifying. All can be eradicated by ECM. (Continued Over)

many organisations have survived the first wave of the information revolution

by assembling a patChwork quilt of teChnology and manual systems.

the magic of eCM

With travel budgets severely cut, your people need to work as if side by side regardless of the actual physical distance between them. They expect to work the same way sitting on a beach as they do in the office. Ask them what their most important applications are and they are likely to say things like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, Google Docs, Flickr and a feed reader. Even if they have absolutely no malice in their hearts, they are likely to have organisational documents and information on their phones and on their laptops and on their home computers. How will you exert some element of control over all this?

A true content management solution will make sure that:

Anyone anywhere anytime with the permission to do so will be provided the right information in the right context;

Workflow will ensure that that a document or piece of information follows the right steps to comply with regulations on your industry;

Every action on any document is tracked and audited such that you will always be able to know the full history for the entire lifecycle of every piece of documentation from creation to destruction;

All documents that are referenced in any way to another are linked in such a way that identifying or opening one, you will have immediate access to any other with a few key strokes;

During an audit, incident review, coroner enquiry, or if faced with litigation, you will be immediately able to find and assess, all required documents as the exact version that they were at any point in the past;

If your organisation creates or relies on having access to native CAD files, x-rays, ultrasounds, videos, encrypted files or any other more complex file types, that your ECM solution understands and manages them all just as effectively and fiercely protects them for you;

Every time a document is sent or received, you will


e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 14 ][ 14 ]

Among the bottom line benefits of going “electronic” are direct and immediate cost savings on paper and shipping and increased process effectiveness and efficiency. There is the potential to fully integrate field staff and offices into the information capabilities of the organisation rather than relying on daily overnight mail.

The amount of content is ever increasing and so are the costs and risks of mismanagement if you are still relying on manual processes.

Imagine being able to see the last saved version of every document that is being worked on at any point in time (if you have the right security privileges)?

How secure would you feel if you knew that every document with a specific deadline will follow an automated workflow to completion and most likely be completed on time. Imagine that you will be automatically notified if it is likely to miss that deadline and allow you plenty of time to reroute the work, or take any other appropriate action.

Many organisations have survived the first wave of the information revolution by assembling a patchwork quilt of technology and manual systems.

SharePoint is making great strides in the enterprise and many regard it as an ECM solution. Gartner even has it in their “magic quadrant”. However I don’t believe SharePoint is ECM in itself.

SharePoint does incorporate a number of ECM elements and has its place in making documentation available to your organisation. However in order to make SharePoint replicate your specific business processes, enforce compliance to the regulations you must adhere to, and to manage much more than the MS Office document types, you will need to add customisation.

If your organisation is unable to employ a specialist SharePoint developer, you will be locked into the third party vendor that does the customisation for you.

Most traditional ECM vendors recognise that SharePoint is being widely adopted and each has developed modules to allow their own systems to “talk” to SharePoint.

Of course, SharePoint is only part of the drive to place corporate-hardened collaboration and social media tools on the desktop.

In addition to SharePoint, other products like Lotus Quickr, EMC’s CenterStage and Open Text’s LiveLink are sweeping through organisations, placing extraordinarily powerful collaboration and content creation tools in the hands of individual knowledge workers and project teams. Google’s Wave is also now looming on the horizon.

Moreover, as many organisations are growing by merger and acquisition, your CIO is facing a moving landscape of collaborative & electronic control requirements.

Often, all this deployment is without a heck of a lot of governance or planning. According to an AIIM survey, 57% of organisations lack any type of executive-endorsed plan for where SharePoint will be used and how. And I’m sure the same % would likely apply to deployment of the other tools listed above.

Let’s see. This all sounds somewhat familiar. What does it remind me of? Oh yeah, 15 years ago we all deployed the most powerful document creation tools the world has ever seen to every desktop, without any thought whatsoever about what we wanted to come out the other end.

The end product for most organisations is a mess of shared drives and non-existent file structures and taxonomies.

So a key part of creating an information management strategy for the next decade is thinking through what you are trying to do with all this collaborative capability, how it will fit together with the other information systems in your organisation, how you will find stuff across these systems, and how you will eventually get rid of everything that you don’t need to keep.

The viability of this strategy will increasingly be in question as the volume of information that must be managed increases. We are rapidly approaching the point at which only additional technology to automate information ingestion and digestion can solve the problem.

know exactly what version it was and who was involved in the process;

If you send a document out for rework such as a CAD drawing to Vietnam for revisions, that when it comes back to you, that you will quickly be able to determine if the change is immediately obvious without resorting to a light table and eye glass;

Each time a file is saved, that it has the exact naming convention, and that all of the information (metadata) you require is entered every time;

Each time a file is saved, it is available to anyone in your organization who requires it and has the security permission to access it;

If a document of any file type is viewed, that you don’t need to have the native software for that type on your

machine. That it can be viewed, marked up, approved and printed using the tools that are also sent to you with that document;

The solution you procure is able to deliver all that you need by way of configuration and as little vendor specific customisations as possible. This means that as your business evolves and as does the developments in the software, that upgrades are as inexpensive, painless and fast;

The solution is able to as closely as possible exactly match the processes you believe are the most productive and compliant for your specific organisation. This will improve acceptance by users, reduce the need for extensive cultural change and not require extensive training to know how to use it;

The solution largely works behind the scenes, taking care of all it needs to and frees your staff to get back to the jobs they are specialised in and paid to do.

Smart configuration and integration with all other enterprise systems replaces as much as possible unnecessary new keystrokes and manual transmission (and therefore the possibility of human error);

Lastly, the solution is easy to use, fast to deploy and can grow and incorporate more complex requirements as your business evolves and as the rules of proof and compliance become much harder to meet.

ENTERPRISE

YOUR INTEGRATION READY ECM PLATFORM

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

CommunityManager.NET is an enterprise application framework that can power your secure intranets, extranets and websites. It has as an extensive range of web applications that will provide you and your organisation with the features and functionality to help drive your business needs forward and enable you toe�ectively compete in today’s business environment.

The Elcom ECM platform, CommunityManager.NET, is quick to implement, cost e�ective and has a number of proven industry solutions to accelerate your ECM strategy.

Built on the .NET framework, CommunityManager.NET seamlessly integrates with your line of business systems, simplifying information management.

Elcom is your partner for the future. Start experiencing the bene�ts many of your competitors are already enjoying today.

Call us now 1300 435 266 | www.elcom.com.au

mW

mI

mT

pP

sE

nI

pG

me

The CommunityManager.NET Platform Web Applications:

WebManager.NET

IntranetManager.NET

TrainingManager.NET

PartnerPortal.NET

EnterpriseSearch.NET

InductionManager.NET

GovernmentPortal.NET

eCommerceManager.NET



Talk to Chief Information Officer John Pittard about content and it’s hard to get away from the bread and butter of a modern media company: the timely delivery of news, sports coverage and entertainment.

Pittard has held the reins as CIO at News Limited since 2003, during a period of unprecedented change in media consumption.

The migration of readership online has forced a reevaluation of the backend infrastructure used to deliver text, image and video content on the Internet.

News Limited is in the midst of migrating from Vignette to the Fatwire CMS for all of its Australian Web properties. Web sites for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the Melbourne’s Herald-Sun are already running on the Fatwire platform, with other sites to follow

“We were a big Vignette user and we realised we had to invest in a new platform and began looking at it two years ago. We didn’t think Vignette was the right product,” said Pittard.

Prior to the rollout at News Limited, the Fatwire CMS had not been deployed by an Australian media organisation.

News Limited is a subsidiary of the News Corporation global empire however other subsidiaries in the UK (The Times, The Sun) and US (Dow Jones) have adopted different CMS platforms.

“News Corp is a bit of a loose federation,” said Pittard. “We are pretty happy with the Fatwire platform. It was a decision we made that we felt fitted what we needed to do in the online space.

“They weren’t operating in Australia and we are now one of their biggest implementations in the world. News Limited has quite a big network and part of the basis of the acquisition was that they would put a presence into Australia. “

The attraction for Pittard was the flexibility it provided Web production staff to assemble content from a wide array of sources and intuitively assemble text, images and video into a story template.

“Fatwire allows an editor to pull up stories from our wire feeds, our internal newspaper publishing systems, and stories which we may create ourselves that form a single content store. You can pull out stories and relate them to pictures or videos, and Fatwire automatically tags it for you and presents it in a template - it’s a really slick production process,” he said.

“We have done a lot of development around the Fatwire platform to allow us to manage our content internally in News Digital Media as well, and we are looking to see if we can’t use the technology we have developed there right back through our newspaper operations as well. I look at the way we manage content in our online business and I’m not sure why it needs to be different in the way we run our newspaper business. The publishing channel is different, but the way we manage content is not, so we are actually having a long hard look at that.

“We are looking at using some of the concepts and the technologies from our Fatwire CMS platform for newspaper production. We are also bringing our online and our print newsrooms together so the difference between print and online for content and content creation is becoming blurred.”

Organic growth over the past 50 years has left News Limited with the legacy of a fragmented approach to running the newspaper businesses across the country. Different systems are used for managing pictures, video, PDF and text. Other different asset management platforms are used to backend consumer sales with

News at the crossroadsAny organisation with over 10,000 staff could safely say it has a significant enterprise content management challenge However for News Limited, one of Australia’s major publishers of national, metropolitan and regional newspapers and magazines and the name behind some of the most trafficked Web sites, that internal challenge is dwarfed by the task of delivering a constant stream of original content to an insatiable public.

“We have some big decisions coming up in the next couple of years around content

management. It will be one of the key decisions we need to make,” -

News Limited Chief Information Officer

John Pittard.


different systems again used at different masthead locations.“One of the biggest challenges we’ve got and I think probably

the same with most media companies, is getting our digital asset management strategies right. They’re not done well at the moment and we’ve got an enormous number of digital assets. Given the history of the company and the size of it it’s very hard to navigate your way through all of that content and get to a story you might want to research that was 20 years old and relate it to some pictures. It becomes a very difficult exercise,” said Pittard.

“The last thing a photographer usually thinks about when he or she brings in a digital camera in is to correctly tag each of the photographs so we end up with a difficult management exercise there. We also have fragmented platforms so they are different for each newspaper and bringing that together is quite difficult.”

While the implementation of the Fatwire platform is well underway for its online properties, News Limited does not have a centralised Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system for its corporate users.

Like most Office 2003/Windows XP environments, News Limited has begun deploying SharePoint for a range of different business units; however it is not an enterprise-wide deployment.

“People have just started using SharePoint and we are now starting to put some structure and strategies around its use at the moment. SharePoint is in place at every one of our divisions around Australia.

“We leave it to the business division to figure out what they want to do with it and then its configured for them centrally.”

Apart from standardised Office and Exchange email, there is a lot of diversity across the information systems environments that have evolved over the 50-year history of News Limited in Australia.

Enterprise applications in use at News Limited include JD Edwards financials, Siebel CRM, Aurion HR/Payroll and

specialised systems for newspaper production and advertising management.

“We have some big decisions coming up in the next couple of years around content management. It will be one of the key decisions we need to make,” said Pittard.

“We could bring it together on a single centralised CMS or another way is to put in a separate search or content management layer across distributed content groupings across our operations. That’s what we are looking at.

“There are two ways to go with ECM, one is a very big project to build one big data store and run a search engine across the top, and I’m not sure that’s the path we would go down.

“The other way is to keep multiple data stores and put a search layer across the top, which is really the Google way. I feel much more comfortable with that strategy especially with a company like ours that has grown organically and you have a really dispersed management of assets.”

Advertisers range from the large agencies and multinational corporations to mum and dad classifieds advertisers. From top to bottom News Limited is moving to provide options for electronic booking and payment, via EDI and online portals.

Centralising email management and archiving is a big priority for News Limited, which still faces the challenge of staff storing PST files on their desktop PCs.

“Any media company is subject to regular litigation so we have to be rigorous around what we do,” said Pittard.

“we are looking at using some of the ConCepts and the teChnologies from our fatwire Cms platform for newspaper produCtion.”

PDF for your DMS

NEW

Autonomy iManage WorkSiteNetDocumentsObjectiveOpen Text eDOCS DM and DOCS OpenTRIMWorldoxand now MS SharePoint

NEW

task-centric

content management

and publishing

The pdfDocs Solutions Suite

integrates into leading

Document Management

Systems to provide PDF

creation, collation, annotation,

redaction, form-filling, OCR,

file splitting, bates numbering,

document binding and

comparison capability.

[email protected]

Dual integration into a

DMS and MS SharePoint

DO1390 ad:HPC IDM 18/09/09 4:34 PM Page 1



The adage “rome wasn’t built in a day” teaches us we have to work hard and overcome many challenges if we want to dance on the stage of success. It also

reminds us how difficult it is for even the greatest to stay on top.

Many parallels exist between what causes civilizations and enterprise content management (ECM) initiatives to succeed or fail. In tough times like these, the guidance you give may dictate whether a company flourishes, struggles to survive, or folds.

The following guidelines will help you establish the framework for a successful ECM project, with tips for using standard office equipment (copiers, scanners, fax machines and printers) to significantly increase productivity and profit. Establish a clear vision & project goals.

• Know your vision, long- and short-term goals, and how ECM can be used effectively to achieve them.

• Understand how copiers, scanners, fax machines and printers work with ECM software to help reach your aspirations. Consider underutilised equipment that could serve as capture sources. Solicit input and buy-in from staff.

• Someone must communicate project vision, process, and benefits to staff early in the planning process. After they understand the project goals, take advantage of their knowledge and experience. Staff members may unearth overlooked weaknesses or improvement opportunities that should be considered. Carefully evaluate everyone’s input. This also builds staff buy-in for your project.

Help staff embrace change.• Employees who fear that ECM will eliminate their jobs often

find it challenging to embrace project goals and meet timelines. Job insecurity can lead to lack of commitment, slowdowns, and even project sabotage. Make sure to communicate short and long-term plans, including repurposing staff to other positions, eliminating posts gradually through retirement, etc.Give staff adequate tools and training.

• After employees embrace the idea of using new technology, they will need adequate training, documentation, and support to succeed. Regardless of who will provide what’s needed, make sure a detailed plan is communicated to staff. It will relieve anxiety and encourage readiness to move forward.Encourage creativity, flexibility, & communication.

• For an ECM project to reach its potential, staff must streamline how information is created, shared, and distributed. Unconventional ideas often lead to innovative adaptations and integrations of existing technology, with ECM driving the changes.

All ideas should be encouraged, as long as they are focused. • Although detailed project plans are vital for success, there must

be flexibility to address ideas and obstacles throughout the project. A realistic yet positive attitude is critical.

• Goals, policies, expectations, timelines, and roadblocks should be communicated regularly. Appropriate, inclusive communication gets results.

• Change is challenging. Recognise project milestones. Celebrate success. Establish disaster recovery plans.• Data is integral to a business’s ability to continue operations if there is a pandemic, flood, or other catastrophe. Disaster recovery planning is vital. Create a hierarchy of business information. Note who is responsible for which recovery steps and the order in which data will be restored. Proceeding without a solid plan puts businesses unnecessarily at risk.

Tools to conquer inefficiencyWeb-based ECM stores, organises, and makes information

available to the right people, whenever they need it, from any location. Copiers (including MFPs), scanners, fax machines, and printers often have many capabilities you need to get started, but staff—and even their supplier or advisor—may not be aware of the functionality or how it works. Assess equipment you already own.

Copiers & MFPs. Many modern copiers and MFPs have basic scanning functionality that captures documents electronically. Copier and MFP indexing functions might be severely limited, but if documents can be indexed with one or two keywords, powerful ECM tools can complete the cataloguing process. Customisable ECM security settings let you specify who can access files, improving security while significantly reducing paper waste.

Scanners. Whether using desktop devices with basic one-, two- or three-step functions or highly sophisticated scanners for large-volume batch input, scanning dramatically accelerates document availability and distribution. Like copiers and MFPs, desktop scanners enable anyone to capture and manage information electronically with ease. For high volumes of routine paperwork, high-speed batch scanning quickly captures and indexes documents for ECM storage within seconds, making data instantly available for search, retrieval, and processing.

Fax machines. A frequently overlooked benefit of ECM is the ability to capture faxes electronically for storage and automatic routing. Digital fax capture improves readability, eliminates frustrating ‘ghost’ transmissions, saves significant toner and paper, enables secure desktop access, and facilitates compliance. If the system allows, you can route faxes appropriately to email Inboxes, ensuring they are categorised and secured in the data repository for future retrieval.

Printers. Although most people equate printers with paper copies, some ECM solutions can capture data from print streams and feed it into on-screen reports or tables. For those who regularly create detailed reports, enterprise report management technology (or COLD-ERM) saves significant time and expense. Money should be spent on printing, toner, and manual documentation review only when it makes sense.

ECM lets organisations gain control over disparate information sources and helps transform office efficiency. Understand the full capabilities of your equipment, educate yourself about principles that make companies rise and fall, and take proactive steps to ensure success. With a solid plan and the right tools, you’ll be off to a strong start.

Laurel Sanders is the director of public relations and communications for Optical Image Technology, makers of the DocFinity suite of document management and workflow software. This article is reprinted with permission from imageSource (July 2009).

Your eCM checklist for successBy Laurel Sanders




[ 19 ]


[ 19 ][ 19 ]

“We are two years into the project, and it was anticipated that at end of third year we would be in pilot mode however we are currently in pilot mode right now,” said Nikoletatos.

Curtin is one of two Australian universities to select the open source Alfresco platform (ANU is the other). Alfresco is being integrated with Curtin’s HR and Student management system and will provide a single repository from 2010.

“We have created an enterprise-wide taxonomy which we use to categorise documentation, policies, forms and intranet pages – a Curtin common vocabulary approach,” said Nikoletatos.

Work has commenced on making structured and unstructured data available through an existing staff portal. Curtin University is also evaluating SharePoint server and is investigating integration of SharePoint with the Alfresco ECM solution

“SharePoint use is now so widespread and we already have it as part of our Microsoft arrangement. I think they will coexist,” said Nikoletatos.

Alfresco has not been able to satisfy all of the information management and presentation needs at Curtin. It is currently being implemented to provide document management capability while Open Text is providing a Web Content Management System for the University Web site. SharePoint is being used by the University’s ICT group (Curtin IT Services (CITS)) to run the portal site for their online Project Office

“The CITS Project Office is using SharePoint and evaluating whether Alfresco is the best fit for every requirement or are their situations where SharePoint may be a more appropriate outcome so we have contingency in case we can’t address everything via Alfresco.

Nikoletatos admits there have been challenges being an Alfresco pioneer in Perth, as he points out, one of the most isolated cities on the world.

“One of the risks of open source technology is that you can be limited in trying to obtain professional support services. With alternatives you may have higher license fees but you also get a more readily available pool of support. It’s easier to find a SharePoint expert tomorrow than it is to find an Alfresco expert if I need one.”

“There is definitely an appetite across higher education to support

open source technology, but there are pros and cons, you may reduce your licence fees but you spend it on professional services

“We are now very focused with the Alfresco product and are keen to get it fully in production for our go live on January 1 2010 and heavily in pilot right now. We are also seeing more corporate take-up of Alfresco in Australia and we are encouraged by that. It’s not a bad product but when you get to a sticky situation resources are a little harder to find.”

“There are APIs for Alfresco integration with SharePoint and we see those two products as the core of our ECM strategy.”

The ECM program at Curtin began when the University faced the challenge of integrating a disparate approach to document and record management that was being handled in independently by all of the faculties. The aim was to provide de-duplicated access to

student and corporate records while also making the process of updating Web site content more efficient. Reducing duplication of storage across the university was another key aim, by introducing s centralised repository of documents so that people could send pointers (links) rather than attachments. The higher education sector also faces stringent requirements for twice yearly auditing.

“Historically Curtin University has been a highly decentralised organisation,” said Nikoletatos.

“Universities are steeped in history out of this idea of collegiate decision-making unlike the corporate world which is generally more about centralised decision-making, so there is an onus on my office to ensure a more significant collaborative process is in place that has to be managed and communicated well.”

The centralised CMS replaces a system of distributed file stores, which led to inconsistent records management as staff weren’t always aware of their statutory requirements. It has been implemented on RedHat Virtualised Servers running a clustered SUN network filesystem.

While much of the student and corporate records nowadays is electronic, like any University, Curtin has a large backlog of paper records which must be retained for a long time as a statutory requirement. Curtin University has recently embarked on a program to scan and digitally archive high value records in Alfresco, utilizing a Kodak i440 scanner and Kofax capture software.

“The State Government has added complexity by its requirement for JPG full colour single sided images of documents, which makes it difficult to automate scanning with this approach because documents aren’t always single sided , different sized paper, so there’s a few challenges for us. This task is therefore a highly resource intensive operation, notwithstanding the storage demands it creates,” said Nikoletatos.

The email platform at Curtin is Exchange 2003 and Nikoletatos expects to migrate to Exchange 2010 later next year.

“In the short term Alfresco will provide email archiving capability but in the long term we are looking to work with Microsoft as our strategic partner. Email specifically is around 10% of our corporate data (15Tb including backups). We are hoping the ECM deployment will change the way our staff use email, enabling them to point to a source document instead of using attachments.”

A three year project to implement the Alfresco Content Management System at Curtin university was well underway when Peter Nikoletatos took up the reins as CIO in late 2008.

“We are now managing our data in a different way, the whole information lifecycle,” - - CIO Peter Nikoletatos.

like our Colleagues at other universities we have an exponential growth in

storage requirements beCause we have an inConsistent way of storing our reCords.

Alfresco on track at Curtin



Brisbane is just one of five Catholic Education Dioces’ across Queensland that have no real commonality of approach to information management.

Each uses a different assortment of financial and enterprise applications which necessarily leads to an independent approach to collaboration and content management.

The situation is similar in the state education system.“There is no real national forum in education ICT at the moment,

I talk individually to some CIOs but there is not a lot of overlap and SharePoint is probably one of the most common across all of them,” said CIO Warren Armitage.

The 134 primary and secondary schools under Armitage’s domain will soon unite under a common platform hosted on a fully virtualised data centre in Brisbane.

This will host student administration, finance, HR/payroll, SharePoint and many other applications. The technology platform is Microsoft-based covering device management, operations management, database management, document and records management, identity and security management.

Brisbane Catholic Education has an extensive WAN, providing services to the 134 schools across South East Queensland. These operate approximately 20000 computers across the whole of the school community, 62000 students and 10000 staff.

The WAN provides for fibre broadband into all schools and is

managed by Telstra as part of Catholic Networks Australia which provides national education sector broadband connectivity.

“SharePoint is used as more than a content management system, it’s a backend for both our public and internal sites,” said Armitage.

Armitage has also been able to take advantage of a free enhancement to SharePoint for the education market that was partly developed in Australia with input from OBS. The Microsoft Learning Gateway is a SharePoint “add-on” that provides custom functionality for teachers and students.

A new version of the Microsoft Learning Gateway under development and scheduled for release in 2010, codenamed Uluru, indicating the high level of Australian input. This will provide that ability for teachers to automatically setup class lists so students can have their own collaborative space and setup blogs and wikis, teachers can have workgroups they can manage themselves, and also create their own portals with tailored MySites

Microsoft’s Live@edu email platform is used by teachers and students, with Exchange 2003 as the central email platform for administration staff.

i5 records management“SharePoint was implemented as the basis for our eDRMS

requirements with i5 from OBS providing the overall records and document management functionality on top of SharePoint,” said Armitage.

“Beyond standard business documents our organisations needs to manage a high volume of Payroll/HR paper documents for our 10000 employees spread across 134 schools.”

“An integrated repository was our goal as our community of users is spread across many physical locations.

The SharePoint ECM is integrated for identity management purposes with a HR/payroll solution from Talent2 using

“sharepoint tries to do everything and to some extent suCCeeds, although you

may not be able to do everything as well as you may like it’s definitely got a broad

Capability.” - Cio warren armitage.

top marks for sharePoint atBrisbane Catholic educationSharePoint is providing a united Enterprise Content Management platform for schools in the Brisbane Catholic Education system.

SharePoint is used as a Web Content Management system for central web sites, intranet portals and soon individual school portals and web sites, said

CIO Warren Armitage.

As well as an internal portal for administration of the school system, SharePoint will be used by all 134 schools to establish collaboration sites for students and teachers.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t [ 21 ][ 21 ][ 21 ]

Microsoft’s ILM. The EDRMS is being implemented by i5 parent company OBS, which has worked with business units within Brisbane Catholic Education to create an information architecture and Business Classification System.

SharePoint is used to provide access to both structured and unstructured data within the organisation. Browser-based access is provided to all significant systems including to “proof-of-concept” data marts.

Australia Post subsidiary Decipha is providing outsourced mailroom scanning capabilities for documents and invoices submitted on paper which are then stored within i5 and Sharepoint.

“Decipha scans all our inbound mail,” said Armitage, “there is still a lot of HR paper being generated.

“Teachers can achieve most of their HR functions electronically such as applying for leave however when it comes to submitting a doctor’s certificate it is still easier to pop it into an envelope than finding a scanner.”

All invoices are scanned however data entry into the financials system is still manual as the volume doesn’t justify the effort to implement an automated workflow, said Armitage.

“Most of our costs lie in salaries and that does not generate a lot of financial transactions. We don’t have lots of customers.”

Parents of Brisbane Catholic Education schoolkids can look forward to receiving report cards for their children electronically from late 2010.

Sydney developer MXL has been commissioned to create an application that will be used for delivery of school reports and student portfolios through SharePoint. In the first stage being implemented by 30 November, teachers will be able to submit their results via the portal.

“The next phase in the first half of 2010 will provide parents with access over the Internet to see reports and also communicate with teachers about results and see samples of student work,” said Armitage.

“Most of that work is now being created electronically. The federal government program means all secondary students have notebooks so it skips the step of printing things out.

Students and teachers will have mobile access to the SharePoint portal via notebooks and Apple iPhones

Armitage said there are still some challenges to be faced before the solution is fully deployed in 2010. The technical challenges include linking school active directory domains with the central Catholic Education Office domains.

“This presents challenges for authentication and identity management and also within the SharePoint environment,” said Armitage.

“Apart from the central portal at our Brisbane office we are providing 138 separate portals for each of the schools. That will help get around the Actrive Directory issue,” he said. “We pass identity from our HR payroll to Active Directory and hence to SharePoint so the schools do not have to provision the accounts they may need for their staff and it simplifies their administration at their end. We create some default groupings of users for them using our identity management solution.

“Schools will be able to establish their own identity by being able to customise the templates available in SharePoint Designer so its not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Also on the agenda is an upgrade to Exchange 2007 and the implementation of an email archiving solution.

“the next phase in the first half of 2010 will provide parents with aCCess over the internet to see reports and also CommuniCate with teaChers about results and see samples of student work,”

Strong, effective and rapid relieffrom the painful symptoms of non-compliance.

www.recordpoint.com.au

ISO15489 compliant and fully VERS certifi ed

Implementation of retention and disposal requirements

Rule based records classifi cation reduces records management complexity

High user adoption, increased productivity and decreased end user workload

100% Microsoft SharePoint™ based

recordpointrecords management made easy

RecordPoint is a 3rd generation, rules based records management solution built exclusively on the Microsoft SharePoint™ platform and is specifi cally designed to cater for the record keeping challenges of an increasingly electronic world.

Extremely cost effective, RecordPoint is easy to use and will enable your organisation to meet its evolving records management needs.

Information Worker Solutions, Portal and Collaboration Partner of the YearAWARD WINNER

2009



Tatts Pokies, Tatts Lotteries, Unitab Wagering and Maxgaming: some of the biggest names in Australian gaming and wagering come under the umbrella of Tatts Group, which has over 2500 staff located across the country.

Since 2003 Tatts Group has employed SharePoint to manage documentation through its lifecycle from creation and storage, to discovery, archiving and deletion.

Fiona Caldwell, Group Manager, Business Systems, said, “In 2003 we looked for a simple solution to assist us, and found that Microsoft SharePoint 2003 provided the fundamentals of what we needed at a very low entry cost.

“This solution was then implemented into Tatts Group, and has since been expanded on. Last year we upgraded to SharePoint 2007.”

SharePoint drives the corporate intranet which provides the source of truth for corporate information, company policies and forms, and employee information. It is also utilised for team collaboration sites and communities of interest; as well as personal workspaces, and employee profiles that are integrated with the Telephone Directory.

“Our requirements for content management are very similar to other companies,” said Caldwell, “We want to better manage our information – such as documents, emails, business processes, etc. This includes the ability to capture, manage, store and archive. While we have some digital assets these are not extensive and there is limited requirement to manage these assets at this point in time.

“We are looking at implementing a capture workflow for our Accounts Payable processes within the next 12 months. This means that we have started looking at scanning and capture.

“We are also in the progress of implementing a Business Process Management solution (K2) that integrates with our SharePoint environment to automate and monitor manual forms based processes. These processes will integrate with our corporate Financial and HR systems.”

Tatts Group uses TechnologyOne Financials and the Chris21 HR application from Frontier Software.

It is currently underway with a desktop upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Office 2007 under the Microsoft early adopter program. Symantec Enterprise Vault is also being deployed for email archiving.

“We currently have information residing in many repositories – file shares, SharePoint sites, email, business intelligence systems, corporate applications, etc,” said Caldwell.

“While it is not important for us to create a single repository for our information, it is important that we have one location where an employee can go to find information. To achieve this we are continuing to improve the information that can be found and accessed through our intranet.

“Our intranet search can currently be used to find structured and unstructured data in the intranet and corporate file servers. This information includes formal document and policies, corporate information, team based information, and employee based information such as contact details, areas of responsibility, expertise, interests, languages spoken, etc. Future plans include hooking this search into our business intelligence systems.”

While SharePoint allows for content types and metadata to be attached to all information added, Tatts does not enforce any particular standards as to how information should be categorised.

“There are currently no plans for delivering corporate information to mobile devices, but the systems we have put in place have this capability should it become a priority in the future,” said Caldwell.

Designing the futureAECOM is a global company that provides technical and management consulting on some of the world’s largest design and engineering projects.

Dams and skyscrapers, aircraft carriers, highways and power plants – the AECOM group of companies has the engineering and design expertise resting within its more than 44,000 employees to handle some of the world’s largest construction projects. Last year it earned more than $US6 billion in revenue.

It has more than 4000 employees in Australia and New Zealand,

dancing to a different drum

Three very different Australian organisations have adapted SharePoint for important initiatives in gaming, infrastructure and government.




[ 23 ]


[ 23 ]

involved in projects such as Brisbane’s North South Bypass Tunnel, the Australian Synchrotron, Olympic Dam Mine and Kunioon Coal Project; and in New Zealand, the Otahuhu Power Station and Auckland Rail Electrification project.

AECOM has turned to SharePoint for internal project management in Australia and New Zealand. For collaboration with clients and other companies working on long term projects it employs other platforms.

A Virtual Project Office (VPO) provides a means of distributing internal project delivery forms and managing collaboration outputs like documents and discussions.

Mike Harris, Associate Director and Manager Business Systems – Corporate for AECOM Australia New Zealand, said “SharePoint is used for critical documents on all projects and general correspondence on some, with Aconnex, ProPM and other products serving that need on our largest projects.”

Harris lists SharePoint’s ease of use among the reasons it was chosen for deployment.

“There is minimal training needed, it’s easy to maintain and SharePoint fits into our IT and Business Systems Strategy,” said Harris.

A solid collaboration platform is essential to minimising the risk of contractual disputes, and makes available a valuable repository of lessons learned from previous projects

AECOM has deployed SharePoint MOSS 2007 Enterprise Features Pack 2. It is installed on Windows 2003 64-bit Standard Edition using SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 4 with an indexing engine installed on a separate server.

All AECOM staff use the basic Microsoft Office package and then depending on their role they may have specialised software for tasks such as CAD and architectural modelling programs.

Prior to the rollout of SharePoint, AECOM faced the usual problems with file and folder storage: files being easily lost or overwritten, and the wrong version being sent mistakenly.

“We implemented formal business rules that needed to be supported by some automated processes and workflows,” said Harris.

“We have now customised SharePoint to provide workflow and tracking that assists staff with implementing our project delivery processes though.

“Our business rule is that all critical project documents and records are to be stored in the project folder (or VPO). When a project has closed the project manager must approve the content to be archived. Inherent in this step is that the project manager ensures that all the documents are stored in the correct folders through monitoring and continual reminders to team members.”

“At present SharePoint doesn’t provide a satisfactory solution to AECOM for the management of e-mail. We still use Outlook public folders to store our project emails.”

Ahead of PlanThe ACT Planning and Land Authority (ACTPLA), is the ACT

Government agency, responsible for strategic planning, urban design, land information, development and building regulation and lease administration.

In relation to the development and building industry, ACTPLA is responsible for processing development applications and receiving building approvals, as well as the licensing of trades for building, electrical, plumbing and gas. Earlier this year, ACTPLA launched

eDevelopment, which allows customers to lodge development applications online via the web.

ACTPLA’s Manager of Information Services, Phil Jorritsma, says SharePoint is at the heart of eDevelopment, which will be expanded in the coming months to allow the entire development and building approval processes to be conducted online.

“The online system has been well received by applicants with 37 per cent of DAs being lodged electronically during September,” Mr Jorritsma says.

“The organisation is now building on the electronic foundation by upgrading to the latest version of Objective. This will facilitate collaboration and document management with SharePoint.”

Objective was implemented more than five years ago. The SharePoint-based eDevelopment repository hosts lodged DAs and supporting documents, while Objective has a much broader scope to consolidate all of ACTPLA’s records and document management into a single streamlined system used across the organisation.

When the Territory Records Act 2002 was introduced, the intention was to replace the use of network and local drives.

Jorritsma says ACTPLA is at the forefront of developing electronic business solutions.

“As an organisation we have long recognised that adopting and adapting technology is able to provide long-term benefits to staff, industry and the ACT community.

“ACTPLA was selected as a pilot agency to trial Objective as a potential whole-of-government solution for records and document management. The diversity of the organisation and the wide range of documents which we create and manage were seen as a good test of the system’s capability”.

“Objective has provided ACTPLA with the important foundation that is required to develop electronic business applications such as eDevelopment. In practice, ACTPLA’s Integrated Document Management System (IDMS) makes the storage and retrieval of documents easier and faster.

“This assisted in significantly reducing the amount of time that staff were taking to locate files and therefore improved customer service. The system also simplifies mandatory searches, such as responding to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.”

“When we receive a development application, particularly for commercial or multi-units, we often receive a large number of documents supporting the application. Objective allows us to manage all the documents in a single location providing access to all stakeholders simultaneously.

“Having multiple access to lodged plans allows processes to happen concurrently rather than consecutively. Objective’s audit and document control capability gives us confidence in the knowledge we are accessing the most accurate and up-to-date versions available.”

Until the upgrade to the new version of Objective, due to take place in early 2010, documents and supporting files submitted to SharePoint must be duplicated in Objective. The upgrade will allow for plans and associated documents to be lodged directly into Objective with pointers (aliases) displayed in the SharePoint document library.

ACTPLA is currently expanding eDevelopment to allow Building Certifiers to lodge their building approvals online.

“This module will integrate nicely with the eDA component and provide access to approved plans and conditions of approval. Various trades involved in the construction phase such as builders, plumbers and electricians will avoid the need to fill out approximately 70 per cent of forms given that the information is already captured in ACTPLA’s database. ACTPLA is also trialling laptops for electrical and plumbing inspectors in the field. Providing remote access to the electronic systems is already saving significant travel time.”

“The effective use of contemporary technology to support our business needs has made an enormous difference to the way we support our customers,” said Jorritsma.

“sharepoint fits into our it and business systems strategy,” - mike harris, manager business systems Corporate for aeCom australia and new Zealand



In my last article on SharePoint published in IDM in April 2008 (SharePoint – A Primer: For EDrM and ECM managers) I promised a future article on integrating

with SharePoint. Well, days have a way of filling up and time has a way of flying by so it has taken a little longer than expected.

The core problem isn’t SharePoint (though creating applications in SharePoint isn’t for the faint hearted); it is anyone’s understanding of the word “integration”.

For example:• Do you want me to take information from SharePoint and add

it to my application?• Do you want me to take information from my application and

add it to SharePoint?• Do you want my application to be able to search information in

SharePoint?• Do you want SharePoint to be able to search for information in

my application?There are literally hundreds of such questions one has to ask

before you can define what the customer means by “integration”.In order to simplify this paper, I am going to assume that in most

cases the customer actually wants SharePoint to be its corporate portal; the common, shared ‘gateway’ into most information within the enterprise. This is OK because this is what SharePoint is really good at as long as you keep it simple.

In order to illustrate how this integration process works I am going to show you how we integrate our product RecFind 6 to SharePoint. Note however that what you see is a ‘generic’ solution only; every customer wants it to look and work differently; this is not a standard product. The search we chose to implement is called a Federated search and it is a standard feature of SharePoint. You may be told it requires the use of another server called Search Server 2008 but it actually doesn’t if you use the right components and the right version of SharePoint. For the technically minded:

- In order to perform Federated Searches and other advance searching features in MOSS 2007, You need to update to MOSS 2007 SP1 and install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers;

- SharePoint pages use WebParts (Microsoft version of web widgets). WebParts can be stand alone components or can connect to other WebParts on the same page. i.e., they can be consumers or producers in SharePoint parlance; and

- Federated searches are based on OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 and implemented via a Federated Connector that returns its search results in XML format as an RSS feed.

Our task is made easier because we built our full text search engine in RecFind 6 using SQL Server’s standard text search

functionality (using iFilters). We automatically index all Metadata and electronic documents (stored as Blobs in our database). This means we are ‘ready’ for a SharePoint Federated search.

In our example our Federated search searches the RecFind database, the Adventure Works database and the Internet. It is an example of a true knowledge management search, connecting to all sources of knowledge. However, then we have to present the information ‘found’ by the search in a way that makes sense to the user. We do this in two stages. The first is to present the results as URLs (hyperlinks) just as Bing does within the portal.

Now if a user wants to see the details/full document he/she clicks on the hyperlink.

It is at this stage we have to write some code because we need to be able to display the information held in RecFind 6 in a consistent and sensible manner and you can’t display all the different types of information we store in RecFind 6’s database in Internet Explorer.

Maintain Document SecurityWe also need to make sure that all requests go through our security system. We have to enforce the same access rights that apply to RecFind 6 users. The requirement for document security doesn’t go away just because we are using a SharePoint portal. Luckily we had already developed a suitable product for this called the RecFind 6 MINI API. It is the ‘middleman’ between RecFind 6 and any external request for information and it enforces RecFind6’s security regime. When the user clicks on the URL, this is what our MINI API display screen looks like when displaying Metadata from RecFind 6:

We handle electronic documents a little differently, using the authoring package (or in this case ADOBE) to display the electronic document in its ‘natural’ form:

integrating with sharePoint

For our sample integration we built a simple SharePoint portal and added the functionality to search the RecFind 6 database (and other data sources) and to run a few simple RecFind functions. This is what our sample portal

looks like:

By Frank McKenna


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t [ 25 ][ 25 ][ 25 ][ 25 ][ 25 ]

In this example we also provide access to some basic RecFind functions in addition to a full text search. We chose some basic records management functions:

This is harder than doing a full text search because now you are forced to write code to replicate some of the functionality of RecFind 6.

This is where I would like to make a very strong point. If you have a sophisticated application like RecFind 6 with powerful text, Metadata and BOOLEAN searches and a host of other functionality you would be a fool to try to replicate it in SharePoint because that is exactly what SharePoint is not good at. If you need to do the hard things then just use the native application.

This last section is again for the more technically minded. Explaining in detail how we built our portal is beyond the scope or length of this article so this is a very brief summary for our IT literate readers.

Once you have installed MOSS 2007, SP1, and then Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers, you then have the ability to add federated locations to your SharePoint searches.

First you have to add your desired federated location through the SharePoint Central Administration page. Once you navigate through a few menus, you get to a section called Manage Federated Locations. Here we create a new one called RecFind 6

You need to select that you are using OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 and you need to specify the URL where SharePoint will send its query term and get back results as XML.

Select OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 to display results from another search engine that can receive a query by using a URL and return results as structured XML. Use this protocol to search Web sites that support

RSS or Atom, or to search remote Search indexes on other farms.Specify the template for passing queries to the OpenSearch

location's URL. In the template, the case-sensitive parameter "{searchTerms}" represents the keywords entered into the Search box by end-users.

If you specified a prefix trigger, "{searchTerms}" represents the keywords with the prefix removed. Instead of "{searchTerms}", you can also use capture groups defined by your trigger pattern (see Trigger Pattern above).

The query template is equivalent to the URL template in OpenSearch. The URL specified should return structured XML (typically RSS or Atom results). It should not consist of a URL that shows an HTML-based search results page.

Example A: The following URL would query a remote search server site: http://server/SearchCenter/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k ={searchTerms}

Example B: This query would display medical documents with a specific ID number: http://www.example.com/search-rss.aspx?q= docid:{searchTerms}%20topic=medical

Example C: This query would search only the contents of the "<city>" capture group (instead of the entire user query): http://server/ SearchCenter/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={city}

Basically it is saying it passes the search term to your federated connector. You can also use prefixes and patterns. It is just a means of refining the search, so that a user could specify a particular table only.

You will also have to provide a means of authentication and there are many types to choose from. A federated connector can use the authentication method to apply security to the results it returns to SharePoint.

Once you have set up your federated location, you just need to add it as a “Federated Results” Web Part on the results page of the desired SharePoint Site. This means it will be searched along with any other sources you have set up in your results page of SharePoint.

When results are returned from our federated connector, each record contains a link to that particular record in the Mini-API (our standard interface tool with RecFind 6).

SummarySharePoint is a great tool for corporate portals and it has all the functionality required to integrate it to any application or data source.

However, building integration requires a clear idea of what is required and it is a very technical job; even though all the tools are there it is definitely not an easy task.

My best advice is keep it simple, do not try to get SharePoint to do what it is not good at.

Frank McKenna is CEO, founder and major shareholder of Knowledgeone Corporation, developer of the enterprise content management solution, RecFind 6.


d o C U M e N t & r e C o r d s M A N A G e M e N t s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 26 ][ 26 ][ 26 ]

There is a software company that owns solicitors’ desktops. It has the lion’s share of their company email too, and now it wants the rest of their IT business.

Microsoft is a brand that needs little introduction, but it is making inroads into areas of law firm IT which were previously the domain of specialist IT vendors.

SharePoint – or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to use its full name – is playing an increasingly large part in office life, and law firms are no exception.

In 2008, industry watchers at IT analyst firm Gartner estimated that half of all mid-sized organisations use SharePoint, mostly to aid collaboration among colleagues. Like many organisations that use it, law firms may well have acquired SharePoint almost inadvertently as part of a Microsoft Enterprise Licence Agreement, Windows Server, Core Client Access Licence or Small Business Server.

SharePoint is good at managing workflows – a key element of modern law firm IT – and it integrates well with other Office applications to make them part of a collaborative effort. It is software putty that can be shaped to suit varied tasks, such as case or document management.

The ubiquity of Microsoft applications and operating systems, the pre-packaged nature of SharePoint and the ease with which it can be set up and used for collaboration without the assistance of IT specialists, has made SharePoint popular. And these three factors make it an increasingly attractive way of doing things for which law firms have previously bought proprietary dedicated software – such as document management (DM) or even case and practice management (CMS/PMS).

If it comes for free – that is, the licences are already paid for as part of a bundle – why bother buying a specific application? Why not shape the free putty to do the job?

‘There has been a significant increase in interest in SharePoint from the legal sector in recent months,’ says Steve Marsh, SharePoint Server product manager at Microsoft. ‘SharePoint has matured and firms realise it can do more than document management – it’s a collaboration platform with built-in search which you can use to manage your practice, for example using the business intelligence tools to build dashboards of KPIs.’

Building dashboards of KPIs means creating easily viewed overviews of key performance indicators – either of individuals, teams or the whole firm – which means SharePoint can be useful to multiple parts of a law firm. Unmodified, SharePoint bears little resemblance to a bespoke PMS. However, SharePoint’s putty can be moulded to perform many different functions that relate directly to law firms’ day-to-day tasks.

These include workflows and collaboration both between employees (fee-earners and non-legal staff) and between the firm and external parties (clients and barristers). SharePoint allows people to compare diaries and work on shared documents, while keeping track of versions.

Underpinning all Microsoft software is the company’s .NET Framework. This is Microsoft’s Rosetta stone and is designed to provide a common web-friendly language for software.

We cannot take that analogy too far: the translation works only for applications designed for .NET. But that encompasses the modern Windows universe, including Microsoft’s own software, as well as independently developed software such as DM, CMS and PMS if specifically written for the .NET Framework – as many of them increasingly are.

Until quite recently, law firms were largely tethered to monolithic proprietary suites, which ran their accounting, time-recording, billing, case management and so on, alongside Microsoft Office.

But Microsoft’s influence has reached far beyond the desktop, into the fabric of IT set-ups, running servers and communications. This has forced independent software developers, including legal software providers, to bind their products into the .NET Framework.

For small independent software vendors faced with the ubiquity of Microsoft, resistance is futile.

In the Law Society’s 2009 Software Solutions Guide, all PMS vendor’s systems are .NET- based. The vendors nearly all name SharePoint as important to current and future products.

Much of that integration is now complete, and .NET and SharePoint are de facto standards.

The result is a common software core, off which hang .NET-compliant applications, which a competent systems integrator can

share and share alike

Microsoft means a lot more than just Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, reports Andrew Charlesworth. SharePoint is the new product in town for the legal industry, and it could save solicitors a lot of money.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 d o C U M e N t & r e C o r d s M A N A G e M e N t [ 27 ]

plug in like modules. And if modules can be plugged in, they can be unplugged and swapped for modules that better serve the purpose of the customer, or do the same thing at a lower cost.

Thus the monolithic era of legal software is ending – and with it the ability of suppliers to ‘lock in’ their customers to any equivalent extent. Without captive customers, legal software vendors are exposed to wider competition, from one another and from independent software developers with products, such as DM, which are proven in other sectors and can plug into any .NET set-up.

For example, Australian document management developer DocsCorp supplies the likes of UK law firm Hammonds and practices Taylor Wessing and Lovells. The company specialises in integrating PDF technology into DM systems, such as Hummingbird, Open Text and Interwoven, so users can create PDFs within the DM environment, and save and profile external content directly into the DM system.

In February, DocsCorp announced an upgrade to its flagship product, pdfDocs Desktop 2.2, to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint.

Law firms are increasingly turning to SharePoint for DM, especially smaller firms, says Kerry Carroll, marketing manager at DocsCorp.

Some larger firms also use SharePoint as a repository where they publish content.

Although SharePoint can theoretically be used ‘out of the box’ without the assistance of an IT professional, the reality is that a law firm will probably need the services of a systems integrator to mould SharePoint’s putty into a set of functions the practice can recognise and use, especially when it comes to integration with existing CMS/PMS, timesheets, billing and accounts systems. But the beauty of this arrangement is that, even if a firm’s systems integrator disappears, charges too much or otherwise falls out of favour with the firm, another SharePoint-savvy integrator can be found.

That level of competitive pressure should keep integration fees down and integrators keen to keep customers sweet.

The flexibility of SharePoint is illustrated by its use at Californian construction consultancy Gafcon. It uses SharePoint as a tool to automate proposals, compile business intelligence reports, and to obviate the need for multiple licences to third-party software.

For each new proposal, Gafcon creates a new SharePoint ‘site’ on the company intranet, using a customised template which includes a document library, built-in workflows and other elements that support the company’s proposal process. Then the relevant consultants ‘subscribe’ to the site, delivering the parts of the proposal for which they are responsible.

It is not difficult to see how this approach can be adopted by law firms. For each new matter under the client hierarchy a SharePoint ‘site’ can be created, to which the relevant parties – for example, in-house legal staff, client and external agents – can subscribe, with appropriate access rights granted.

These sites look like websites but they are essentially places on the firm’s internet that represent all the information relating to the project in hand. Here, relevant documents will be available to collaborate on, and the process will be driven by workflow rules and deadlines established at set-up.

At Gafcon, SharePoint is also used to compile timesheets and display charts showing each consultant’s time booked with clients. That means managers can monitor timesheets more closely. Furthermore, employees are entering timesheets on time and more

accurately, so Gafcon can send out invoices to its clients, on average, up to two weeks earlier than before.

Gafcon’s projects may involve numerous in-house consultants and contractors, all of whom need access to the same information. By publishing the relevant documents as a SharePoint site, they don’t need to buy extra licences for everyone to access documents from other DM systems. That all sounds like a PMS, doesn’t it?

Workflow rules would need to be written by someone who knows SharePoint, but the same applies to any proprietary case or practice management system.

Microsoft integrators such as London-based ClearPeople are also being asked by law firms to develop business intelligence-style reporting tools using SharePoint.

But document management without buying into monstrous DM companies is the SharePoint-derived application for which ClearPeople has seen most demand from law firms.

A SharePoint-based DM system may not have the rich functionality that a dedicated DM tool has, but how many people use all that functionality anyway? Maybe the features firms do need can be replicated by integrating a much simpler plug-in.

‘Instead of a proprietary system, you are basing DM on something which is already integrated with other tools, such as Office, Outlook and Exchange Server, which the firm uses every day,’ says Karawani.

Many of the systems used by law firms currently are not fully integrated in this way. For example, support staff may be updating a PMS with new client and matter information during working hours, but these get pulled into the DM system by a batch process overnight, or at best hourly.

In some cases, says Karawani, moving from, say, an early version of Hummingbird to the latest version could prove to be more costly and cumbersome than building a new SharePoint-based DM system, especially if the firm already has in-house support for Microsoft applications, and supporting a SharePoint system is likely to be easier and cheaper.

However, it is worth reiterating that SharePoint requires modification before it will suit the needs of a law firm. For example, modifications such as a unique document numbering system, a consistent DM user interface, an automated approach for creating a client-matter hierarchy for filing which lawyers are used to, and a new tool to deal with non-matter-related documents.

‘SharePoint is good for DM, web interface and knowledge management, but when you look in more detail, you begin to see the gaps between what it offers and what users expect,’ says Karawani.

‘You have to add a friendly user interface lawyers can feel comfortable with.’

Another SharePoint challenge law firms should be aware of is security. Not that SharePoint is unsecure if used correctly, but firms should be wary of lax governance when setting up SharePoint sites.

A recent survey by Courion, an access-management software firm (so admittedly with a vested interest) discovered that SharePoint sites are being deployed in large organisations without strong governance or consideration for security best practice.

Of particular concern was unauthorised migration of sensitive data on to SharePoint sites. Of 163 organisations, almost a quarter (23%) had found sensitive data on inadequately protected SharePoint sites in their organisation, although only 3% admitted to an actual breach of confidentiality. But 86% said they were concerned that sensitive data could be revealed accidentally via SharePoint sites.

SharePoint, then, is the raw material from which powerful, flexible systems that are less expensive to construct and maintain than dedicated legal software can be built for law firms – but only in the right hands. Even Microsoft urges firms to seek the advice of a systems integrator ‘who can advise on how to get started, how to get the best out of the technology and what is possible with SharePoint’, says Marsh.

Andrew Charlesworth is a freelance Journalist. Reprinted with permission from the UK Law Society Gazette.

sharepoint’s putty Can be moulded to perform many different funCtions that relate direCtly to law firms’ day-today tasks, suCh as workflows


d o C U M e N t & r e C o r d s M A N A G e M e N t s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 28 ][ 28 ]

sharePoint workflow kitA new add-on for SharePoint, Virto SharePoint Workflow, expands the range of the standard SharePoint activities, providing wider opportunities for creating custom activity sets, and thus, more flexible customization of business processes.

The Workflow Kit is a set of no-code and ready-to-use activity blocks that you can easily add to SharePoint Designer and build your own workflow within a minute.

SharePoint 2007 can be customised via about 30 standard activity blocks in SharePoint Workflow Designer, however the standard set of activities sometimes does not allow for organizing specific business processes.

In the new version the set of Virto Workflow Kit activities is extended with a number of new, text and messaging related activities that allow:

— Sending a single SMS message to specified phone number via Clickatell and Smscountry bulk SMS gateways;

— Removing leading and trailing white-space characters and storing the result in a variable; Extracting a substring from a text and storing the result in a variable;

— Deleting items from a SharePoint list according to the filter settings.

open text outlines Vignette strategyOpen Text has announced it will continue to develop both Vignette Content Management and Open Text Web Solutions as complementary offerings, as it evolves its strategy to integrate social media and collaboration into its ECM offerings.

Vignette will form the basis of its Web content management platform, while providing personalised and multi-channel capabilities integrated with the Open Text ECM Suite. Vignette Content Management version 8.0 and Vignette Portal version 8.0 will be released later this year. Open Text claims that the strategy involves offering two different "flavours" of social media product.

"Both community applications and community services are built on top of the Vignette Collaboration product, which we will continue to ship as we continue to develop this product and the underlying technology components to build out our social media marketplace applications," said a spokesperson.

The two offerings are Vignette Community Applications and Vignette Community Services which are build on the same "engine." The recently released Web Solutions 10.0 will be followed by the release of Web Solutions 10.1 in the first half of 2010.

Get on the move with MobolizeMobophiles has opened a limited beta program for its Mobolize solution, which provides both continuous access to a Sharepoint site when you are offline and accelerated access when you are online, all seamlessly from your browser.

Working from within Internet Explorer on your Windows laptop, the Mobolize solution provides a user experience that is identical to having a super-fast and always-on connection directly to your Sharepoint site, even if the user is at a remote branch office or on a plane.

Mobolize is based on advanced virtualization and caching technology that supports existing web sites without any changes to the web application. It is claimed to be the only offline solution that can provide access to the actual Sharepoint web pages, such as web parts, wiki pages, calendars, and team discussions. In addition to seamless access from the browser, Mobolize also provides seamless access from Microsoft Office applications to files stored on Sharepoint, enabling offline and virtually instant file retrievals.

"The typical reaction when people first see Mobolize in action is disbelief, since they have never been able to use their browser before without internet connectivity," said William Chow, co-founder of Mobophiles. "Once they see that they can get to any of their Sharepoint pages even while offline and they can open huge Office documents in seconds even while remote, the productivity benefits are immediately obvious."

The public beta release can be downloaded by going to: http://www.mobolize.com.

order in the houseThe Department of Building and Housing New Zealand has turned to Objective to provide an enterprise content management solution.

The rollout will provide over 400 staff with the structure to manage more than half a million electronic documents, 200,000 paper-based documents and a growing volume of email.

The building industry regulator will utilise Objective to grow its knowledge base and help in gathering and collating information to use in providing policy advice to the government on the building and housing sectors.

The solution will be integrated with some existing and new business applications, and provide a centralised repository of the Department’s entire corporate, business and customer information.

Mike Winiata, Chief Advisor Information, Department of Building and

Housing said: “We needed an enterprise solution that would manage our entire information life cycle, integrate with existing and new business applications, and support the Department in meeting its statutory compliance obligations under the Public Records Act 2005.”

Knowledgetree opens up to CMisKnowledgeTree has announced the release of a developer snapshot of its product that includes an implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification.

This snapshot is available for testing in the community. CMIS clients, such as CMIS Spaces, will work with the KnowledgeTree CMIS interface and allow users to access content as they would with any other CMIS interface implementation.

The CMIS initiative is led by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets and protect the right of free choice of technology. KnowledgeTree is a sponsoring member of OASIS.

“KnowledgeTree is being proactive in adopting and integrating CMIS into our product suite,” said Philip Arkcoll, product manager, KnowledgeTree.

“This will allow users of ECM products to extend their software investments by gaining visibility into all enterprise document repositories that have a CMIS interface as well as realize benefits such as reduced vendor lock-in, improved interoperability between content management systems and a richer content management ecosystem.”

In addition to the CMIS API, KnowledgeTree is also releasing a proof-of-concept CMIS client module to the Drupal web content management application community. This module demonstrates accessing content in the KnowledgeTree repository from the popular web content management server.

The KnowledgeTree CMIS module is built on the core CMIS module, maintained by Optaros. Practice Director of ECM for Optaros, Jeff Potts, said “I've worked directly with implementations of other standards for various purposes and have long been a fan of standardized communication mechanisms allowing people to share their data without having to worry about format conversions and communication issues. We’re pleased to see other organizations like KnowledgeTree that are passionate about open standards.”




[ 29 ]


Australian research portal unveiledA new on-line portal that brings together research on climate and agriculture by more than 40 Commonwealth and State Government organisations has been launched.

Andrew Campbell, former head of Land & Water Australia and one of the founders behind the project said: “Australia’s challenges in Agriculture, Natural Resource Management and Climate Change are formidable.

“Meeting these challenges will require innovation and new knowledge, and it will also mean making the best possible use of existing knowledge. That requires the ability for people to access existing information easily, and to find out what research is already in train and who is doing it. This fantastic on-line initiative tackles all those objectives. It will help Australian science agencies to minimise the risk of unnecessary duplication, and to maximise the return from public investment in science.”

Bruce Wren, CEO of Netcat said: “While it’s exciting to be providing the cornerstone Web 2.0 technology behind AANRO, as a Company we’re proud to be involved in a project that is addressing one of the biggest challenges facing our nation”.

Netcat.Biz is developing and managing AANRO and has provided a platform with advanced search, database management, web content management, geospatial integration and web publishing.

AANRO has been developed to prevent duplication of effort through providing researchers with access to a Web 2.0 Portal with access to material previously hidden in proprietary databases.

scanFix cleans upAccusoft Pegasus has released ScanFix Xpress Version 6, introducing colour and grayscale document image cleanup to document imaging, in addition to black/white document image cleanup. ScanFix Xpress enhances image quality, prepares images for further processing such as OCR, improves content recognition accuracy, and creates smaller compressed files.

“ScanFix Xpress v6 introduces colour and grayscale image cleanup to document imaging and forms processing application developers,” says Rick Scanlan, director of sales engineering at Accusoft Pegasus.

“Most production scanners today provide a colour scanning option. While storage has become fairly economical, colour images still require considerably more storage space than black and white images. ScanFix Xpress can reduce compressed file sizes and make a significant improvement on OCR, ICR or forms processing activities.”

The new version delivers a large number of new colour and grayscale image processing features.

Automatic colour Detection analyzes image content then recommends if images should remain colour or can safely be converted to bitonal. Greatly improved Automatic Binarization is provided for converting grayscale and colour images to bitonal. Brightness and Contrast Adjustment is now available.

colour Drop removes specified colours from an image. Image Detergent reduces colour noise and variation, and is particularly useful for removing JPEG compression artifacts around characters.

Virtual Bulb emulates a colour dropout scanner. In addition, Deskew, Border Removal, Blank Page/Rectangle Detection, Dilate/Erode, and more are now available within ScanFix Xpress for colour and grayscale images.

The ScanFix Xpress SDK allows developers to build applications targeting both 64-bit and 32-bit Windows .NET architectures. The .NET components included with ScanFix Xpress are compiled as AnyCPU. ScanFix Xpress is optimized for use in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, and is fully compliant for use in .NET Framework 2.0 and higher. Full-featured trial versions of ScanFix Xpress are available.

Filebound cosies up to Capture ProA new software solution from The Priton Group (US) integrates scanned data from KODAK Capture Pro Software into Marex Group’s FILEBOUND Document Management Solution.

The Priton Group developed a release script for KODAK Capture Pro Software to help users of the FILEBOUND Solution enrich the capabilities of front-end document capture.

“Accounting, human resources, education, government, healthcare and other paper intensive industries need to simplify document management to improve control over critical, information-dependent tasks,” said JackArnston, Principal, The Priton Group.

“The integration between Capture Pro Software and the FILEBOUND Solution makes it easier for users to access specific information from a variety of sources, including patient records, employment data, and accounts payable data.”

The release script for Capture Pro Software from The Priton Group combines Kodak’s application programming interface (API) and the FILEBOUND Object Model (FBOM) to provide support for document separation, optical character recognition (OCR), barcode recognition and multiple batch classes. The connection tool automates document scanning processes for an unlimited number of jobs and projects in production capture environments.

“Software compatibility increasingly plays a role in how companies can work across their organization to increase efficiency and competitiveness,” said BrianBagan , Director, Business Development, Document Imaging, Business Solutions and Services Group, Kodak. “The release script for Capture Pro Software from ThePriton Group demonstrates how Kodak’s scanning technology can improve collaborative document management solutions to provide their customers with more usable information.”

The release script provides email alerts when batches are released, check for duplicate records within the FILEBOUND Solution, and can parse multiple index values to the same image. This is especially valuable for Accounts Payable and Register of Deeds applications.

The AANRO website can be found at www.aanro.net.


d o C U M e N t & r e C o r d s M A N A G e M e N t s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 30 ][ 30 ]

By Jennifer PadmanThe Boeing Company (Boeing) and its heritage companies have been an integral part of Australia’s defence industry for more than 75 years. Its largest wholly-owned subsidiary in-country, Boeing Defence Australia (BDA), has approximately 2000 employees located at 14 sites across every state and territory (except Tasmania), making managing data no easy feat!

As the organisation moved into the electronic era, it was required to develop a strategy for dealing with a large paper-based archive.

In January 2009, BDA’s off-site storage facility in Brisbane held 8212 archive boxes. Of these, no destruction dates existed for 4760 boxes, there was unknown content in approximately 80 percent and, in most boxes, the contents were not tracked at the record level. The annual cost of maintaining this data was approximately $A30,000, even thought the real value of this data to the company was extremely minimal.

The potential impact of not being able to locate - or inadvertently destroying - a vital record can be catastrophic for any company.

As a leader in the aerospace industry, BDA’s projects are cutting edge and include the F/A-18 Hornet upgrade program, the High Frequency Modernisation Project (HFMP), the Vigilare command and control program, and the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) modification program.

Due to being project-driven, BDA’s records management systems are fairly stovepiped, with no central records management system. This makes it difficult to establish ownership and identify individual records when a project is archived and staff change programs.

In addition, any Australian defence data is subject to specific distribution and storage requirements – resulting in more complex records management processes.

BDA uses MATRIX as its configuration and data management tool, allowing any record archived within MATRIX to be quickly located. MATRIX is an object oriented database that keeps track of where a file is located in the approval lifecycle: CREATED, APPROVED, IN REVIEW, etc.

Finding any medium (such as paper, CD or DVD) is easy as it is simply the location attribute of the medium object.

But what about functions within BDA that don’t use MATRIX? Or older projects and companies - now owned by Boeing - that were paper based?

The problem of the paper archives was first identified in an audit In 2001, however the task of developing an archive solution was seen as a low priority.

So, how did BDA fix this problem? Firstly, an Excel spreadsheet listing each archive box by project was obtained from the off-site storage facility. This was followed by collecting the available

metadata (some of which had itself been archived!), trawling through drives, finding lists, talking to key players and inputting all information into the spreadsheet. But there were still big data gaps – with 3753 boxes destroyed at this point there were 3776 boxes remaining with no destruction dates.

The next step was to conduct a risk assessment. Was this a key project? Was it a design, build, repair, or in-service support job? How old was it? What were the likely implications of losing data? Were there any potential occupational health and safety problems that could impact that program?

What were some of the potential legal problems that could arise? Did the contracts department hold the original contracts, or was there a possibility of vital data being located in an unidentified box?

With this in mind, BDA then weighed the cost of recalling each box from the off-site facility, opening it and inspecting the contents. It was decided to destroy, inspect or re-sentence the records.

Boeing Defence Australia faced a major legacy data issue in its move to electronic record-keeping.

Flying to a digital future

australian defenCe data is subjeCt to speCifiC distribution and storage requirements – resulting in more Complex reCords management proCesses.




[ 31 ]


At the end of the process, BDA’s leadership team was reluctant to authorise the destruction of unknown data, and understandably so considering the nature of the organisation’s projects. It is a brave person who signs on the dotted line to authorise destruction without knowing exactly what was being destroyed!

Moving forwards, the focus was to then allocate responsibility for each account code for the legacy programs to ‘archive focals’. Each focal underwent archival training and was granted access to the off-site storage facility’s website in order to manage stored data.

The focal provided advice on how and what to archive, how to ensure the data was correctly packed and how to maintain archival registers, while encouraging them to review the spreadsheet to identify data to be destroyed. Not only did this reduce costs, but it created a sense of ownership through assigning responsibility for legacy data.

What did BDA achieve through archiving? While some data was eventually destroyed, the central register was made available on the company intranet, providing greater awareness of archive contents.

One area for improvement that would have alleviated the problem would have been to gain the support of the leadership team earlier in the process. However, in spite of this, BDA has a coordinated company-wide approach to the long-term storage of data for the first time.

BDA also reviewed its Master Records Retention Schedule (MRRS), which required updating. Upon investigation, it was found Boeing has an excellent MRRS available online, as well as a team of experts and consultants available for assistance. The MRRS contains descriptive metadata to guide the user to identify and sentence the record correctly.

As a result, BDA is now mapping the functions in Australia in line with the MRRS, identifying each series of documents and document types.. Once this is completed, the result will be referred to Boeing’s consultants to review legal and other requirements to ensure that the retention period is correct.

By solving the legacy data issue, BDA changed the organisation’s culture to accept the master record as being the electronic copy. Data is approved and distributed electronically with the resulting signed paper records archived immediately and stored off-site in line with BDA’s disaster recovery strategy.

Electronic archivingImplementing an electronic records management system does involve changes. BDA

is starting to investigate options for electronic archiving, and is stressing the importance for data owners to understand that backing up the network is not archiving.

BDA is probably not large enough to warrant implementing a full digital archiving system, such as the Victorian Government has done with its leading edge VERS program for the Public Records Office of Victoria.

Instead, BDA is implementing PDF/A as the company standard for scanned documents. While this increases IT infrastructure costs (as PDF/A files are approximately three times as large as a normal PDF file), the PDF/A files are self-sufficient. This means they do not need other programs to open, and this is essential criteria for long-term electronic storage.

For records classified as ‘important’ or above, the native format will be retained with a PDF/A copy available and the paper copy stored at off-site archives. From a conservative archival point of view, this will protect BDA’s data.

In summary, most organisations manage paper well but have no archiving strategies for electronic information - which is the vast bulk of data. At BDA, the issues are ensuring the native file format can be read in the future, the equipment required to access the data remains available, and selecting a mechanism suitable for long term storage. To focus on electronic storage, BDA set aside the legacy paper issue and adopted PDF/A as the archiving standard in the first step towards digital archiving.

Records management is progressing well and while economic conditions might not be conducive to large capital expenditure at present, the goals and strategy are in place. To-date, archiving costs have been substantially reduced with company-wide processes and trained staff to handle archiving.

Digital archiving options are being investigated, and the BDA leadership team is fully supportive and confident data records are being managed effectively and protected.

Jennifer Padman joined Boeing Defence Australia in 2001. During the past eight years, Jennifer has worked across several data and configuration management roles and is currently the Data Management Lead for Boeing in Australia.

Need Batch Scanning Software?

Need to scan, index and store docu-ments quickly and easily?

i2 Scan features include:1. Support for various document separation methods. Including sepa-ration sheet, barcodes, OCR text and page count.

2. Includes flexible data capture op-tions. Select a region (lasso it) and read data via OCR, barcode or key from image.

3. Offers full automation. Scan, ex-tract data, index and output without any user intervention.

4. Provides automatic document type detection and routing. No need to sort documents into document types prior to scanning.

5. A flexible approach to exporting. Export index data to csv, xml or any ODBC compliant database.

6.6. Support for a wide range of scan-ning and importing methods. Includ-ing network based photocopiers and virtually all document scanners.

Try the application that can painlessly deliver for you.

For a free trial copy...

Call 1300 368 348www.i2scan.com.au

bda set aside the legaCy paper issue and adopted pdf/a as the arChiving standard in the first step towards digital arChiving.


e d i s C o V e r Y s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 32 ][ 32 ][ 32 ]

By Allison Stanfield

There are many challenges in preparing documents to present to a court. Electronic discovery can put your organisation under immense pressure

to retrieve information from a wide range of sources, ranging from email archives to file servers and desktop and mobile devices. However all that effort can come to nought if your documents are not accepted as evidence by the court.Electronic evidence is a relatively new phenomenon and is rapidly becoming the default form of documentary evidence. Information is now largely created and stored digitally and email is now the leading form of communication.

When you are responding to a discovery order or preparing for a court action, it is important to deal with documents in a way that ensures their integrity is not compromised so that, if required, they can be used as evidence in court and that the maximum weight can be applied to the evidence.

Courts in Australia are guided by rules of evidence that exist at common law and a range of legislation (in various forms of the Evidence Acts). To cite a document as evidence in a court, electronic documents must meet the definition of ‘document’ under the relevant Evidence Act. The definitions are broadly similar across the Commonwealth and various states.

Until the best evidence rule was abolished by the Evidence Acts, it was necessary to produce the original document, however, the Evidence Acts provide that a copy can be accepted by the court.

Nothing can guarantee the acceptance of electronic evidence before a court. The admissibility of evidence in any court case is subject to compliance with the rules of admissibility and the interpretation placed upon them by the court.

The rules of evidence govern how a party goes about proving its case. In putting evidence to the court, a party should consider three questions:

• How to put to the court evidence of the fact; • Whether the evidence is admissible;• The weight the court will give the evidence .When attempting to establish the authenticity and reliability

of electronic evidence, it will be necessary to prove the accuracy of the process the system used to create records, the source of the information on the record and the method and time of its preparation. If appropriate standards and procedures have been followed in the creation and maintenance of electronic evidence, the party endeavouring to prove the evidence will be in much better stead than if there are minimal standards and procedures. It is important to show that the chain of custody remains intact when electronic evidence has been handled.

Weight accorded electronic evidenceWhen considering the weight afforded to copies of documents,

for example, where hard copies have been converted in an electronic format, the court may take into account the following factors:

• Accuracy – that the copies were made accurately;• Reliability & Integrity – that the copies have been retained in a

robust and secure environment; • Authenticity – that the copies have not been tampered with in

any way; and• Accessibility – the copies can be accessible in years to come i.e.

to ensure the records are accessible on current technologies.The passage of the Commonwealth Electronic Transactions Act

in 1999 has since meant that transactions conducted electronically in Australia can be enforced.

The importance of good record-keeping practices is emphasised by legislation such as Section 11(2) of the Electronic Transactions

Act 2000 (NSW). This sets out guidelines for information that must be recorded when converting paper documents to electronic format for archiving purposes . Organisations should employ good record keeping practices to afford their evidence more weight, if required. Standards Australia’s HB171-2003 Guidelines for the management of IT evidence should be followed where possible.

A Document Destruction and Retention Policy should be prepared and adhered to, and an appropriate electronic document and records management system should be used to capture electronic information and allow for quick and easy retrieval of information generally or for litigation purposes.

Record-keeping practices should be established, advised to all staff and followed. Adequate resources should be in place to develop, implement and maintain record keeping policies, procedures and systems. It is imperative that audit trails and logs are kept to support reliable and accurate record keeping, particularly to show who accessed the system and when, and to indicate where attempts to gain unauthorised access to the system were undertaken. Security of the system should be robust and tested on a regular basis. System documentation should be maintained and stored in a logical manner. Organisations should ensure that record-keeping practices are capable of being legally acceptable.

The process should include robust quality assurance procedures. QA procedures should be implemented to ensure metadata capture and imaging is undertaken in accordance with standards. Random sampling of pages and metadata should be undertaken to check quality (using standards such as ISO 2859). Verification Certificates verifying the integrity of the imaging and metadata capture process should be completed once random sampling checks have been completed verifying the accuracy of the imaging and metadata process.

The integrity of any electronic document & records management system should be maintained, and IT systems should have:

• Adequate physical and other security safeguards;• Audit logs of access to and use of images and metadata;• Metadata that is secured and linked to images;• Adequate business continuity and disaster recovery plans; and• A migration strategy to ensure data can be moved across to

updated technological platforms.By implementing procedures, documentation and QA processes

which can be submitted to the court to show that the process preserved the integrity of the original, an organisation will be much better placed to cite evidence to establish a fact before any court and have it afforded the most weight.

turning data into evidence

Allison Stanfield is a founder and CEO of e.law Australia, a company specialising in digital evidence. Allison’s has recently published her second book, “Computer Forensics, Electronic Discovery and Electronic Evidence”,

Lexis-Nexis, 2009.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e d i s C o V e r Y [ 33 ]


[ 33 ]


The challenges surrounding the discovery of information from backup tapes was thrown into stark relief in the now-infamous case of Coleman v. Morgan Stanley, where a Florida jury awarded more than $US600 million in damages against the financial services firm.

The judge in that case instructed the jury to assume that Morgan Stanley helped Sunbeam inflate its earnings, because Morgan Stanley failed to produce email.

US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure affirm that computer backup tapes are subject to legal hold, and may be discoverable. If backup tapes are used for information retrieval then they are accessible for the purposes of e-discovery. The problem is, backups were never designed for e-discovery, and it shows.

In another US case, Toussie v. County of Suffolk, the county argued search of backups was overly burdensome. The court narrowed the search request to 35 terms, but it still required an estimated 470 backup tape restorations at a cost of $US600,000-$US900,000.

Why so much? Computer backups are snapshots of a computer system at a particular point in time, so that you can recover the system back to this point in the event of a failure or other disaster. The entire backup process is optimised around that concept of a computer system image at a singular point in time - whereas e-discovery is about finding specific information within a particular time period.

It’s a bit like being asked to find every photo of Aunt Petunia in a green dress during the 1970s when faced with 47 shoe-boxes of family snapshots. The only option is to open all the shoe-boxes and look at all the images. In this particular case, narrowing of the search terms didn’t help the County: with no way of knowing which backup tapes matched the terms, restoring the tapes was the only way to find out.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just about knowing which backup tapes or images are relevant - it can be worse than that. Most backups are of a particular system configuration, which can mean you need the same computer hardware to complete a successful restore. This presents a challenge for most organisations because they often have two- to four-year hardware refresh cycles - so the chances of finding the same hardware are slim for all but the most recent matters. At this point you’re looking at eBay to find old hardware, or specialised backup restoration services.

In general, tapes kept solely for disaster recovery are not likely to be defined as accessible. However studies indicate that 70 percent of restores from backups are not for disaster recovery - they are to retrieve deleted information. Some organizations have attempted to hide behind accessibility, but as the Toussie case shows, backups are often deemed to be accessible. In that case, the fact that there was no other way to get the data was relevant, leading the court to state “You can’t just throw up your hands and say we don’t store [e-mails] in an accessible form and then expect everybody to walk away.”

The concept of accessibility has become pivotal, and the problem is that many backups satisfy its definition. Courts may want to know if a party routinely restores backup tapes (e.g. to test if the tapes still work), or tapes have been restored in other situations (e.g. to restore an accidentally deleted file or email). You may also be asked if your projected costs have been compared to specialised vendors, who may well turn out to be cheaper due to their experience and tools.

Modern active archiving systems were developed to address these problems. I’ve asked a room full of IT people if they’re doing archiving and nearly every hand went up. For some, though, archiving meant a pile of backup tapes somewhere - in one case, the organisation had demolished the employee swimming pool

Archiving is for e-discovery; backup is for recovery“Not a dark or novel art” might sound like a ruling from the Wizengamot Court in the Harry Potter universe, but actually came from a uS court ruling denying “safe harbor” for an evidence spoliation claim. The dark art referred to by the court is information management, the process and technology organisations use to acquire, retain, hold and ultimately expire Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Court rulings like this are why you care about information management, and the difference between backup and archiving. By Mathew Lodge

Mathew Lodge is Senior Director of Product Marketing for Symantec’s Information Management group, and before that ran EMEA Product

Marketing for Symantec. Previously, he was an expert consultant in a $US400m Silicon Valley trade secret lawsuit, and before that led marketing and product management at venture-funded start-ups in the San Francisco

area. Prior to that, he was responsible for product management of a $US600m router business at Cisco Systems. He holds a master’s degree

from the University of York, UK and is an alumni of London Business School.

studies indiCate that 70 perCent of restores from baCkups are not for disaster reCovery - they are to retrieve deleted information

(Continued on page 35)


e d i s C o V e r Y s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 34 ][ 34 ]

David McGrath is Director of e-Litigation Solutions. He currently provides independent

e-discovery, information management and technology consulting services to corporates,

law firms and the courts. David holds degrees in Law and Computer Science and post graduate qualifications in Technology

Management. [email protected]

In a case brought before the Federal Court in WA earlier this year, one company failed in its bid to demand access to a former employee’s private emails, despite having clear evidence that he had emailed company information to a personal email account and to his prospective employer.

The key point illustrated by this case is that even “smoking gun” email evidence is only part of the evidence which will be considered by a court when deciding matters that come before it.

In Cape Australia Holdings Pty Ltd v Iannello [2009] FCA 709, Cape Australia Holdings (“Cape”) and Total Corrosion Control (“Total”) sought access to private emails of a former employee, Darren Ianello. This extended to communications with his new employer, Giovenco Industrial Services Pty Ltd (“Giovenco”).

In legal speak, this is known as an application for “preliminary discovery”. Its purpose is to see a prospective opponent’s documents in order to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to commence potentially costly and expensive legal proceedings.

As Justice Siopis notes in the case1, preliminary discovery permits “fishing” for new evidence. Given the cost and burden of discovery, the court needs to be satisfied that there is a “reasonable cause to believe” the applicant has a case against its opponent.

Total, which was acquired by Cape in August, 2007, provided industrial services to the energy and resources industry.

After five years with Total, Darren Iannello resigned on 18 June, 2008. On his last day, he handed over his laptop computer so that all confidential files could be removed from the laptop and transferred to Total’s server.

Three days later, he received a letter from Total reminding him of his confidentiality and intellectual property obligations. The letter also asserted that Mr Iannello had given assurances not to compete with Total after his resignation. While Mr Iannello acknowledged

his confidentiality and intellectual property obligations, he rejected Total’s assertion that he had given blanket assurances not to compete with his former employer.

One of Total’s major clients was the BP Oil Refinery Pty Ltd (“BP”) which had a site at Kwinana. Mr Iannello had access to confidential information concerning the site, including Total’s site agreement with BP negotiated shortly before his resignation.

On 21 August, Total discovered that Mr Ianello had accessed the BP site using a card issued to him by Total. Total wrote again, alleging that Mr Iannello was “attempting to lure away” Total’s clients by “leveraging off” confidential information protected by contract.

This event appears to have prompted Total to search its computer systems. It found that, prior to leaving, Mr Iannello had forwarded emails to his personal email account. It also found email communications between Mr Iannello and Giovenco.

It also believed that Mr Iannello had deliberately deleted emails prior to leaving, and held copies of customer contracts and project pricing information.

Total’s solicitors wrote again to Mr Iannello’s solicitors on 3 September setting out these matters, stating this vindicated “our client’s suspicions” and constituted evidence “that Mr Iannello had breached fiduciary obligations and obligations of confidence”.

Mr Iannello denied the allegations and on 10 October, Total applied for preliminary discovery.

Total wanted access to a wide range of Mr. Iannello’s private documents, including all: a. emails from Mr Iannello’s former email account with Total;b. documents recording communications between Mr Iannello

and Giovenco from 1 Jan to 4 Aug 2008;c. emails from Mr Iannello’s private email account/s to Giovenco

from 1 Jan to 4 Aug 2008;d. documents received or created by Mr Iannello during his

employment with Total;e. documents concerning Giovenco between 1 Jan to 4 Aug 2008.

Mr Iannello said that he did not have any documents in categories (a) – (d) and the category (e) documents were commercially sensitive. What Total needed to show was not that Mr Iannello had its confidential information but that he “had used, or threatened to use, it to its detriment”. Total was asking the judge to infer this from Mr Iannello’s actions in:

email and the lawBy David McGrath

What if you believed a current or former employee had used their personal email account to steal your trade secrets? What would it take to convince a court to grant access to these emails?

on the Contrary: optiver v tibraTotal submitted that the circumstances in this case were similar to the matter of Optiver Australia Pty Ltd v Tibra Trading Pty Ltd 3 in which a preliminary discovery order was made.

In that case, seven employees of Optiver resigned in a short space of time to join the newly formed Tibra. Two of the employees had emailed crucial information relating to its high speed trading software, including source code, to their home email addresses, shortly before leaving.

Soon after, Tibra was beating Optiver to high speed arbitration trades. Optiver was able to call evidence from a computer expert that it was unlikely that Tibra, on its own, could have developed the software to do this within that period.

The judge was able to easily distinguish the Optiver case. First, there was no evidence that Total’s business had suffered any adverse impact following Mr Iannello’s departure and secondly there was no evidence that Mr Iannello had engaged in anything other than legitimate competitive conduct with Total.

preliminary disCovery permits “fishing” for new evidenCe. given the Cost and burden of disCovery, the Court needs to be satisfied that there is a “reasonable Cause to believe” the appliCant has a Case against its opponent.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e d i s C o V e r Y [ 35 ][ 35 ]

(Continued from page 33 )to create more space for them. Active archiving is different: it’s a way of centrally managing the storage, retention and hold of information while ensuring “live” (or active) access to any item. Active archives are indexed so that information can be rapidly retrieved for business, regulatory or e-discovery purposes.

Active archiving works by moving information out of email and other systems into a central repository - the archive. While the information may be gone from the original application, active archiving software works under the covers to provide access to the archived items with minimal disruption to end users. For example, archived emails still show up in your Inbox, and double-clicking on one in Notes or Outlook opens it like any other message. Under the covers, the software has retrieved the item from the archive and fed it back to your email program, with the benefit that you don’t have to change the way you access your email. You can reply, forward or otherwise use the message just as before.

Once in the archive, an item can be controlled according to an information management policy. This is important because it becomes hard to enforce information policies as the volume grows and this leads to over- or under-retention - which means increased risk and cost. For example, in Phillip M Adams & Associates LLC v. Dell Inc , Adams alleged that a defendant in the case, ASUS, had spoliated relevant evidence. ASUS’ attorneys stated that “its email servers are not designed for archival purposes, and employees are instructed to locally preserve any emails of long term value.”

The court denied the safe harbor claim and imposed sanctions,

stating “the culpability in this case appears at this time to be founded in [the defendant’s] questionable information management practices.” It was this case where the court wrote that “information management policies are not a dark or novel art.” While the ruling in the Adams case is the subject of significant debate, the case has focused attention on information management processes and how organizations approach this issue.

Establishing e-discovery preparedness starts with a partnership between the legal function and IT, HR and records management groups working to identify the most relevant information, which typically means financial data and sales & customer information. A key priority has to be quickly getting to a broad-brush policy and getting information under control as this offers the fastest, greatest return. A complete, detailed set of policies comes through refinement: don’t let the perfect policy be the enemy of good, basic information governance. Once information is under automated control - such as in an active archive - basic retention and deletion policies can be implemented and changed as policies are refined, and information becomes quickly accessible for discovery. If all you have is a great policy and no control, then cost and risk remains until you have a scalable, automated method to control email, files and other “unstructured” information.

When forming a partnership with IT, it helps legal and other teams to put themselves in IT’s shoes. While the cost of active archiving can often be recouped in a single case (think County of Suffolk’s $600-900k backup tape restoration), it also offers immediate benefits to IT too. Unstructured information, such as email, instant messages and files, is the fastest-growing storage area in IT according to industry analyst IDC. Because information is growing far faster than storage unit costs are declining, the net effect is that storage purchases are consuming more and more of the IT budget, squeezing out other projects. Active archiving systems can dramatically reduce storage requirements because they can identify duplication or redundancy and eliminate it.

Active email archiving provides automated mechanisms for ensuring legal hold. The alternative is to try and hold the item “in place,” such as on a laptop or hard drive. While this sounds simple to do, any kind of accidental or deliberate loss means the item is gone and the duty to preserve has been violated. Thousands of laptops are lost every day at airport security lines across the country. By keeping a central, managed copy of the item in the archive, it can be secured and stored until it is no longer required, and then automatically deleted. Active archives also dramatically accelerate early case assessment and review. Because the information is already indexed, archives are easily searchable, so there’s no need for backup restores or outsourcing of collection and review. This immediate access to information allows in-house and outside counsel to make strategy decisions about a matter before undertaking more expensive and time-consuming discovery efforts.

At Symantec, we avoided $US250,000 in external litigation review costs on our first case using active archiving, because the entire collection of email could be rapidly culled and reviewed internally. In summary, courts are becoming less and less tolerant of excuses and failure to maintain proper information management process. Backups were never designed for e-discovery, yet many organisations still rely upon them for information retrieval - and pay the price in time and money.

The benefits of active archiving outweigh the costs and risks of the status quo. While there is no one perfect answer, an e-discovery preparedness partnership between legal, IT and records teams can quickly identify basic information management approaches, and then implement those approaches to dramatically cut storage costs, discovery costs and information risk. The net result? You don’t have to have the wisdom of Dumbledore and a magic wand to deal with e-discovery cost-effectively and quickly.

Archiving is for e-discovery; backup is for recovery

email and the law (cont.)• using Total’s access card when he met with BP on 20 August 2008;• emailing his future employer, Giovenco, regarding a fireproofing job whilst employed by Total; and• sending emails containing client and confidential details from his work email address to his personal email address shortly prior to finishing with Total.

The judge however disagreed. On the first matter, given the evidence of two BP employees

that Mr Iannello did not represent he was working for Total, and had not referred to any of Total/BP contractual matters in their discussions, he dismissed it.

The second point was also dismissed, as Mr Iannello explained that the fireproofing job was referred to Giovenco as Total was unable to perform it.

On the third matter, the judge disagreed that the documents produced by Total were “on their face” confidential, noting that Total also failed to produce any evidence showing how that information could be used by Mr Iannello to harm Total’s business interests.

The Judge’s ConclusionIn the Cape matter, the court essentially had to decide if Mr Iannello was using his ex-employer’s trade secrets against it or was just engaging in legitimate competitive conduct.

Despite the fact that Mr Iannello had sent emails to himself and to his future employer, after having considered all the circumstances in the matter, it came down on the side of legitimate competitive conduct. The electronic trail had just run cold for Total.

Whilst email can prove to be “smoking gun” evidence, it must be remembered that it will always be considered by the court within the context of the broader circumstances of the case.


e N t e r P r i s e A P P l i C A t i o N s s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 36 ][ 36 ][ 36 ]

We asked John why we need to access SAP from SharePoint?Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies have been rapidly gaining momentum and taking a leadership position as a content and collaboration platform for many organizations. Its ease of use, customisable user interfaces, Microsoft Office integration, personalization, and extensibility with third-party Web parts make SharePoint the perfect solution for many applications and organizations of various sizes. With load-balanced Web farm configurations, SharePoint can handle thousands of simultaneous intranet and extranet users. SharePoint-based portal sites provide content aggregation, audience targeting, and enterprise-wide search capabilities. Further, SharePoint’s potential for linking knowledge workers and managers to Microsoft’s infrastructure is well understood. Moreover, the addition of ‘Line of business’ (LOB) content is a compelling information need and a tantalizing promise with SharePoint. The Business Data Catalogue, SharePoint’s connection to LOB solutions, has made this vision a reality. Our goal at Devworkz is to take this integration story to a new level.

SAP is the vault that keeps business data secure and allows the CIO to sleep at night. It also provides rich functionality to expert users and is the central facility that manages and controls many organizations. If SAP functions were freely available via standard services, owners would have a variety of ways to deploy new information strategies and point-solutions. This flexibility complements and leverages an SAP investment, providing freedom to choose the most suitable architecture and platform to surface solutions. Many owners have been spending a significant of time and money trying to get SharePoint and SAP to talk to each

other. Some have even given up entirely, leaving the two systems completely isolated from one another. This has meant their business processes were often disjointed and one system could not leverage data from the other.

Deploying SAP into a portal allows a wide audience to easily search, view and edit selected business data. When organizations can effectively link the SAP and the Microsoft worlds they will be able to enhance the return on investment and empower users through rich, highly accessible information systems. The ability to access, connect and freely leverage cross platform content and serve it up as a unified set of information services will unlock new levels of productivity, insight and business agility.

What are some of the core challenges organizations would face undertaking a cross-platform integration?Cross-platform solutions are an order of magnitude more complex than a single platform. When something goes wrong, the first step becomes to identify which platform to fix. This alone can be challenging. If something changes on one platform –perhaps as the result of an upgrade – it is difficult to determine the impact on other platforms. Debugging, logging and tracing are also much harder in a cross-platform environment. Typical SAP integrations we have researched in this space are bespoke highly customized developments that are typically costly, time consuming and high risk.

Can you outline your vision for your development program?At Devworkz we have always held the view that SharePoint creates the most value if it is positioned as a development environment that supports collaboration and unstructured data. It creates even more value if it can be the access point to all your knowledge reserves – in particular, the ‘line of business solutions’ that support an organization’s transactions and core business processes. .

Our efforts have been focused on removing risk and minimizing the complexity and pain currently experienced in this space. We wanted to be able to access and surface the SAP business entities via industry standard SharePoint tools such as 'Quests Web Parts for SharePoint', (QWP) 'Nintex Workflow' (NFW) and the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). This approach simplifies the complexities involved and gives owners comfort that the solutions they build will be strongly supported by successful third party vendors.

Are you looking to integrate your SAP and Microsoft worlds but find the idea costly and high risk? John Ackery from Devworkz Pty gives us some insight into the work they have been undertaking to connect and integrate SharePoint and SAP. John’s team is working on a vision to make SharePoint a cost effective, low risk access point to SAP. Providing access is one of their key goals, and making SharePoint an application development facility is also right within their sights.

sAP/sharePoint shake hands

The web service connections are centrally managed and controlled from

the SharePoint side via the ‘Configuration Editor’. The configuration editor provides a range of security and connectivity options to each and every service depending on the architecture required. Once provisioned in the Configuration Editor, any of the SAP-aware web parts can access these

services from directly within the web part.

Data grid displays surface content and can be freely defined via the configuration panel. Within this web part, designers have options to

support, run time search, conduct static and dynamic filtering, grouping of data, export and print, show or hiding of columns based on security groups, custom actions, conditional formatting of rows, linking to JavaScript and or

HTML and the linking to other web parts via sessions, and more.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 e N t e r P r i s e A P P l i C A t i o N s [ 37 ][ 37 ][ 37 ][ 37 ]

We have already built a body of knowledge and experience integrating other platforms, such as SQL Server, Lotus Notes, and MS CRM. This experience gave us a clear plan for how we needed to approach the SAP integration question. We knew at day one that if we were to effectively validate SharePoint as an integration platform for SAP then we would need to address SAP services – especially if we going to deliver anything comprehensive and useful to the market.

In summary, our vision centres on demystifying the service provisioning on the SAP side whilst ensuring that proven tools work in a seamless manner

Could you outline the architecture and thinking behind your integration approach?Our solution to the integration of SAP in SharePoint comprises harmonised web services from SAP with full read and write options, the use of SAP-aware web parts that just ‘plug and play’, application development building blocks and codeless development in SharePoint to fast track skills, and solution development.

Our architecture is simple and is designed to meet the needs of both SAP and SharePoint worlds. We leverage existing web services in SAP in a way so that developers can build and provision a defined set of service patterns. The service structures and patterns are defined by an open source standard called ZOA. These services provide a rich set of features ready for a ‘plug and play’ use on the SharePoint side. These harmonised services provide a framework to standardise cross platform integration and support ongoing maintainability and de-bugging.

What is ZOA and how does it harmonize SAP services?ZOA is an open-source framework enabling ABAP developers to build maintainable, reusable web services. ZOON successfully addresses the integration challenges that cause multi-platform solutions to spiral upwards in cost and complexity. It removes communication barriers between SAP and non-SAP developers, provides powerful tools to identify and resolve issues, delivers efficient function interfaces to conserve bandwidth yet scale when needed, and anticipates future requirements within today’s development investment.

The ZOA framework can be used across the SAP suite, creating a consistent set of services that insulate non-SAP developers from the vagaries of each module. The framework defines services to describe available fields, list possible values, and search and display results, or read and update details. It includes the finder and enumerator services required for Microsoft SharePoint BDC integration as an integral part of the framework.

Tell us more about your application development tools.Our initial focus has been on getting the harmonised services to talk seamlessly with the SharePoint tools. We have rich data displays with search, filtering, export, print, paging, conditional formatting, security trimming and dynamic rendering to display user-specific information. We can build dash boards and advanced management views of SAP content; we can even show relational content such as customer’s information and customer booking. Generating forms for ‘display’, ‘edit’, or ‘new’ is incredibly fast. With tabs, custom actions, custom behaviors, security trimming, auto filling from sessions and linkage to workflows, powerful applications can be easily developed.

The development of composite applications can also be managed as we can merge SAP and SharePoint content. We can even merge data from multiple ‘line of business solutions’ such as Lotus Notes, SQL, and Oracle with SAP.

What are you working on now?Quest Web Parts for SharePoint 5.1 is due for release mid-October and will feature a number of requested enhancements designed to support the SAP integration story. This will include better support for complex arrays and direct access to SAP validation and business rules.

We are also drafting a technical guide for providing SAP web services to the ZOA standard. This guide is intended for ‘owners’ of the SAP system and/or ‘system integrators’ to rapidly acquire the skills needed to build these harmonized services.

During October and November, Quest and Devworkz will be hosting a series of seminars in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne to showcase these and other SharePoint-related solutions.

We are looking for SAP owners to come on board as part of our early adopter program along with channel partners that might wish to become certified in this space.

The forms generation web part once connected to a SAP service can –in

minutes – render a form on the page for display, edit or data creation purposes. The form designer can add features such as tabs, custom

behaviors, custom actions, list dependencies, security trimming based on security groups, auto filling of content via sessions and more.

Charts and dashboards are a great way to build management views based

on real time live data out of SAP. Couple this with dynamic filtering (e.g., orders placed in the last 24hrs) or user-driven filtering; SharePoint can

become a destination for performance management, reporting, data exports and extensive business insight.

Surfacing SAP content in SharePoint is relatively straightforward. Being able to edit, update and create new records in SAP from SharePoint was a key feature that was central to our integration offering. The ability to edit and create new entries in SAP from SharePoint provides a world of application development options and possibilities. As you can see in the

screen shots above, users can create a list of customers, select a record (in this case Andreas Lotz) and open an edit form, update fields and pass

this back to SAP.


e N t e r P r i s e A P P l i C A t i o N s s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 38 ][ 38 ][ 38 ][ 38 ]

Australian web solutions company Squiz sponsored a recent Gartner morning seminar in Sydney entitled “Supported Open Source Software – Unavoidable, Beneficial, and Coming to an Application Near You” .

The seminar contained presentations from Gartner Research Vice President Brian Prentice, Squiz Managing Director John-Paul Syriatowicz and Funnelback search Chief Scientist David Hawking all. It concluded with a round-table discussion inviting interaction from the room full of “C” level executives from IT and Marketing.

Gartner Research Vice President Brian Prentice began the day with an analysis of the corporate challenge in assessing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an open source product.

“A true open source product must give users the right to modify the code and redistribute the product,” said Prentice.

He noted that it was common to include proprietary elements in commercial open source software, notably support, although a small minority of the open source community remains vehemently opposed to property rights of any kind.

When assessing the TCO, organisations must evaluate whether they have sufficient options for support.

“If one company owns all of the support capability for the product

then you effectively have the same lock-in as with proprietary software.”

However Prentice believes the open source model is responsible for such a high level of product innovation that its adoption is now moving beyond the software industry into biotech industries, manufacturing and government.

“Unnoticed by many, the open-source movement has changed irreversibly during the past five years. Open source once stood as the industry's direct factory outlet mall — the place to acquire software directly from the manufacturer at a significantly lower price, albeit with some inconvenience.

“Now open source is firmly ensconced in the mechanics and machinations of the software industry.”

By 2011, Gartner estimates that 80% of all commercial

software will include elements of open source. Squiz offers the MySourceMatrix CMS as open source GNU General Public License (GPL) or the Squiz Supported Version (SSV) that adds a warranty and service level agreements.

“We are one of three CMS vendors to offer 24x7 global support,” said Squiz Managing Director John-Paul Syriatowicz.

Syriatowicz said that it was a common misconception that support would be difficult to obtain with an open source product and that the product would be less sophisticated.

He claims that as the source code is open it can be thoroughly viewed, tested, validated, and configured to requirements thereby providing much greater comfort levels than with closed proprietary code solutions.

Funnelback searchSquiz has acquired the Australian- developed Funnelback search platform from the CSIRO, which will be incorporated into a new release of the MySourceMatrix CMS due out in late 2009.

The addition of Funnelback functionality will broaden the scope of MySourceMatrix for enterprise content management by adding the capability to look at other data sources, providing centralized access to a range of content e.g. databases, CSV, XML, RSS.

Funnelback is built on an open source stack, but Squiz is not moving immediately to release the source code.

“We are committed to open source but the order in which we do that for Funnelback and the timeline is yet to be decided,” said Syriatowicz.

Dr David Hawking, Funnelback's Chief Scientist, argues the business benefit of effective search. "Ineffective search leads to decreased productivity, reduced competitiveness and non-delivery of relevant and sometimes critical information", he said.

Dr Hawking outlined a methodology for measuring the effectiveness of search deployment and for comparing search tools. "A successful search project requires effective result ranking, but must also respond to the needs of different audience groups. Search implementers must accept that many people are unable to come up with optimal queries, and try to deliver useful results anyway", he said.

Dr Hawking used a large number of Funnelback client web sites to illustrate tools and approaches which can contribute to successful search implementation within an organisation. These included: A tool which aids result set exploration and query refinement and requires little or no configuration; Search plugins to accommodate the needs of different sections of an audience; Geospatial tools providing searchers with media results and government information relevant to their location; and customisation tools and methods which allow a search interface to be configured to an organisation's look and feel in as little as an hour.

Squiz is also supporting the adoption of the open source with a freely-available package called PHP_CodeSniffer.

Lead developer, Squiz Product Development Manager Greg Sherwood, says that “PHP_CodeSniffer has been embraced by the global open source and wider development community to check code violations against a defined set of standards and report any errors to developers. It does this by sniffing PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to ensure code remains clean and consistent while also helping to prevent those common semantic errors that developers can make.”

The latest release PHP_CodeSniffer version 1.2.0 adds support for checking CSS files, the ability to tell PHP_CodeSniffer to ignore selected parts of code, writing any report to a file and full support for the new PEAR coding standard.

PHP_CodeSniffer is released under the BSD License. Further information and file download at http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer.

the case for open source CMs

Squiz Managing Director John-Paul Syriatowicz said the business model has grown up since the Australian developer made the choice to pursue an

open source path with MySourceMatrix CMS.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 i M A G i N G & W o r K F l o W [ 39 ][ 39 ][ 39 ][ 39 ]

By Tim Mortenson Decades before the smartphone, the netbook, or even the personal computer, vast, complex networks hosted information primarily for large organisations, including the military, government agencies, and major corporations.

While these systems were enabled by the essential technology that still powers the Internet today, it was not until the introduction of Web browser software that widespread adoption of the Internet became ubiquitous for average individuals. Now, innovative software drives the latest trends in Web-based communications, including an array of content-rich applications, such as iTunes, Facebook and YouTube.

As with the Web browsers’ impact on the widespread usage of the Internet, software used in conjunction with document capture scanners, helps businesses and organisations more effectively harness and implement effective solutions for capturing, organising and managing mass, unstructured data, estimated to account for more than 80 percent of business information. And these capabilities have evolved from large, enterprise exclusive document management systems into today’s more flexible, scalable desktop applications that provide the ability to identify specific information at the point of capture. Through this capability, more offices are able to achieve greater efficiency and accuracy from their document processes creating widespread cost and time savings.

Solutions for an Economy in TransitionToday’s challenging and shifting economy demands that desktop

capture solutions provide smarter, faster results that enhance how core business demands are met, such as in customer service and patient care. From the financial and manufacturing sectors to healthcare and service based companies, all organisations require document capture systems that will eliminate manual document processes to accelerate the flow of user-specific information.

With the rise of small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), the majority of these offices are comprised of fewer employees who require tools that make it easy to both multitask and work collaboratively across various locations.

A snapshot of these businesses includes the individual CPA who, while serving hundreds of clients, needs to extract a single piece of information for a single client from a 2006 tax return; or the physician in a small clinical office working diligently to provide high quality patient care, while also trying to keep up with the document management requirements associated with expanded medical compliance standards. These professionals remain in a constant balancing act to improve their services, increase accessibility to information and control operating costs.

Advanced Desktop ScanningThe widespread adoption of desktop capture solutions relies on

ease of use, ease of implementation, accessibility and affordability. Through advancing the performance of the distributed capture hardware and software, these less expensive offerings have allowed more businesses to take advantage of digitizing paper documents into electronic files.

While the desktop capture segment is expected to grow at more than 10 percent through the year 2012, according to a recent InfoTrends survey, it is no longer enough to simply convert hard copy documents into a digital duplicate. Information dependent processes of 21st Century businesses require specific, searchable content. Desktop capture software plays a central role in providing fully comprehensive and effective solutions for professionals across

various industries. For many organisations that need to integrate electronic records

into their workplace, such as in healthcare, implementation often poses a significant challenge. In the US Medical Records Institute's Ninth Annual Survey of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Trends and Usage in 2007, respondents indicated that anticipated difficulties associated with changing to an EMR system among their top concerns. Effective desktop capture applications combine advanced performance capabilities with ease of use to drive solutions that overcome these perceived obstacles.

Capturing information from a paper document previously required complex applications and trained document professionals. However, with fewer organisations able to support specialised IT staff, high performance desktop capture software enables businesses to simplify this process, allowing virtually anyone to begin scanning documents and extracting specific, usable content. For example, Kodak Capture Desktop Software provides built-in editing functions for scanned images and provides single field indexing for highlighting specific reference points in a document. In addition to post-scan imaging enhancements, Kodak’s desktop application also advances ease of use through a variety of single touch shortcuts that assign shortcuts to common tasks and file locations. Shortcuts can be programmed to output to many file formats (including searchable PDF), email, printer, or SharePoint Server.

With limited IT budgets, businesses require components, applications and solutions that are affordable. Kodak Capture Desktop Software, bundled free with select Kodak Scanners, also provides an easy upgrade path to Kodak Capture Pro Software that allows for organizations to expand their document capture solutions with future growth. Built in scalability also helps to limit additional costs associated with training, installation, service and support.

Through the combination of these capabilities, user focused applications will help solutions providers bridge the gap between document capture and information management for the large number of service oriented, information-dependent businesses. Information in a more accessible, on-demand format will promote a more efficient workplace and improve how customer problems are solved, from financial liability to the quality of our health care.

Tim Mortenson is Director Solutions Software, Business Solutions and Services Group, Eastman Kodak Company.

software: defining success for desktop capture solutions

Kodak adds new Plus Series ScannersKodak has announced a new range of Plus Series Scanners that promise to improve document capture productivity by up to 50 percent over their predecessor models at the same price levels.

The i1200 Plus and i1300 Plus Series Scanners deliver 50 percent scanning speed improvements for 200 dots per inch (dpi) bitonal and grayscale and 300 dpi bitonal, grayscale and color (45 pages per minute (ppm) at 200 dpi and 30 ppm at 300 dpi). Kodak i1300 Plus Series Scanners also feature performance improvements including a 33 percent increase in scanning speed for 200 dpi, color at 40 ppm.

Third party connectivity includes integration with SharePoint Server to automate the process of scanning, sharing and storing digital documents.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 40 ]

en

te

rp

ris

e g

uid

e

e N t e r P r i s e C o N t e N t M A N A G e M e N t j U l Y / A U G U s t 2 0 0 9[ 40 ]

en

te

rp

ris

e g

uid

e

[ 40 ]

EzeScanPhone: (07) 3398 7747

Fax: (07) 3117 9471

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.ezescan.com.au

Ezescan enables clients to substantially slash the cost of deploying batch scanning solutions for unstructured (correspondence, printed emails), semi structured (invoices) and structured (application forms) hard-copy documents. EzeScan enables images to be integrated seamlessly with your ECM and/or EDRM System easily and effectively using our built in integration connectors. EzeScan works with any TWAIN scanner or any brand of networked MFD unit to unleash the full power of your scanning hardware. EzeScan provides 3 levels of integration: Scan to Input Queues; Scan/Index using a ECM registration form; and Auto Scan. Index/Upload bypassing the ECM registration form. EzeScan has a proven track record of use with TRIM, Objective, Worksite, Open Text eDOCS, Open text Livelink ECM, SharePoint, DocuShare systems, plus we now support infoXpert 8.0. EzeScan solutions range from basic manual data entry to highly automated forms processing. With over 480 installations in Australia, NZ ,Canada & the UK, Ezescan is your ideal batch scanning application.

Open TextPhone: +61 (0) 2 9026 3400

Fax: +61 (0) 2 9026 3455


Web: www.opentext.com

Global organisations face complex and daunting challenges around the business content they create and receive. They also face an opportunity to increase productivity and compliance and to reduce storage costs. Open Text Content Management Solutions enable organisations to manage content throughout its entire lifecycle and orchestrate people, process, and content to create business value and achieve strategic success. With software to enable imaging, document management, graphical and intuitive workflow, and integration to leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) content, Open Text CMS helps increase productivity, simplify compliance with proven, top-ranked records management, and reduce storage costs.

Objective CorporationPhone: 1800 065 640


Web: www.objective.com

Objective delivers Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for, information intensive organisations, enabling them to leverage the value of their unstructured content. By effectively managing the entire range of an organisation’s information assets – electronic documents, physical documents, business processes, email, web content, and more, Objective enables organisations to re-use corporate memory and make effective decisions based on complete information. Trusted by Government agencies and Top 1000 corporations globally, Objective solutions meet international standards, provide regulatory or industrial compliance and deliver security and accountability of information. Objective also helps organisations comply with record-keeping standards such as ISO 15489, its solution is certified by USDoD 5015.2, UK TNA02, VERS and is a certified supplier on NSW and South Australian government EDRMS panel contracts. Objective Corporation has the largest team of dedicated ECM consultants in the Asia Pacific region.

RecordPointPhone: (02) 8001 7777

Fax: (02) 8001 7778


Web: www.uniqueworld.net

RecordPoint simplifies your records management and compliance processes by combing the world leading Microsoft SharePoint platform with a simple rules based retention and classification system. By using RecordPoint and Microsoft SharePoint 2007 organisations can fully comply with Australian regulatory requirements and corporate retention and disposition policies without the need for a second system. RecordPoint is the only solution available built entirely on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. By taking advantage of your existing technology investments, the solution is extremely cost effective, highly intuitive, has high user acceptance and training costs are minimised.

Knowledge PartnersPh: 1300 721 095 Fax: 02 9211 4611


Web: www.knowledgepartners.com.au

Recognised as one of Australia’s leading ECM delivery organisations, Knowledge Partners’ practice covers a wide spectrum of services relating to the selection, planning, design, implementation, training and support of advanced ECM solutions. Our experienced and highly skilled team guarantees the delivery of a solution perfectly suited to your organisations needs.

Kroll Ontrack Ph: +61 7 3255 1199

Fax: +61 7 3255 3099


www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au

Through its Ontrack Data Recovery products and services, Kroll Ontrack is a global leader of data recovery and tape conversion services worldwide. Using its proprietary tools and techniques, Ontrack Data Recovery helps businesses and consumers recover legacy, lost or corrupted data from all types of storage devices including tape media through its do-it-yourself, remote and in-lab capabilities. See www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au for further details. The Legal Technologies division of Kroll Ontrack provides corporations, law firms and government agencies with technology and for paper and electronic disclosure, computer forensics, litigation readiness.

SpeedscanPh 1300 937 226


Web: www.speedscan.com.au, www.speedscan.co.nz

Speedscan brings together a combination of experience, leading edge technologies and robust processing services to deliver world class outsourcing solutions for document intensive business processes. These Document Process Outsourcing (DPO) solutions are delivered from locations across Australia and New Zealand. We drive efficiency, productivity and profitability for major banks, insurers, local government and more than 500 companies, managing more than one billion pages. We are experts in: Inbound Document Processing; Document Scanning; Data Capture; Forms Processing; Workflow/Routing; Online Invoice/Statement Presentment; and Secure Hosting. Sydney – Melbourne – Auckland –Wellington –Christchurch

- Manila

fullpage

ad

[ 41 ][ 41 ][ 41 ]

Can you rebuild a serverin minutes and never lose

more than 15 minutes of data?

you CAN!ShadowProtect™with

StorageCraft aSia PaCifiC - LeveL 11, 53 WaLker StreetNorth SydNey, NSW 2060 02 9929 9770

N e t W o r K s t o r A G e s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 42 ]


[ 42 ]


[ 42 ]

Hitachi NAs duo

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation is broadening its midrange storage offerings with two new NAS platforms, the Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090.

Offering up to 2 Petabytes of capacity and 100K IOPS per node, the new Hitachi NAS Platform offers native Intelligent Tiering capability. The products and are tightly integrated with the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite to enable customers to move data automatically among Fibre channel, SAS, SATA and archive tiers based on pre-set policies, search the content across storage silos and use the search results to trigger data movement.

The entry Hitachi NAS 3080 model reaches 1 petabyte of capacity. The Hitachi NAS 3090 reaches 2 petabytes and supports 256 terabytes of file system.

NetApp takes suncorp to the cloudAustralian financial services leader Suncorp has consolidated its storage environment and implemented an IT as a service model based on the Dynamic Data Centre concept developed by NetApp.

The overhaul has allowed Suncorp to standardise the management of its storage environment, enabling greater storage efficiencies and improving service levels across its business.

Jeff Smith, Group Executive Business Technology of Suncorp said, “We decided it was time to consolidate and standardise our storage environment with NetApp as our annual storage growth was unsustainable.”

Suncorp is deploying NetApp FAS6070, FAS6080 and FAS6030 systems, VMware and NetApp storage virtualization technologies for its storage, network and hosting infrastructure.

The NetApp implementation has allowed Suncorp to reduce its data centres from three locations to two, with the pre-production and production data centres linked by IP-SAN. Suncorp is one of the first customers in the world to virtualise its core and aggregation layers with Cisco Nexus 7000 switches.

Mr Smith said, “We worked with NetApp to create a best practice design for our storage infrastructure through the use of virtualisation. By implementing NetApp, Cisco and VMware technology, we have

increased our storage efficiency, introduced greater flexibility and reduced our total IT costs.

"We have also improved our ability to develop and bring new product and service applications to market and respond to customer demands quickly.”

storageCraft shadowProtect 3.5StorageCraft has announced the release of ShadowProtect 3.5, the latest update to the disk-based backup, disaster recovery and system migration software for Windows servers, desktops and laptops.

ShadowProtect 3.5 includes several new features, including the ability to backup failing hard drives – so IT administrators can salvage as much data as possible. This new feature allows you to continue a backup even if some areas of the hard drive can no longer be read.

“ShadowProtect 3.5 allows you to back up as many sectors on a failing hard drive as you can,” said Brandon Nordquist, vice president of product management at StorageCraft. “You may not be able to save all of the data on the drive, but you can recover as much as possible and save the data to new hardware.”

In addition, IT administrators can set up ShadowProtect 3.5 to notify them when a hard drive begins to fail so that they’re able to quickly take a backup and recover as much data as possible.

Besides the new Ignore Read Failures feature, ShadowProtect 3.5 also includes several other improvements, including the following:• enhanced e-mail notification improving client administration services;• improved management over backup commencement, allowing you to specify how quickly a backup begins following a system reboot; improved management of Hardware Independent Restore features, allowing administrators to have greater control over hardware drivers when migrating to new, different hardware; and• improved Boot Configuration tool.

NearPoint hosting launches downunder:A platform for hosted email, file, and SharePoint archiving solutions in Australia has been announced by Mimosa Systems in tandem with Global Storage, a backup and disaster recovery specialist.

The Mimosa NearPoint unified content archiving platform will be integrated into Global Storage's hosted Enterprise Managed Archival Service, ArchiveReady.

"At Global Storage, we have vast experience and expertise in understanding the long term challenges of managing email and file data growth and regulatory

compliance needs," said David Duncan, CEO, Global Storage.

"We have made a significant investment in archival infrastructure, process and methodology, and the dedicated resources to monitor and manage a customer's storage archival processes. Mimosa NearPoint is a leading-industry solution for the complete retention and protection of this critical company data. By partnering with Mimosa and integrating NearPoint into our hosted ArchiveReady Enterprise Managed Archival Service, we provide the most comprehensive solution available for complete information protection."

Mimosa NearPoint will provide the technology backbone for Global Storage's ArchiveReady solution. ArchiveReady is a next-generation content archival service that provides an integrated content archive for email, file, and SharePoint, eDiscovery, local recovery, disaster recovery and storage management, all delivered as a fully managed service.

ArchiveReady provides full text indexing on email subject line, message body, and attachments as well as SharePoint content, allowing powerful search and retrieval tools to be used to find archived email or content.

sAtA drive speeds rev up to 6GbpsSeagate has launched a Barracuda XT 7200RPM drive featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface.

The 3.5-inch desktop drive maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration.

ASUS and GIGABYTE have begun shipping SATA 6Gb/s motherboards.

tandberg drives ahead with dAtTandberg Data is adding DAT drives to its backup range with storage capacities up to 160GB of data on a single cartridge.

It will be offering a choice of capacities (72GB or 160GB) with a selection of different configurations (internal, external or rackmount) and interfaces (SCSI or USB). Tandberg Data will also sell DAT media.

Tandberg DAT160 supports WORM (Write Once, Read Many) functionality, allowing users to meet regulatory compliance requirements for long term archiving.

The DAT72 drive starts at $US499, and the DAT160 starts at $US749, which includes a 3 year warranty and 1 year Advanced Replacement Service.


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 N e t W o r K s t o r A G e [ 43 ]

Adaptec’s solid startAdaptec has announced a solution for building and managing High-Performance Hybrid Arrays (HPHAs) - storage arrays that use both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs).

The company claims it will deliver up to five times the I/O performance, up to 50 percent savings in capital and operating expenses, and a dramatic reduction in power consumption over HDD-only arrays. Adaptec’s new MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution integrates a tuned 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD, used as high-performance cache, with Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD caching software.

“By incorporating Intel’s SSDs into our MaxIQ solution, we’re able to offer data centre managers, particularly those running massive on-demand cloud computing data centres, a non-disruptive,

scalable approach to managing storage with maximum application performance and reduced capital and operating costs,” said S. “Sundi” Sundaresh, Adaptec president and CEO.

The Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit (AUD$1,749 including GST) includes one MaxIQ-tuned 32GB Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA SSD used as high-performance cache and MaxIQ SSD Caching Software.

sGi adds scalable workgroup clusterSGI has announced a new generation of scalable workgroup clusters for HPC, graphics and Internet applications, the CloudRack X2.

They promise extreme density and power distribution efficiency in a small, 5-square-foot form factor. This enables a

broad range of new deployment scenarios, including to workgroups, laboratories and traditional HPC environments either as a stand-alone unit mounted on casters for in-lab use or installed in industry-standard, 19-inch racks—especially valuable for heterogeneous computing environments.

CloudRack X2 represents the first time that CloudRack trays are available in HPC-dedicated configurations. The new system now supports high-performance processors and high-speed interconnects, including 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand.

“The CloudRack X2 is a workgroup cluster done right,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI.

“Customers can scale at 24 or 216 core increments, with support for low- to high-power processors, and incorporate high-end graphics or GP-GPU processing, if needed.”

Free sharePoint archiving solutionMetalogix Software has announced it is making available its Archiving Express SharePoint Archiving solution for free download. Archiving Express supports complex compliance retention policies while promising to improve SharePoint system performance and reducing overall backup and restore time by 50%.

With features to automate disaster recovery and shorten backup times dramatically for the SharePoint environment, Metalogix Archiving Express for SharePoint also provides search, retention and disposition capabilities to help companies execute internal policies.

Archived content is classified by metadata attribute, file size, or modification date, so even the most granular of retention policies will be executed.

Backup volumes are reduced by removing duplicate data through the Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) engine. This reduces backup and restore times by up to 50%. Metalogix Archiving Express for SharePoint also cuts bloated portal sizes by up to 80% and automatically offloads less active documents to less expensive storage. Archived documents are fully accessible by end users, just like non-archived documents, and the activities are transparent to users. Next-generation search finds information archives from anywhere in the SharePoint environment. Users of other Metalogix archiving solutions (Exchange or Files) can search for email, files, and/or SharePoint from a single view.

“We are happy to offer our SharePoint archiving solution for free to the SharePoint community because we know that administrators are struggling to optimise the performance of their content database,” said ChrisRisley, CEO, Metalogix.

The lack of preparedness of most small and media businesses for an IT disaster is drummed home again by a new survey conducted by Symantec.

The 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey shows a large discrepancy between how SMBs perceive their disaster readiness and their actual level of preparedness.

“The startling part of this research is the fact that SMBs don’t realise the impact their outages have on customers, particularly when they have tools at their fingertips to help them be prepared to deal with disasters,” said Pat Hanavan, vice president, Backup Exec product management, Symantec.

The findings show that SMBs are confident in their disaster preparedness plans. Ninety-three percent (82 percent globally) of respondents in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) say they are somewhat/very satisfied with their disaster plans, and a similar number (88 percent in ANZ and 84 percent globally) say they feel somewhat/very protected in case a disaster strikes.

SMBs also believe their customers will be understanding and patient if there is a disruption to their computer or technology resources. In case of such an outage, only one-quarter (25 percent in ANZ and 34 percent globally) of SMB respondents believe their customers will evaluate other options, including looking at

competitors.However, the practices of SMBs reveal that this confidence is unwarranted. The average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and an employee accidentally deleting data, while globally the causes are virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters. 30 percent of respondents in ANZ and 47 percent globally report they do not yet have a plan to deal with such disruptions.

The survey found that 33 percent of (23 percent globally) SMBs in Australia and New Zealand back up daily and an average SMB backs up 60 percent of their company and customer data. Fifty percent (55 percent globally) of the ANZ respondents estimate they would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire.

sMBs lack disaster strategy: symantec

t o o l s & t e C H N i Q U e s s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 44 ]


[ 44 ]


[ 44 ]

enterprise search lands on the desktopCoveo has unveiled a new Desktop Search application as part of Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0. It promises unified and contextually relevant search of cross-enterprise PC and laptop content, including email pst files, which may be further unified with information from any enterprise systems.

Information monitoring and alerts is offered to ensure compliance with company information policies and regulatory requirements related to employee information access, utilization and processes. IT will be able to monitor, for example, the storage and transmission of documents labeled as confidential or private, the offline presence of documents labelled as confidential or private, or of prohibited laptop content.

Coveo CEO and President Laurent Simoneau, said, “What we’ve done is elevate that access to a higher level, with unified search of not only their individual PCs and laptops, but of contextually relevant knowledge and information residing in any enterprise system, based on IT permissions. In so doing, we’ve placed control over cross-enterprise desktop content indexing, with complete security and access permissions, in the hands of IT.”

scanning gets personal with P-150

Canon has launched a new lightweight personal scanner that weighs just over 1kg, the imageFORMULA P-150. The foot-long P-150 can scan a batch of up to 20 documents at its maximum scanning speed of 15 pages-per-minute (ppm) in simplex, or 30 images-per-minute (ipm) in duplex scanning, yet still fits easily into a briefcase.

Canon's "CaptureOnTouch Lite", a "Plug-and-Scan" capability, is built directly into the scanner, letting users easily and instantaneously start scanning without installing drivers of imaging applications.

The P-150 also includes ISIS and TWAIN drivers for easy hardware integration with third-party Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software. In addition, the P-150 can use electrical power via a single USB cable connected to a PC.

i2 seeks out batch scanning solutioni2 Software has added smart seek technology to its batch scanning solution, providing a fast and efficient way to locating text strings within single or multi page documents.

i2 is an Australian-developed solution that supports ISIS-compliant document scanners and provides the ability watch folders from multi-function devices.

Designed to provide a simple yet powerful way to scan in bulk documents, i2 Software now incorporates Smart Seek technology that automatically searches for strings of data anywhere within scanned documents. During processing, in real time, the system seeks out instances of predefined text and zooms into the region for user input or data extraction. The documents being processed don't even need to be in an OCRd format.

Trial CDs of i2 Scan are available upon request. For sales and reseller enquiries please contact [email protected]

www.i2scan.com.au

ediscovery in UnityIris Data Services has announced the release of the Unity 2.x eDiscovery processing platform.

“The newest version of the Unity eDiscovery processing platform offers significant features to our customers. We have completely enhanced our Unicode support to handle all languages and encoding,” said Joseph Ziegler, Iris’ Director of Technical Services. “We have also significantly improved the technologies that index metadata.”

“Unity cannot only display and process in more than 150 different languages, including Chinese Japanese and Korean, it can automatically detect the language of origin and index the document accordingly, allowing for more efficient searching and more effective assigning of documents,” said Ziegler.

“Iris is capable of processing languages in several Unicode formats in addition to non-Unicode single and double-byte formats. And our intelligent searching processes are capable of adjusting terms to be run over left to right, right to left, and other language-specific syntax.”

Unity captures the full text plus more than 100 types of metadata from email, attachments and loose electronic documents in over 150 different languages. Unity is capable of processing almost any type of file, recognizes image files (such as PDF, TIF and JPG) without text for OCR, parses any type of embedded object, and maintains multiple level document hierarchies to ensure the most accurate data extraction possible.

ABBY unveils FlexiCapture 9.0ABBYY has launched the next evolution of its dynamic data and document capture solution, FlexiCapture 9.0. It promises the ability to provide high performance extraction of data from documents across a range of deployments, from departmental to enterprise and government scale.

ABBYY FlexiCapture 9.0 provides the ability to process any type of document simultaneously in one stream — including machine-readable forms, semi-structured and unstructured documents such as invoices, contracts or letters. It automatically extracts data and text from documents for input into backend systems and databases and offers capacity for document classification, indexing, data capture, and document conversion.

Intelligent routing supports more processes for different document types at the same time. For example, while one type of document is recognised and exported in fully automated, unattended mode, other types (including documents with questionable quality) can be separated from the main document stream to be routed for verification by qualified operators.

FlexiCapture 9.0 includes ABBYY FlexiLayout Studio, a tool used for specifying processing parameters for semi-structured and unstructured documents. The latest version provides the ability to create several alternative FlexiLayouts for the same document type, simplifying the processing of documents with extremely variable location of data fields (e.g. invoices).

ABBYY FormDesigner, a tool to aid in creation of machine readable forms, now provides the ability to create electronic forms in PDF format. This expands FlexiCapture’s ability to cover hybrid projects, with both paper and electronic forms.

Vi-search offers new look at video searchA new tool to simplify the search and retrieval of video content has been unveiled by Israel's Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi). Vi-Search also offers statistical analysis capabilities, such as analysis of motion patterns, traffic flows, and traffic loads. It analyses the video stream and generates scene metadata of events and features in the video as it is recorded, and allows for later retrieval and analysis of specific video segments through an intuitive and automatic search within the metadata of the vast amounts of stored video.

Vi-Search supports all forms of analysis of stored video, including search by events, search for target type (People, Vehicles,


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 t o o l s & t e C H N i Q U e s [ 45 ]


[ 45 ]


[ 45 ][ 45 ]

Objects), search targets by colour or size, motion path analysis, statistical traffic analysis and video summary.

"Vi-Search is a new and exciting product that will enable users of surveillance networks to reap practical benefits from their stored video," saidItsik Kattan, CEO of Agent Vi.

Vi-Search employs Agent Vi's distributed and open-architecture approach, which enables integration with a wide variety of edge devices and video management systems, and requires deployment of a minimal amount of dedicated hardware. This makes Vi-Search a feasible solution for all existing and new surveillance networks, whether their focus is security, safety, law enforcement or business intelligence applications.

exploring the M-FilesMotive Systems has announced an update to its document management software that utilises a unique Windows Explorer interface, M-Files 6.0.

It allows opening and saving files directly from any Windows application. In addition, M-Files offers a "virtual local" drive that promises significant advantages in performance and reliability over purely Web-based alternatives or systems that use traditional mapped network drives.

Users work from their local hard drive while a caching mechanism synchronises with the server in the background. M-Files 6.0 significantly offers support for scanners and email, a Web interface and a flexible capability to connect to external databases and applications such as an existing CRM, ERP or billing systems.

New enhancements and features include:• Support for Microsoft SQL Server;• 64-bit M-Files Server and Windows 7 compatibility;• Advanced automatic properties and the ability to run scripts as event handlers; for example, document permissions can be automatically changed when the document's properties change, or documents can be automatically saved as PDFs so the PDF version is always available;• M-Files OCR module providing a direct interface to scanners with integrated Optical Character Recognition;• Enhancements to workflows and assignments for precisely controlling when a document moves to or from a given state, or the ability to assign a workflow to only a particular type of document;• Major enhancement to Web Access;• Integrated preview function to view documents directly from within the M-Files interface;

Being on the move in a tough location is no reason to not have some high powered computing on tap with the latest rugged PDA computers now available in the local market.

The European-designed Nautiz range is now available through Australian distributor AvanTEC.

Three PDA models will be available, all of which use the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system and are 3G-enabled for phone and data. Pricing starts at $A1975 for the X7 model, $A1825 for the X5 and $A2642 for the eTicket (all ex. GST).

Standard features on all models include integrated SiRF Star III GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11b/g WLAN functionality, three-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash. The X5 also includes a standard 1-D laser barcode scanner, while the ultra-rugged X7 features an integrated compass/altimeter and a G-force sensor/accelerometer that can measure speed, vibration and rotation.

The Nautiz eTicket is a PDA designed for payment transactions and validations and includes a standard 2D imager barcode scanner.

All Nautiz models meet military standards for ruggedness and international standards for ingress protection, meaning they are impervious to dust, highly water-resistant, can withstand drops from 1.8 meters and operate in a wide range of temperatures.

Meanwhile Motorola’s latest MC9500 handheld device ($A2935 to $A3876 ex GST depending on configuration) moves the bar further by offering 3.5G WAN .

It provides support for GSM HSDPA or CDMA-EVDO Rev A wireless broadband connectivity in

one device. The new MC9500 mobile computer also features a portfolio of modular, swappable keypads that meet the needs of virtually any application.

The MC9500 also incorporates interactive sensor technology (IST) – a new Motorola feature that supports a host of motion-sensing applications.

For example, enterprises can increase worker accountability by detecting and logging device drops. In addition, theIST improves power management by enabling the MC9500 mobile computer to automatically revert to sleep mode when not in use, or if the display is face down. And for added flexibility, in applications such as signature capture, the integrated accelerometer also allows the display to dynamically switch between portrait and landscape modes based on the orientation of the device.

Equipped with the Marvell XScale PXA320@806 MHz processor and Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, the MC9500 also offers a variety of data capture options, including a 1D laser scanner or 2Dimager. A 3-megapixel, auto-focus, high-resolution digital color camera can be used with either the scanner or imager for the capture of high-resolution photographs, video footage and documents – allowing for easy signature capture, proof of condition or delivery.

Handheld all-stars hold their own

Motorola MC9500

Nautiz X7.

t o o l s & t e C H N i Q U e s s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 46 ]


[ 46 ]


[ 46 ]

Migrating Notes apps to sharePointVisionet has announced the next generation of its Lotus Notes-to-Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) application migration tool, VisiMigrate. Earlier versions of VisiMigrate focused on groupware content migration from Lotus Notes databases and applications to the Microsoft SharePoint platform (MOSS). The VisiMigrate Version 2.0 toolset goes beyond content and data migration to tackle the challenge of transforming Lotus Notes applications into SharePoint based web-applications.

VisiMigrate works by creating custom SharePoint form templates that mirror existing Lotus Notes form layouts and translating Lotus Script and formula based business logic into Microsoft .Net code snippets. Then it packages the forms and translated code into a Microsoft Visual Studio project that the developers can use to quickly complete the application conversion process.

Integral to this new version of the software is the companion assessment application. This added feature creates an inventory of all Lotus Notes applications and analyses their contents to produce a conversion roadmap that identifies the portions of the application that can be readily transformed into SharePoint forms and Microsoft .Net code.

scan with the iPhone Qipit White is a new iPhone application that effectively turns any iPhone into a portable scanner.

It converts the picture captured from the iPhone’s camera, removes u n w a n t e d shadows and glare, whitens the background and darkens the writing. The result is a fully transformed ink-on-white digital copy (PDF or JPEG) shareable via email from the iPhone handset. The app is currently available at the Apple App store for $US4.99.

“We designed Qipit White from the ground up, creating a product that better meets the needs of anyone seeking to instantly and clearly capture and transmit the results of their collaborative efforts,” commented Benoit Bergeret, CEO of Qipit.

Qipit White works with any iPhone model, running version 3.0 or higher, regardless of its camera resolution or the presence of an autofocus lens.

Getting smart with liveCycle esA new solution to provide non-technical business users with access to the power of LiveCycle PDF SmartForms has been launched by Avoka. SmartForm Composer puts the power of an expert SmartForm developer into the hands of business analysts, forms designers and others, making it possible for more people to rapidly create high quality LiveCycle PDFSmartForms.

SmartForms are highly interactive and intelligent electronic forms that make it easy for users to engage with on-line business applications such as an employment application, mortgage application, purchase order, and applications for social services such as child support and Medicare.

sharePoint workflowA new add-on for SharePoint, Virto SharePoint Workflow, expands the range of the standard SharePoint activities, providing wider opportunities for creating custom activity sets, and thus, more flexible customization of business processes.

The Workflow Kit is a set of no-code and ready-to-use activity blocks that you can easily add to SharePoint Designer and build your own workflow within a minute.

SharePoint 2007 can be customised via about 30 standard activity blocks in SharePoint Workflow Designer, however the standard set of activities sometimes does not allow for organizing specific business processes.

eCopy-enabled compact scannerCanon Australia is launching a new compact network scanner that includes eCopy’s ShareScan software, one of the leading document imaging solutions in the paper capture and distribution office market. The imageFORMULA ScanFront 220eP includes eCopy ShareScan, software that enables seamless integration and connection with many critical business applications and services including document management, workflow and database systems, as well as email and fax servers.

The ScanFront 220eP is designed for decentralised or distributed scanning applications and for easily sharing documents via a network. It features an 8.5 inch color touch panel that allows for easy navigation as well as a preview of scanned images.

The imageFORMULA ScanFront 220eP rovides high-quality and secure scanning of up to 24 ppm and incorporates customisable one-touch job buttons.

MFP scan pair

Kyocera Mita has introduced two new multifunctional printers (MFPs) that offer several standard scanning destinations, including Scan-to-E-mail, Scan-to-PC, Scan-to-FTP, Scan-to-USB and TWAIN scanning. With enhanced scanning capabilities in resolutions ranging from 200-600 dpi, the FS-1128MFP and FS-1028MFP come with a standard 50-sheet reverse automatic document processor that can scan up to 35 images per minute (300dpi; A4, Black and white) and up to two 250-sheet paper drawers can be installed for a maximum input of 800 sheets.

In both MFPs, the toner is the only item which needs to be replaced periodically and the drum unit every 100,000 pages. They are supplied with a standard duplex function. The FS-1028MFP includes standard network printing, copying and colour scanning capabilities; while the FS-1128MFP also includes fax capabilities.

The FS-1128MFP and FS-1028MFP support a variety of network and device management tools, including KMnet Admin and KMnet Viewer. These two devices include PDF Direct Print capability; a software utility that allows users to send PDF files directly to the device.

The FS-1128MFP is $A1538.90 incl. GST and the FS-1028MFP $A1428.90 incl. GST.

pdfdocs desktop 3.1 delivers sharePointDocsCorp has enhanced workflow and increased interoperability with SharePoint and the Microsoft Office suite in version 3.1 of its flagship PDF content management and workflow solution, pdfDocs Desktop.

There are new project management and publishing features; dual integration into Microsoft SharePoint and a document management system; redaction codes; PDF metadata cleansing and PDF/A capability.

pdfDocs Desktop 3.1 is built on the latest Microsoft .Net 3.5 framework to make it easier to create, distribute and archive PDF documents from within Office 2007


s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9 t o o l s & t e C H N i Q U e s [ 47 ]


[ 47 ]


[ 47 ][ 47 ][ 47 ]

and other Microsoft platforms. pdfDocs Desktop lets users assemble and collate documents from different applications and systems into a single secure PDF document. It offers the ability to edit, redact, annotate and secure content as well as apply stationery, watermarks or headers and footers across a collection of documents. The final document can be saved directly into Microsoft SharePoint as pdfDocs Desktop remembers the last Microsoft SharePoint "save into" location.

A document that relates to a specific Microsoft SharePoint project can be exported into its own Project folder in pdfDocs Desktop. Project folders can be configured to have their own unique output settings, such as security, watermarks, headers and footers and PDF metadata removal. The Project folder can be output as a single PDF or PDF/A document and multiple Project folders can be setup within pdfDocs Desktop.

From pdfDocs Desktop it is possible to add an entire Microsoft SharePoint project, while maintaining folder and subfolder structure, into a pdfDocs Project workspace. Convert the Project documents to a single or multi-PDF document,

complete with a table of contents, cross-document bookmarks and links.

SharePoint users can insert cover pages and apply headers and footers across the document(s), as well as create templates and cover pages to minimise workload. The final document can be emailed or saved back into Microsoft SharePoint directly from pdfDocs Desktop.

Quick Fields 8 fronts up for laserficheLaserfiche has announced the release of Quick Fields 8, a document imaging and capture front-end for the Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) product suite. It promises a breakthrough in configurable forms processing for the enterprise, according to Laserfiche Vice President of Product Management Tom Wayman.

To extend possibilities for integrating Quick Fields into existing business processes, IT staff can run custom processes on document components and return them to Quick Fields for further processing, use the included scripting kit to run custom C# and VB.NET scripts or exchange data

with outside databases and applications. Quick Fields 8 also offers a range of new features, including a revamped user interface with movable panes, customisable toolbars and collapsible menus, to improve customisation. Administrators can configure the exact fields operators need to see, in the format they prefer, to optimize processing and data entry speed. And with a new auto-annotation feature, document processing can include the automatic redaction of secure information, benefiting organizations that formerly couldn’t distribute documents due to data security issues. Ricoh Australia is a value-added reseller for Australia/New Zealand.

eCopy unveils PaperWorksRicoh is to replace its eCopy Desktop scanning software with a new version, PaperWorks, that promises improved document workflow management and enhanced ability to scan, merge and modify documents. PaperWorks adds additional scanning capabilities to Ricoh desktop and network printers, scanners and multifunction devices as well as the ability to convert electronic and paper documents into text-searchable, secure PDFs that can be saved to and retrieved from any system or network folder.

Additionally, users can view and edit scanned and electronic document image files with PaperWorks. Inserting bookmarks, adding headers, footers, notes and electronic signatures along with annotating pages using drawing and text tools are among the modifying options available.

Security features include the ability to permanently remove confidential information with blackout and whiteout tools, encrypt documents before sending them over a network and apply password protection to control who can print, copy or edit a document.

In instances when documents stem from different sources, such as e-mail, fax or electronic file, PaperWorks lets the end-user combine these into a secure, searchable, common file format. With the simple drag and drop functions, users can rearrange content within the merged file as well. PaperWorks also enables the integration of documents into business process workflows. Using the optional eCopy PaperWorks Software Development Kit (SDK), this software solution can assimilate with back-end business applications. Additionally, eCopy PaperWorks Connectors for SharePoint, Documentum, Autonomy iManage WorkSite, and Open Text eDOCS DM, provide the ability to deliver, store, and retrieve electronic and scanned information from document management systems.

Australian developer EB Strada has released FormReturn version 1.0, a cross-platform, optical mark recognition (OMR) system designed to simplify the process of collecting hand-written data.

Individuals and organisations - particularly those in education, government, market research & healthcare who rely on sourcing information from the results of questionnaire forms - are promised time saving, fast and accurate, automated collection of data.

Optical mark recognition (OMR) is the process of electronically capturing hand-written marks from documents or forms. It is a technology that has been in widespread use since the 1960s where it has commonly been used with lottery systems,

“bubble sheet” multiple choice questionnaires and ballot/voting systems.

Often implemented using hardware rather than software, OMR has been both expensive and complex, requiring in-depth training. FormReturn simplifies OMR, by offering an integrated,

affordable, easy to use application that can work with inexpensive hardware and requires far less training.

FormReturn's built-in form designer expedites creation of customised questionnaires. Only a small number of OMR solutions include this very important feature. So by using the one program, form are created, published, automatically marked and scored, then stored as electronic data in its own built-in SQL compliant

database. The tight integration of these powerful features is what makes it easy for anyone to use.

Formreturn takes oMr in hand

s e P t e M B e r / o C t o B e r 2 0 0 9[ 48 ]

Image & Data manager • idm.net.auImage & Data manager • idm.net.au

IIM ACT 2009 Conference -“Managing Information Today and Tomorrow” 7 October, 2009 Rydges Lakeside, Canberra

The Institute for Information Management’s ACT Branch Conference 2009 provides a forum for both information practitioners and solution providers to come together. The IIM ACT Conference 2009 will have three streams of presentations: Governance, Risk and Compliance; Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence.

Automated Invoice Processing 13 October, 2009, 8-10am Hyde Park Forum, Sydney

ELO Digital Office and its partners invite you to a Breakfast Seminar for the Australian launch of ELO’s DocXtractor, an intelligent solution for full and automated invoice processing. Contact Rainer Krause on (02) 9460 0406 or email your confirmation to [email protected]

Agile AUSTRALIA‘09 15 – 16 October, 2009 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney

Agile Australia will discuss themes around culture, people, governance, and organisation and process. Speakers will share their varying experiences of adopting Agile and the impact it has had on delivery and risk. www.agileaustralia.com

Data Security Essentials 22-23 October 2009, Wellington, 11 & 12 November 2009 - Auckland, New ZealandThis two-day course will take you through a step-by-step approach to building your data security programme to writing policies and using ISO 27001 and COBIT to implement appropriate testing, monitoring and continuous improvement. This course will help you better leverage and enhance your data security policies. www.brightstar.co.nz

KM Asia 2009 24 - 26 November 2009 Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre

KM Asia will feature prominent international keynotes, industry practitioners and MAKE Award winning organisations who will explore opportunities and obstacles in collaboration and networking, social media, sustainability and profitability. www.kmasia.com

People on the Move EvEnt diaryMike Foster has been appointed as Group Executive Director of Sales and Business Development for Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand. Mike joined Fujitsu through the merger withKAZ where he was CEO.

In his previous role, Mike was the CEO of KAZ and directed the Telstra Service Solutions. He joined the Telstra Corporation in March 2000 as the Managing Director, Telstra Business & Government Sales.

Ian Hodge has been appointed as Group Executive Director of Enterprise Solutions for Australia and New Zealand, who will assume responsibility for the operations and management of Fujitsu’s SAP practice, which has become the largest in South East Asia, comprising more than 500 SAP practitioners.

Michael Blake has been appointed Group Executive Director of Federal Government for Fujitsu Australia, responsible for driving the Fujitsu offerings with the Federal Government.

Software AG has promoted Steve Keys as Head of Global Consulting Services across Asia, Australia and Japan, based in the company’s regional headquarters in Sydney.

Prior to joining Software AG in 2006, Keys spent eight years with Primavera Systems, overseeing the development of its international sales operations throughout UK, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Toby Knight has been appointed to the newly created role of director of desktop technologies at Citrix Systems.

Based in Sydney, the new position will see Toby responsible for leading Australia and New Zealand’s (ANZ) desktop technologies team and driving business and channel opportunities.

Prior to this role, Toby was a senior manager of systems engineering and managed partners for Citrix for over two years, responsible for leading the systems engineering team and providingenablement and direction for partners.

Acronis has appointed Lachlan Everett as Business Development Manager to drive corporate licence revenues for the Australian and New Zealand markets.

Everett brings with him six years sales experience in the IT sector, especially with SMB and large corporate accounts.

Prior to joining Acronis, Everett was the National Sales Manager for StayinFront Group and he has also held various sales positions at Symantec, Bright Mail and Trend Micro.

Scale-out NAS provider Isilon Systems has added Gary Donin as technical director, Australia and New Zealand. Based in Sydney, Donin worked for himself before joining Isilon, specialising in delivering storage, visualization, animation, graphics workstation, 3D technology and multimedia solutions to broadcasting, research, post production, oil & gas, and education organisations, as well as to government and the defence sectors.

Earlier, he spent five years with the Australian arm of Sun Microsystems as a System Engineer.

CA has announced three appointments. Stephen Miles has taken on the role of Vice President, Solutions Sales, while Vicki Batka becomes Senior Director, Channel Sales and Jim Fisher is named Vice President, Regional Channel Sales.

Jim Fisher has been appointed CA's Vice President, Regional Channel Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan

Quest Software has appointed Terry Burgess as sales specialist for Australia and New Zealand. Terry's focus will be on building and driving Quest Software's virtualisation business within Australian and New Zealand. Terry has a background in sales with VMware and Attachmate where he worked across strategic enterprise accounts in banking, finance and telecommunications to develop cloud services and hosted desktop programs across Australia and New Zealand.Toby Knight, Citrix Systems

Lachlan Everett, Acronis

SUBSCRIBE TO IDM NOW

Australia - 2 years (12 issues) $80 (save $16) 1 year (6 issues) $A48

New Zealand - 1 year (6 issues) $A66 Other Countries - 1 year (6 issues) $A98

Please make cheques payable to Transmit Media

Pay by Credit Card Visa Mastercard Bankcard American Express

CARD NO.

CARDHOLDER NAME _________________________________________ EXPIRY DATE / CODE _____________________

TITLE _____ FIRST NAME ____________________________ SURNAME _________________________________________________________

POSITION/TITLE _________________________ COMPANY/ORGANISATION _____________________________________________________

ADDRESS ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

SUBURB _______________________________________ STATE _____________ POSTCODE ______________ COUNTRY ________________

PHONE ___________________________________ ______FAX ______________________________________________________________

EMAIL ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FAX THIS FORM TO (02) 8212 8985 OR POST TO TRANSMIT MEDIA, PO BOX 392, PADDINGTON 2021

EMAIL TO [email protected] OR SUBSCRIBE OVER THE PHONE AT (02) 9043 2943

YES, I would like to subscribe to IDM Magazine & Weekly eNewsletter

First published in 1994, IDM is a trusted resource for information managers in enterprise & government in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region.

IDM magazine provides insights into a broad range of contemporary information management issues such as compliance, knowledge management, document automation, email management, ediscovery, enterprise content management, imaging, workflow and related storage solutions.

idm.net.auJanuary/February 2009A$8.80 NZ$11.00inc. GST

Prin

t Pos

t App

rove

d: P

P 25

5003

/072

38

ISSN 1320-176X

9771320176003

07ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

MEASURING SHAREPOINT SUCCESSNAVIGATE THE MESSAGING MINEFIELDRECORDS MANAGEMENT 2.0?

C A S E ST U DY : E N T E R P R I S E D O C U M E N T

M A N A G E M E N T

Receive a free demo CD and half price Voucher offer on the latest exciting release of the Cumulus 8 digital asset management (DAM) system - Single User edition - from Australian distributor DataBasics.

To get you started, the Single User edition offers most features of the client-server Workgroup/Enterprise editions - at a fraction of the price. It is a simple matter to migrate to a network edition as your needs grow - and keep using your catalogs.

The new look Cumulus 8 has a freshly designed interface, an inbuilt image editor, enhanced metadata capabilities and better online help and commenting. Performance has been dramatically improved across the whole Cumulus 8 product line and there are new and affordable network-based add-ons such as statistical reporting, email cataloging and more.

All new and renewing IDM subscribers receive the demo CD and a DataBasics Voucher to purchase the Single User for HALF PRICE! Normal recommended retail pricing for Canto Cumulus 8 Single User edition is Aus$540 (ex.GST) but you can purchase for only $A270 when you subscribe.

EXCLUSIVE DAM DISCOUNT OFFER

KodaK Scanning SolutionS

networked | check | Workgroup | Departmental | Production | Software | Service

contact Kodak at:australia 1800-895-747new Zealand 0800-256-325 (0800 2 KoDaK)Email [email protected]

At a time when managing information seems harder than ever, you need

something easy. Like Kodak Scanning Solutions. Easy to use. Easy to integrate.

With performance that meets the demands of your world, first scan to last.

And with world-class service and support, it’s one decision that’s easy to

stand behind.

It’s time for you aNd Kodak

kodak.com/go/docimaging

© K

odak

, 20

09.

Kod

ak is

a tr

adem

ark.

it’s time to scan once aNd empower many.

it’s time to make a key decision aNd know you got it right.

DElivEr it anyWhErE inStantly.

it’S timE to Put information in itS PlacE

My article demystifying enterprise content management pages 12-14

Documents

Transcript of My article demystifying enterprise content management pages 12-14