Today marks the release of ColumbiaSoft Document Locator v6.  Version 6.0 enhances many of Document Locator’s greatest document management features including seamless integration into Microsoft Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office while expanding into new areas including business process management and real-time reporting analytics for all of ColumbiaSoft’s customers.  We are excited to see how our customers can transform and automate their business operations leveraging the workflow and dashboard style reporting now included with Document Locator.

Document Locator’s business process management components are in use today at a number of enterprises as well as government entities helping drive efficiencies and enforcing compliance.  Solutions built using ColumbiaSoft’s workflow automation include accounts payable processing, ISO/FDA continuous improvement processes, vendor submittals for AEC firms, routing mail to remote workers, expense reports, vacation request processing, and more.  These implementations were all designed around improving productivity, efficiency, and traceability enabling companies to focus on their core business operations.  In Document Locator v6 the workflow module is integrated as base production functionality providing enterprise level business process automation to all of our customers.

The reporting components added in Document Locator are entirely new and based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.  Users can select from a variety of canned reports included with the upgrade package in addition to being able to produce custom reports using Microsoft’s easy-to-use WYSIWYG report generation tools (Report Builder 3.0).  Reports can be launched securely inside of Document Locator’s Windows Integrated client or from within Document Locator’s internet application WebTools.  The reports provide users unlimited real-time access to critical business information displayed in graphical and roll-up style dashboard reports.  Reports are available for records management statistics, user activity, workflow automation, SQL Server configuration, as well any business specific reports that our customers can dream up.

Document Locator v6 continues the tradition of providing well-designed, easy-to-use document management and business process automation software.  We are excited about this current release and look forward to helping companies transition to a more organized and automated organization that can easily report against their critical business operations. For more information click here.

Our engineering team here at ColumbiaSoft met one-on-one with Microsoft’s top software, database, and network engineers at the Mountain View Technology Center recently in an architecture design summit.  This laid out the groundwork for a co-authored roadmap for the next generation of the Document Locator document management system.

The timing coincided perfectly with our efforts underway here at ColumbiaSoft to evaluate the technological underpinnings of Document Locator. New technology advancements in software development are making entirely new product solutions possible. To take advantage of these technologies, portions of Document Locator’s underlying architecture must be re-invented to support future application requirements.

As we build for the future, being able to work closely with Microsoft is invaluable because it provides an opportunity for the developers to share design ideas.  It’s this kind of engineer-to-engineer brainstorming that exposes details about existing development methodologies and techniques, while providing insight into future technologies that Microsoft is working on. 

Our next generation architecture will incorporate Microsoft’s technology supremacy, along with ColumbiaSoft’s document management expertise, to create a win-win for customers. The new architectural design takes into consideration handheld computing, distributed workforces, multilingual organizations, ever increasing security threats, scalability, cloud computing, and more.

Successfully incorporating a document management system into your organization requires finding the right software, backed by the right people, to ensure the implementation is a success.  When searching for the right partner, expand your requirements beyond the immediate business objectives and ask the prospective vendor how they plan on serving your needs tomorrow as technology and business process change.

Solving tomorrow’s needs requires solution providers to work closely with customers and prospects alike in order to learn what’s working well for organizations and what potential solutions lay undiscovered in the document management sphere.  Equally as important, solution providers must have partnerships with mass-market software and hardware vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, and Kodak in order to gain insight into future product directions.

As an established document management provider, ColumbiaSoft is uniquely positioned to work with its extensive customer base and software partnerships in formulating innovative product solutions.  The experiences of working closely with clients and partners are readily apparent in the latest generation of Document Locator.  The next release of Document Locator has been enhanced for increased performance, deeper integration in mainstream applications, and includes expanded features designed to help customers work more efficiently.

Enhancements to Document Locator v5.3 include:

1. Integration into Microsoft Windows 64-bit operating systems
2. Embedded Autodesk’s RealDWG technology for managing CAD files
3. Drag and drop support into Document Locator’s web client (WebTools)
4. Advanced .NET / JavaScript user interface updates for the web client (WebTools)
5. Improved Windows Installer installation packages6. Productivity improvements in the area of scanning, document approvals, records management, disaster recovery, document search, email archive, and more… 

Document Locator v5.3 beta is currently being trialed among existing customers to ensure success across varying deployments and industries, including AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction), government, insurance, consulting, and property management.  ColumbiaSoft is working closely with these beta customers to ensure the application is stable, user friendly, and most importantly is solving real business problems to benefit their organization.

Brava! Desktop is an affordable, easy to use application designed for viewing, printing, and marking-up documents and drawings. Brava! Desktop provides support for most major document formats including MS Office Documents, CAD and other engineering formats, as well as PDF format types. By using a powerful markup/viewer application, users have the advantage of being able to open proprietary file formats such as Autodesk CAD, Bentley MicroStation, and Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks 3-D models without owning the original development software or a purpose built viewer for each application.

What truly sets Brava! Desktop apart though, is the ability to markup and annotate files for collaboration. For example, an engineering firm can distribute floor plan drawings for review to the contracted architect and construction company, allowing them to digitally markup each drawing where they have questions. Brava! Desktop is purpose built for this form of paperless collaboration and includes powerful AEC industry features including measurements, drawing magnification, stamping, markup burn-in, save as PDF, and more.

When viewing and digital markup technology are incorporated into an existing document management system that supports metadata searching, workflow routing, notifications, security, records management, remote web access, and email archive – you have a full featured project file management system that will allow collaboration within the organization and to outside vendors, suppliers, sub-contractors, and more. Imagine a system were design drawings (submittals/transmittals) were automatically routed to the necessary reviewers for the project and their responses were electronically captured and returned.

Included in the next release of Document Locator v5.3 will be integration into Informative Graphics Brava! Desktop 2.2 – previous integration support included up version 1.3 of Brava! Desktop. In addition to supporting the latest release, functionality is expanded, allowing users to create and apply dynamic stamps using Brava! Desktop that automatically extract profile property information from Document Locator as the stamp is applied. This means that generic stamps can be employed that will dynamically embed project related information onto drawings including project number, project engineer, or dates by reading the values from the metadata associated with the drawing that is open.

The last two decades of mainstream personal computers have been based on a 32-bit architecture.  That design allowed the computer to access 2 to the 32nd power of memory addresses (4 GB of RAM).  When the design was incorporated in the first x86 processors in the 1980s, the average PC ran on only 4 megabytes of RAM (4 MB) meaning the theoretical limit of the 32-bit architecture represented a 1000x multiple of the PC’s RAM.  Since then, Moore’s law of computer capacity doubling every 2 years has pushed memory limits against the 32-bit buffer.

Crushing the 4 gigabyte memory barrier are systems leveraging a 64-bit architecture (2 to the 64th power of memory addresses).  Microsoft and Intel have been selling 64-bit software and hardware for several years already.  While the number of users with 64-bit Windows operating systems is still low, the number of computers on the market with 64-bit processors capable of making the leap is huge.

Why the slow adoption?  The answer is compatibility – compatibility with software applications and hardware components.  Most enterprise scale applications on the market today are not available in a 64-bit format.  From a user perspective, upgrading to the 64-bit operating system and losing existing application functionality is not an option.  Luckily, Microsoft anticipated this and created their operating systems with support to allow most applications to run in 32-bit mode on the Windows 64-bit operating system.

Developing a 64-bit release of software is not always simple.  Many of the development tools used by programmers over the years are not capable of building software with a 64-bit architecture.  In addition, applications must be completely upgraded – any sub-components called inside the application must be fully 64-bit compliant.  Despite 64-bit operating systems and hardware being available for several years,  many common applications such as Microsoft Office have yet to make the leap.ColumbiaSoft invested in developing a 64-bit version of Document Locator for a number of reasons:

1. Microsoft Windows 7 is beginning Beta this month.  As a Microsoft partner with a deep integration into Microsoft Windows, ColumbiaSoft is committed to leading the document management industry by staying current with Microsoft.  This includes working with the latest releases of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system in both 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
2. Document Locator has significant clients in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry.  Applications used in the AEC industry like Autodesk Revit are leading the transition to 64-bit processing because of the significant computing required for rendering 3-dimensional models.
3. The ColumbiaSoft Engineering department prides itself on continuously pushing the envelope of Document Locator.  This includes refactoring processes to ensure optimal performance, leveraging the latest database technologies, and reviewing the overall system architecture as new development languages and methodologies become available.

In the coming months ColumbiaSoft will announce the release of Document Locator 5.3.  In addition to handful of other enhancements, version 5.3 will ship with a thick client installation package intended for 64-bit operating systems.  Users on the 64-bit platform will notice a performance increase due to the efficiencies of integration with Windows Explorer 64-bit.  Additional performance gains are derived from Document Locator’s revamped architecture of the Windows shell integration.  Stay tuned for more updates on a release date and the additional features included with Document Locator v5.3.

Included in Document Locator v5.2 are several enhancements to the workflow system. One enhancement already generating enormous fanfare in the user community is the overhauled notification system. Previous generations of Document Locator dutifully rendered and distributed email messages to the appropriate users notifying them based on the required task. These notifications included relevant information such as workflow task details, file index information, and user entered comments.

What ColumbiaSoft heard from our user community was that the existing messaging solution worked. The notification messages contained the appropriate content and were reliably received by their intended recipient notifying them of subscription events, pending workflow tasks, or user initiated notifications. As with anything, however, there is always room for improvement. Many customers told us they wanted to have the capability to design custom notifications.

The result: we designed a configurable email notification template architecture in v5.2. The new HTML-based template framework allows users to merge variable data from Document Locator into pre-configured HTML-based email templates. This architecture enables customers (maybe with help from their graphic designers) to create templates based on the company’s own brand or look and feel. These templates can include embedded images, CSS styles, table formatting, confidentiality statements, and more. Because the templates are HTML-based, any standard design tool can be employed including graphics-based design tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

One of the 5.2 beta customers “test drove” the new email notification system and created a report-style email for customer distribution via a workflow process. The notification system uses tokens to dynamically merge metadata attributes into pre-configured HTML templates. The design also supports one-to-many data relationships as it loops through sections creating multiple lines. This enables the report-style email notification being tested by the customer. In their example, the email report included their corporate logo along with detailed information pertaining to all of the files being distributed through their workflow process.

Configurable email notification templates are included as part of Document Locator v5.2, so note to DL customers… get ready to brush up on your design skills and start gathering your thoughts about how configurable notifications could benefit your organization. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories about implementing the configurable notifications and how it impacted your organization.

When Document Locator v5.2 is made available, some new bells and whistles are included that existing and prospective customers have requested. I could certainly go into endless detail about the various product enhancements that have been added or mention the notably increased performance made against our internal benchmarks, but not today. Rather I felt like commenting on how PDFs – now officially accepted as an ISO 32000 standard – are increasingly being utilized for electronic markup, digital signature and digital turnover in the AEC Industry (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction).

The allure of the “paperless office” has been marketed to most every industry since the early days of digital imaging – aka the early 80’s for those of us not old enough to remember. There is certainly a minority of companies and industries that have been successful digitizing their paper-intensive operations. However, the majority of business operations fail to become paperless when their operational documents require a human signature or any form of manual markup process. The release of MS Office 2007 and Adobe Acrobat 8.0, both of which include a secure digital signature technology, present mainstream platforms that eliminates the historical road blocks to running a paperless operation.

Imagine having a digital workflow for your organization that automatically creates electronic documents, routes them in a workflow process, includes digitally stamping and signing documents, and provides for easy search and retrieval along with bulk distribution. That electronic world has become a reality at several Document Locator shops. With the addition of the Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat add-ins to Document Locator v5.2 (part of the base product offering for those existing customers who are dying to know), customers will be able to easily check-out documents and apply comments, digital signatures, stamps and more to PDF documents directly from inside of Adobe Acrobat 8.0 (and Reader) or newer.

Thus far the feedback from the beta customers using the Adobe Acrobat integration has been terrific. The add-in functions in a similar manner to the existing product add-ins presently found in the majority of the MS Office applications, Brava! Desktop, and AutoCAD. With the technology to easily store, route, search, and now digitally sign documents, Document Locator will continue to improve business efficiency while reducing paper waste and storage. Enjoy.

A quick trip over to our engineering group today (the smart side of the office) gave me a heads-up on a neat new technology being worked on for an upcoming Document Locator release. It’s not fully baked yet – it doesn’t even have a name… so there’s no chance of getting more details from our crew in the front-office. But, here’s some inside details for all the fellow Document Locator followers out there: The new feature will allow you to, really easily, and really quickly, save-off files from your managed repositories and share them in an organized way with non-Document Locator users. Useful things like ‘project close-out’ and ‘customer or vendor hand-off’ come to mind, so stay tuned for more details… And if you’re a Document Locator customer, be on the lookout for a new version release later this spring!

The brain trust here at ColumbiaSoft has done it again. Officially, we can’t announce anything yet (it has to wait for our next version of document management software to be released), but what I just saw in an insiders’ demo will certainly be a big hit with anyone who has ever faced the challenge of inter-departmental collaboration and the incompatibility of different business systems.

People share documents across different business units all the time. Yet document management that is tied to individual business applications fail to consider this important fact. We don’t. Stay tuned for details to come in January.