The road to true collaboration with your business partners begins with developing an exceptional system of internal controls. For document intensive organizations, those controls are implemented using a robust document management system. When selecting a document management system for your organization, you will want to research systems that support collaboration as well as metadata indexing, workflow routing, fast searching, document audit logs, records management, and business rules enforcement.

Companies with fully deployed document management systems recognize the benefits of their implementation immediately. Repetitive tasks that involve searching for and/or distributing company documents can be performed in a matter of seconds by a single employee. Implementing agreed-upon standards for storing, naming, and profiling documents means less time searching for documents and more time focusing on what makes the company money. The list of benefits an organization will achieve is quite remarkable. The question that inevitably emerges is how to connect your internal business processes with resources on the outside of the organization.

The capacity to collaborate with resources, both inside and outside of the organization, while maintaining your internal business controls is king. Collaboration is the means to efficiently communicate and share data with your outside vendors and/or suppliers in a consistent and auditable format. Your success with collaboration depends upon whether you have the necessary tools to provide a secure, intuitive portal for easily uploading and retrieving documents and for involving external users in workflows.

Advanced collaboration solutions also offer tools for distributing bulk documents to resources for the purposes of document turnover, transmittals, or e-Discovery. This technology is used for extracting entire projects or folder directory structures from within a document management system and exporting the information to an external storage device - CD, DVD, thumb drive, or USB hard drive. The documents are accessed through a self-contained, searchable document archive that presents the complete folder and file hierarchy, metadata information, and a robust search function. All of this functionality is available to the data recipient without requiring any special software installation process.

Leveraging collaboration tools in your organization will improve your ability to produce the goods or services that drive revenue. Collaborative tools provide real-time data sharing with your vendors and suppliers. This improves your overall efficiency while reducing risk. Bulk document distribution functionality allows your organization to provide a greater level of service to your customers and therefore a strategic advantage over the competition. Implementing a document management system with collaboration has proven valuable to many organizations across a broad range of industries.

Written by: Scott Zieg

So here’s a recent success story worth a mention: A manufacturing company that implemented Document Locator into their Quality department received a higher return on investment than they anticipated. The process resulted in the company receiving accreditation for selling their manufactured products into a lucrative new market.

The primary business driver for purchasing document management was to strengthen document control activities for the Quality department. To that end, the company concentrated their deployment on building controls around approval processes, folder structure standards, metadata indexing, document security, audit trails, and automatic change notifications.

Since completing their deployment of Document Locator, the company has fulfilled the necessary Nuclear Quality Assurance audits for being a supplier to construction companies building nuclear power plants. As they communicated to ColumbiaSoft, they would have never passed the audits without the capabilities and auditability of their document management system.

Written by: Scott Zieg

For employees whose job dictates that they regularly create new documents, having access to an intuitive and easy to use version control system is a major advantage. Early in my career I distinctly remember the struggles I experienced creating specification documents, training guides, and other business related documentation. Authoring the content was challenging enough, but the issues were compounded by the processes associated with saving revisions, routing the documents for approvals, and distributing the final version to the intended recipients.

Version control is defined by Wikipedia as “the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” While that definition is accurate, I think my brother put it best when he said “version control is akin to having unlimited edit-undo.” When creating documents using a version control system, the author has the capability of recording snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle. Having access to snapshots of the document is especially helpful when the author needs to rewrite or remove a section of a document. Prior to working with a document management system, I am embarrassed to admit to the number of times I removed entire sections of a document without saving off a version of the file. Deleting sections from a document inevitably leads to rework and it did for me countless times.

The symptoms of a business needing a version control system are easy to recognize. The primary symptom is when users have file names saved with special extensions detailing the file version’s “something” (date, editor’s initials, or internal revision number). Experienced document authors compensate for not having a document management system by developing their own naming conventions for each document revision. As a result, their ‘My Documents’ folder is littered with countless revisions of documents using specialized file naming conventions such as filename – date – revision.ext. Modifying file names can partially address the individual author’s version control needs, but invariably leads to wide-scale confusion across an organization. The confusion is exacerbated when versions of files are emailed to others in the organization responsible for editing and/or approving the documents. Often the email recipients save a local copy of the file using yet another naming standard before performing their edits. When the files are returned, the original author now has a trail of dissimilar named files that require manual consolidation and cannot be easily audited.

In engineering and software departments, version control systems have been commonly used for decades. One Tree Software, in the early 1990s, developed the most prolific version control system for application engineers called ‘SourceSafe’ for Windows. One Tree Software was subsequently purchased by Microsoft and the SourceSafe application became integrated as part of Microsoft Visual Studio (Microsoft’s software development application suite) since 1995. Visual SourceSafe (VSS) became a widely adopted tool for managing versions of source code files, but never gained popularity with users outside of the engineering and software development teams.

The document management industry recognized the benefits that engineers were experiencing with version control and sought to bring equivalent functionality to the rest of the business community. Before that vision would be realized, a new breed of intuitive, integrated document management system needed to be developed that supported how document creators produced content. Business users required the essential version control features that engineers had come to expect such as saving revisions of documents, notes for detailing specific versions of the file, and the capability to promote historical versions of a file. However unlike the engineers, the business users also demanded advanced document management functionality including integration into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat applications, electronic workflow for routing documents, electronic review and approval, digital signatures, document retention schedules, and profiling with metadata indexing.

Today business users have the opportunity to deploy a document management system that provides their users with robust version control functionality. Document creators from diverse industries gain notable efficiencies by utilizing a version control system for maintaining revisions of their documents. The benefits they realize include having access to all historical data associated with the document being generated, a complete document log detailing who and when a document was accessed, and the assurance that all of the versions of the document are stacked in the document’s version history and not concealed through varied naming standards. Can your organization afford not to provide your document authors with the tools they need to efficiently and confidently create the documents that drive your organization?

Written by: Scott Zieg

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.

Written by: Scott Zieg

I recently read that product managers categorically receive the most emails in the company. Reading this brought a grin across my face - misery loves company. My email inbox gets bombarded daily with product enhancement ideas, consulting proposals, internal questions, meeting requests, and industry articles. For me, it’s an imperative that our employees have a means to organize and manage their entire volume of emails. Without these tools, we could never leverage the wealth of reference and historical data contained within the email archives.

As Product Manager at ColumbiaSoft, I speak with managers and executives from a number of industries including AEC, pharmaceutical, facilities management, legal, health and manufacturing that are inundated with emails and need solutions for managing them. It is clear that there are differing needs across an organization based on a person’s job responsibility. With employees working in a project-based environment there is tremendous value in having the capability to store and manage your emails in the same directory structure as the bulk of your project documents. For IT and corporate executives, the capability to provide fast and accurate e-Discovery, to meet regulatory compliance, and to allow employees to restore their own lost emails is exceedingly important.

Email has a number of inherent shortcomings. It is de-humanizing, riddled with unscrupulous SPAM, and seeps beyond the regular work day. Unfortunately, many of those issues are beyond my control. (My only advice is to avoid those invasive handhelds that beam email communications to you 24 hours a day. ) But, there are real world issues we can confront such as providing solutions for employees to help organize emails alongside their project documents in addition to providing IT staff tools for managing the backend email archive.

In a project-based environment, one of the most endemic problems is gaining access to emails that are siloed in a project manager’s inbox. Non-email documents associated with a project such as contracts, schedules, and specifications are typically stored on a shared file server to promote collaboration across the project team. Project-related email storage is not. A manager’s inbox will contain critical information that affects the direction of a project, yet the data is trapped on an island. Even though the information contained in these emails normally gets disseminated to the team members, when unexpected contingencies arise (and they do) the team does not receive critical information. This costs money, time, and credibility. Imagine if the project manager had automated email rules configured in MS Outlook that stored and indexed project related documents in the same directory structure as the other critical documents, thus providing the entire team access to critical information regardless of the PM’s availability.

Dealing with the volume of email in your inbox is difficult enough, but let’s not forget the struggles that your IT staff has dealing with maintaining the servers 24/7, providing for disaster recovery, and dealing with the constant requests for retrieving lost or deleted emails from backups. To lessen the load on the IT staff, I recommend migrating older emails that are bloating the MS Exchange server to an email archive solution. Leading email archive software packages offer a variety of solutions that expedite many labor intensive tasks that burden IT departments. One such task is handling e-Discovery requests. Unless you have ever been involved with an e-Discovery process, it’s difficult to imagine the complexity of aggregating all relevant data across your organization and from dispersed systems. With litigation so frequent in many industries, IT teams are too often dragged into e-Discovery without the benefit of tools that simplify gathering and distributing the data. Having an email archive tool capable of providing instant search results based on sender, recipient, body content, and attachments along with associated emails tracked through threading information can shorten e-Discovery processes significantly. Another common time drain for IT is handling requests for copies of lost or deleted emails. Imagine if all of the company’s inbound and outbound emails were stored in an email archive solution capable of providing secure access to the archive so that IT staff could enforce smaller Exchange database size limits while providing emails 24/7 access to emails they either sent or received.

Regardless of whether you view email as a blessing or curse, it’s here to stay. The question is now how best to deal with managing and archiving emails along with the myriad of other documents amassed in your organization. With the software packages being offered by several document management companies focused on integrating email management and document management into a single solution, I think they are worth investigating in more detail.

Written by: Scott Zieg

In talking with a customer recently at a large energy firm, I learned they were just about ready to integrate our document management application within SharePoint. The reason: They want to combine the two tools to make a very good portal solution that has advanced document management features integrated right within. They felt it was the right solution for unifying their information and collaboration across the company inside a web portal environment - and I couldn’t agree more. People in different departments across the company will be able to easily access and share documents and records from a single platform.

If you are curious how it works you can check out the SharePoint Document Management connector page…. In a nutshell, it places a document management web part on portal pages so users can check in and check out documents from a web page, for instance an Intranet page. There’s also a combined search option that lets users search and see results from across both Document Locator and SharePoint at the same time.

Written by: Jim Kemp

Random notes:

• Lots of talk today about ISO 15926, which is the data integration standard initiative for FIATECH. Here’s how FIATECH describes the standard: “ISO 15926 is an International Standard for the representation of lifecycle information for process plants, including oil and gas production facility. This is specified by a generic, conceptual data model that is suitable as the basis for implementation in a shared database or data warehouse.” Wikipedia adds this comment: “This title is regarded too narrow by the present ISO 15926 developers. Having developed a generic data model and Reference Data Library for process plants it turned out that this subject is already so wide, that actually any state information may be modelled with it.” This standard enables a data model for the entire lifecycle of a complex facility, including all its components, so that the owner/operator has complete information at handover. Use of a standard data model also enables sharing, transfer, and migration of data among software systems. This obviously has potential application to document management systems, especially during the operation and maintenance (O&M) phases of a facility.
• I also caught a talk by Bruno Berti on “Visibility and Efficiency across the Project Lifecycle.” Bruno is Sr. Director of Product Management at Meridian Systems. Bruno talked about the need to extend information accumulated in the design and build phases in a useful way through the O&M phase. Later, I talked with Bruno 1:1 about how we are extending Document Locator into Prolog Manager to ensure that all documents related to a Prolog record are correctly linked and available. Since ColumbiaSoft will be exhibiting jointly with The Cram Group at the Meridian user conference in May, Bruno requested a demo of Document Locator and the Prolog Integration Module. I’m looking forward to getting his reaction.

Written by: Carl Azar

Day 1 at FIATECH, and I thought the most interesting session was by Barry LePatner, who focused on “How to fix America’s broken construction industry.” As you can tell, LePatner argues that Construction is uniquely broken among U.S. industries, and is essentially continuing to do business the same way and with the same technology as 100 years ago. Here are some “factoids” from LePatner that caught my ear:

• In 2007, $1.7T in new construction was contracted, representing 5% of GDP and 10M workers.
• 92% of those workers are in firms smaller than 20 people.
• The U.S. will need to go from 400B sq ft to 827B sq ft of buildings by 2030.
• In that same period, the rest of the world will build 23 completely new cities with over 10M people each – and the U.S. will be competing in the same world market for material and skilled labor.
• A recent meta-study found that 50% of all construction labor in the U.S. is wasted – mostly due to scheduling inefficiencies. This amounts to $120B in waste per year.
• All other industries in the U.S. have increased productivity by an average of 250% since 1964 – Construction has decreased productivity by 25%.
• Across industries, investment in IT returns 3-5 times the increase in productivity as does investment in machinery alone.

LePatner is arguing that this state of affairs cannot continue, and that a combination of new contracting methods and new technology will be required to consolidate and transform construction firms into an efficient and profitable national-scale industry. Some of that technology will be on the design side (like BIM), but improved collaboration has the potential to dramatically improve productivity at the job site.

If you want to read more, LePatner has written a number of articles and a new book on this subject: “Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets.”

Written by: Carl Azar

Another of our customers has successfully used Document Locator to power document management within an intranet environment… we issued a release on how HITT Contracting Gets Organized just the other day. Actually, much of the credit goes to our partner The Cram Group for getting HITT up and running. Now, HITT’s 700+ employees are using their intranet to share and collaborate in an organized way, with document management at the core of information control. So many companies face difficulties sharing information using email, shared folders, and FTP. Intranets are one way to help improve the situation, but they alone don’t necessarily put information under proper management. Intranets are like rooms… spaces where people can meet, share and exchange information, while document management adds a layer of control over information with versioning, notifications, approvals, workflow and more.

Written by: Jim Kemp

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.

Written by: Jim Kemp