Alfresco FileMark

Here's a story about a neat integration between FileMark and Alfresco. FileMark is a high-end archiving, imaging, COLD, and workflow vendor currently being run by former Tower Technology marketing wizard Bill Zastrow. Zastrow left Tower when it was acquied by Vignette a couple years go. Incidentally, Vignette seems to be doing well in the wake of the acquistion. Alfresco, of course, is the Open Source document/content management developer founded by former Documentum personnel. Kevin Cochrane, a former VP of Interwoven has also been brought on board. Alfresco seems to have pretty solid software, but of course, doesn't have an imaging component. So, I guess what FileMark is doing with them is probably similar to what everybody else is doing with SharePoint. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

Ralph

South African company Looking for Software partner

As far as I can tell, this is legit. I have corresponded with the author of this e-mail. He seems to the co-proprietor of South African paper storage company that is looking for a document imagnig software partner. They are unhappy with their current partner. Here's the text of the e-mail I received: (I have not corrected spelling or grammer.)


Hi Ralph

My name is Langa Mkhwanazi from South Africa, I am a partner and in charge of operations in newly formed Document storage and Scanning Company called Safefile. We sort of manage to develop a box storage system software for our Warehouse which cost us a lot of money. We however have been let down Marjory by people that promised to develop a scanning, indexing and viewing software for us, with major financial losses for our business.

Some of our problems are, we depend on these people for the livelihood of our business, in that they control the software with out us getting the source codes as to customize the systems to our clients needs. Some have offered mediocre systems that do not allow us to penetrate industries like the financial sector. Over under above that, we have to sell this viewing software to our customers on their behalf at ridiculous amounts and end up losing on the contract.

I am looking for help in developing our own scanning, indexing and viewing program. We are using Kodac scanners and so are able to scan our documents, but when it comes to indexing and providing solutions via our viewing system for our clients we are no where. We cannot even provide a software that allow our clients to manage their documents, email, fax, create workflows.

We have been bleed dry financial, but we need a Safefile owned software to perform our business, Ralph we don’t even have a workflow for our own scanning services.

We need help and any help will do or we will go down.

Regards,


Langa Mkhwanazi
Operations Director
Safefile (Pty) Ltd
l.mkhwanazi@safefile.co.za

Xerox CTO

Here's a somewhat intersting interview with the CTO of Xerox.

More on XPS

Here's an insightful article that discusses some of the features/functionality of XPS, the PDF alternative that Microsoft will release with its Vista OS sometime next year. Interestingly, the writer seems to position XPS the same way that Microsoft partner ScanSoft/Nuance has been positioning its PDF capabilities, as a lower overhead product when compared to Adobe Acrobat, aimed at office workers and their needs, leaving the graphics world to Adobe.

Ralph

Google

Last post for today. This article probably explains why Google will not surpass Microsoft, as much as I like their server-based computing model.

TiS wins smokin' deal

More evidence of successful invoice processing/ERP integration: TiS wins a contract with Altadis, Europe's leading manufacturer of tobacco products.

FileNet Document Encryption

FileNet has teamed up with storage security expert Decru to create a hardware/software solution for ecrypting document based on user-defined groups.

Microsoft PDF

It seems Microsoft and Adobe have had a falling out over their agreement to incorporate PDF in Office. We remember when this project was first announced - curiously, it was after Microsoft had launched its XPS "PDF-killer" format. Not surprisingly, Microsoft expects to get sued by Adobe. Microsoft is notorious for pretending to partner with company just so they can get a peek at their technology.

Hummingbird deal

It seems that some Hummingbird investors are up in arms about the $456 million being paid by a California firm to take Hummingbird private. One gentleman has even encouraging voting against it. The hope is that a strategic buyer, like a FileNet or Oracle will be found. I guess, based on $1.5 billion that Documentum got from ECM, Hummingbird shareholders might have a right to be disappointed.

JPEG Patents

There seems to be quite a bit of discussion in our industry about the recent USPTO ruling on the invalidity of major chunks of the JPEG patent that Forgent has leveraged so far to generate some $100 million in revenue. It looks like someone finally got one of these patent rulings right. Hurrah! Let's hope there is more of this to come.

File Scrub

This looks like some pretty cool and useful document management technology. Aren't these the same guys that originally developed LizardTech's geospacial compression stuff? In fact, it appears LizardTech's old CEO, John "Grizz" Deal might even be involved in this venture as well.

Intriguing New CAS

Here's a new content-addressed storage company founded by the guy that apparently invented Centera. Now, I have trouble telling one CAS device from another, but I assume there are some people out there that really understand this stuff...I'd like to say things were easier when all we had to worry about was optical, but I know that's not the case.

Google vs. Microsoft

Here's a Cringely column that addresses the very issue I wrote about yesterday. Yes, he takes Google's side as well.

AIIM Wrap

Another AIIM is in the books. Wow! What a show. It was nice to see everybody who I saw. I apologize to everyone I missed, especially those I had appointments with. I think I need to hire some correspondents just to fully cover the show.

There was a lot of good quality mature technology there. I got to see a lot of scanners, I acted as a Best of Show judge in the workgroup and departmental scanner categories. Compared to five years ago, boy, have feeders and image processing come along way. The real current of the show, however, seemed to be pulling in the direction of server-based computing. More on this in the next issue of DIR - but there are two camps being orgazined. Microsoft supporters are in one and Google supporters are in the other. Guess which side wants to move functionality off the desktop and onto the server?

Based on the fun I had last year with this, I thought I'd offer my informal, very, very informal, DIR Best of AIIM award. Please, take note, these are in now way associated with AIIM sponsored Best of Show awards for which I got to test all the scanners.

Thanks.

Best Product: Scott Blau's SOA-based forms processing product. Love the concept of making data extraction (and also image processing by the way) available as series of services. It is the most efficient way to handle this. Oh yeah, and guess whose side I'm on in the above mentioned debate.
Most polarizing product: The Kofax Avalon/Document Scan Server. People loved it or hated it.
Biggest, only in Philadelphia, inconvenience of the year award: I think we finally figured out how to deal with the Penn graduation on Monday, only to be hit with a city-wide 24-hour taxi-strike on Tuesday. Next year - Boston - the week of the Boston Marathon.
Best Storyteller of the Year: Art Gingrande. Well, they were a little long, but Art is apparently in law school, so he should fit right in.
Best Disappearing Act: Chris Thompson. He was missed by many, but everyone seemed happy for him as well.
Best Soon-To-Be Disappearing Act: Go Reynolds!
Best Digital Copier-related product: Sharp. More SOA stuff.
Best AIIM Chairman of the Year: Don McMahan. Congrats, Don.
Yawner of the year: It was 2 p.m. on Thursday and Xerox was showing me yet another proprietary digital copier capture platform. Sorry about that. The guy demoing it was nice enough, but seriously, I nearly fell asleep on my feet.
Story of the Year: Art's bit about a trash can and a CEO - oh yes, and OCR software.
Dinner of the Year: Suzie Fu's - something like that - French/Asian wonderful food.
Party of the Year: I believe I was singing Karekoke at one point.
Casting the longest shadow: Microsoft
Best Apparent Turnaround: Scan-Optics. Seem to be doing great a year after a major reorg. I guess, we'll see long-term, but CEO Paul Yantis seemed is optimistic.

Cheers

Why I love AIIM

Yesterday, I've having a conversation about my blog. I mention one that one of my favorite posts occurred while waiting for an hour on the Philadelphia runway when I handed out my impromptu DIR "Best of AIIM Awards." The marketing people I'm sitting with get a laugh when I explain that being trapped on an airplane is a great muse. The software engineer with us mere says, "nice battery."

Anyhow, the big talk out here early seems to revolve around Microsoft SharePoint and its future effect on the ECM market. There is more than one person who thinks it spells doom for people like Open Text and other EDM specialists. Ironically, however, this is also the week of Microsoft's own SharePoint convention, so a lot of their heavy hitters aren't even here. If I'm Open Text, I'm not too worried yet. (I love the way the spell checker in the thing - which is owned by Google I understand - doesn't recognize "SharePoint.)

Ralph

AIIM 2006

So, I'm stuck here in the Erie Airport, waiting for my departing flight to Philly - what a great time to blog. Yup, headin' down to AIIM On Demand - the second year at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I actually enjoyed last year's show immensely and found Philadelphia easy to get around. (Sorry for any mistakes that follow, need to go through security. We're moving.)

Apparently, there are some T-storms going on this way. Hope your flight isn't too badly delayed. Fortunately, I'm flying direclty there and not using it as a connection, because (Philly is a U.S. Air hub), the people in front of me in line were really screwed up. I'm just going to use my down time here as a substitute for sitting in Starbucks this afternoon and catching up on things and prepping for the show. (Flight from Philly just landed close to on time, but still we're delayed for an hour. Don't quite get it, but oh well.)

Two interesting announcements in preparation for the show this week. The first comes from Kofax, which has finally officially announced it Document Scan Server. The Scan Server is a hardware/software appliance designed to replace ISIS and TWAIN drivers with SOA calls directly to the device. In other words, instead of having to configure a TWAIN interface into your accounting application, you can just write some SOA/Web services calls to get the image. Like a lot of things these days, the Scan Server is designed to bring document imaging further into the mainstream. "No longer do you need a developer that specializes in ISIS or TWAIN, now you can get any engineer that knows standards-based Web services to do you image enablement [enable your application to receive document images directly from a scanner]." That's a big of a paraphrase, but that's pretty much what Anthony Macciola of Kofax told us. It's an interesting venture by Kofax, whose Image Controls driver business has morphed into VRS, and which has cooperted very closely with ISIS Master Developer Pixel over the past few years. It appears Kofax wants its driver buisness back. It definitely has the partnerships with the scanner vendors in place to make this happen.

Kofax partners seem pretty excited about the Document Scan Server, and we recently had an opportunity to talk with an integrator that has had the Boy Scouts of America commit to buying like 250 Scan Servers. Kofax preliminary pricing was $1,000 per unit - but they stressed that volume discounts will be made. The ROI comes in the areas of integration and maitenance, as the Scan Server is designed to enable true server-based deployment and maiteance of Server-based capture. Plenty more on this in my next issue, which comes out tomorrow.

Interestingly, Datacap also made an SOA-centric announcment today. It make it TaskMaster flagship application available as a service. (I apologize, I couldn't find it as a link, so here's the complete text:

Datacap Releases Taskmaster Web Service,
the Industry’s First SOA Capture Solution

On Demand Image Processing, Recognition, Validations and
Export Formatting for any Platform

May 15, 2006, Tarrytown, NY – Datacap announced today the release of Taskmaster Web Service, a new approach for users to capture document images via the Internet. Whether an organization is running FileNet Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture or another capture product, they can expand their capture capabilities whenever and wherever needed simply by calling the Web service.

“Datacap continually leverages key technology developments to provide maximum flexibility to organizations looking to increase data-entry and document-indexing efficiency and accuracy,” said Datacap CEO Scott Blau. “Taskmaster Web Service brings a whole new level of flexibility. Users can take advantage of Datacap’s procedural rules engine to control document identification, field recognition, data validation, and export formatting – all without any programming.

Taskmaster Web Service takes advantage of the Service Oriented Architecture trend to decouple traditional forms processing and advanced document capture capabilities from the capture platform. This makes it easy to set up rules that will run exactly the same on documents whether they are scanned locally or remotely, whether they are processed in one capture system, such as Kofax Ascent Capture, or another, like Datacap Taskmaster. Simplified rules administration – without programming – means less administrative overhead for a capture application. Centralized, Web-service based processing also makes it easier to monitor multiple capture applications efficiently sharing the same resources.

Those using FileNet Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture or other capture platforms can use Taskmaster Web Service to add enhanced capture capabilities not standard in their existing platforms. As user needs change, organizations can add the capture pieces they need via the Web Service. Taskmaster Web Service integrates with third party capture platforms and can easily provide added capabilities, saving organizations the expense and effort of replacing their existing capture investment.

An early adopter of the Taskmaster Web Service has built an application that sends fax images to the Service to capture addressee information with advanced recognition. The fax management application was developed independently as a Microsoft .NET executable. The functionality for natural handwriting recognition was added with only a few lines of code to call the Web Service and interpret the results.

Availability
Taskmaster Web Service is available immediately. For pricing and system requirements, contact Datacap at sales@datacap.com.

Comment: This application would seem to be the perfect compliment to the Document Scan Server, as it puts the entire data capture portion of document imaging on a servier - makes it available as a service. So, once you capture the image with one of these Scan Servers, you feed it to Datacap and off you go.

Ralph

Good quarters

Capture specialists Dicom and Top Image Systems both announced strong first quarters - another sign of the current stength of the imaging industry.

Also, I'll apologize in advance for anyone I miss at the upcoming AIIM show in Philly next week.

Thanks.

Ralph

Carman at Computhink

Congrats to Paul Carman, who has accepted the job a president of Computhink. Computhink is a Chicago-based document imaging/workflow/records management software vendor. Last I knew, they were trying to build a VAR channel. I actually applied for a business development job there a few years back, but was turned down. Always thought Chicago would be a cool place to live. Paul's been around the imaging block, so to speak, a few times. He started with Kodak, moved into the IMC, which he helped sell to AIIM, was with an ASP firm for awhile, and most recently has been an EVP with Document Boss - a job search/M&A organization based in the U.K. We wish Paul the best in his latest endeavor and are looking forward to catching up.

Pegasus Releases Latest toolkit version

Improved .NET functionality, better support for thumbnail viewing and improved image processing.

INSCII acquisiton completed

In case you were wondering what happened to the old INSCII high-volume COLD and document imaging business...