Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Speaking at The Architect Factory Event

2010-01-25T21:11:24Z

On Wednesday, I’ll be leading a session at The Architect Factory event in Cambridge, MA. My topic is Persuading Product/Project Managers and is in the Architecture Leadership track.

I’ll be covering:

What is a Product Manager?
How Product Managers think
How technical should Product Managers be?
What motivates Product Managers
How Architects and Product Managers work together
How to describe technical concepts to non-technical managers
How to communicate estimates
How to communicate design choices
How to describe implementation details like unit testing, refactoring, and infrastructure

More than a third of the time will be devoted to discussion.

SharePoint Document Management Checklist: Get Things Done

2010-01-09T15:56:21Z

Windows IT Pro published a checklist for SharePoint Document Management. It covers some of the things you need to think about in addition to just adopting SharePoint (storage, interoperability, backup, security, etc)

Those things are important, but instead of concentrating on the infrastructure mechanics of document management, it’s better to talk about the purpose. If you are sitting in front of your computer looking at SharePoint and thinking about folders, Documentum integration, your SAN, and backup procedures, then something has gone completely wrong.

The reason to use any tool is to get stuff done – pay invoices, process claims, answer inquiries. The more you can get SharePoint and whatever you add to it to put your work in front of you and help you do it, the more you will get out of it.

Here’s my checklist of what to look for in Document Management that will help you get work done.

Are all the things you need to process a document organized and easy to get to while viewing it (Annotations, meta-data, document editing)?
Are related documents readily accessible?
Can you compare two documents easily? For example, the purchase order and the related invoice or two versions of your newsletter.
Is search integrated so that I don’t need to leave my management window to bring up another document?
Can I correct a badly scanned page with an ad-hoc page rescan right from my viewer?

Of course everything needs to be backed up, versioned correctly, integrated, etc. But if that’s all you get, then you won’t get the full benefit. In the end, the ROI will be driven by the business getting it’s work done, so don’t stop at just the infrastructure requirements.

Atalasoft 2009 Blog Retrospective

2009-12-30T14:01:27Z

Last year, around this time, I did a 2008 retrospective with one blog post from each of the blogs hosted by Atalasoft. Here is my 2009 version.

Atalasoft Office Blog

This year, Christina (our Vizit Marketing Manager among other things) started an office blog to let our customers, partners, etc get to know us a little better. No post does that better than the chronicle of Bacon Day:

The 3 of us sat around my desk and thought, "What is something FUN we can do for the handful of staff members in the office? Something that will make the rest of those guys, enjoying the night life in Philadelphia, CRINGE with JEALOUSY?"

Steve's answer to everything is "bacon." And in this case, he was 100% spot on.

I’m not sure how you name something “Bacon Day” when you do it three times in a year.

Rick Minerich’s Development Wonderland

Rick has been speaking more and more about F#, and his blog has become a popular destination for the community. In June, he wrote this concise history of programming languages – my favorite part is the quotes he chose for each part:

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”
- Larry Wall

Steve’s Tech Talk

Staff meetings at Atalasoft became epic in 2009. In May, we changed our format so that a rotating producer would be in charge of organizing and running the meeting. One aspect of the meeting is a topical presentation on something relevant to the company – in July, Steve, our Chief Architect, explained our development process to the rest of the company with an educational video.

Bill Bither’s Insights

Bill, our CEO and founder, wrote this entry just ahead of the Vizit 1.0 release with some practical advice on introducing a new product on a limited budget:

We researched the market, talked to potential customers, built relationships with industry recognized players, and are now in the midst of turning Atalasoft from a one product company to a two product company – all without any external financing, and during a recession.

I believe that now IS a good time to start a new company, or launch a new product. This is the year for small agile companies to innovate while larger companies cut back and wait it out.

David Cilley’s Ajax Imaging Blog

While Dave was working on a demo using YUI, he whipped up a way of converting YUI Button Groups into Image Buttons.

I poked around YUI’s documentation a bit and came up with simple function that can convert a YUI Button into an image only button, much like a button on a tool bar. These converted YUI Buttons still maintain the same original properties internally, so you can use them interchangeably.

Jake Opines

When Jacob told me he was going to move his personal projects from WordPress to SharePoint, I was shocked. I personally use WordPress, but have been unhappy with it for years – it’s just the best of a lot of bad alternatives to me. This entry explains some of his rationale for using SharePoint 2010 over LAMP:

SharePoint offers a framework that abstracts away databases and security design, it gives you a complete content management system, a plug-in architecture, and for the price, unmatched scalability. This doesn't even begin to take into account the growing ecosystem of third party features available both for free and fee.

If you can’t be a developer, be a developer supporter

Elaine runs our support and training. On her blog, you’ll find a mixture of information about our products and posts like this one, an account of her experience as a customer using some other company’s support:

I could end all this with some philosophical advice and parallels of my experiences as a support engineer in the software industry, but, really, everything is pretty clear in four rules:

1. Do it right.
2. If you can’t, communicate.
3. Do what you can do.
4. Do it quickly.

If you build it, They will come

Dave named this blog when he was in charge of builds – now, he’s a Vizit engineer (but still the most knowledgeable about our builds). When these worlds collide, you get a very thorough post on using TypeMock for SharePoint to mock SharePoint SPSecurity Delegates.

The main problem I found was that SPSecurity had to be mocked, otherwise it would throw a NullReferenceException […] for obvious reasons, there’s no SharePoint to test against! Let’s flex those Mock muscles and handle calls to SharePoint’s static objects.

Insert Quality Here

In 2008, I discovered LLVM for Cocoa/Objective-C static analysis, which, unlike Lint, lists problems with no false positives. Adam did this round-up of static analysis tools last year that gives a few good reasons to use them even if their output is unwieldy.

It has seemed to me that most folks' (including mine) first impression of the massive amounts of output that a static analysis tool generates is, “Oh, dear Lord. What's all this crap about code style?”, and “Where're the useful results?”.

Dan Barvitsky

Our newest engineering blog is from Dan. I’m a sucker for sequence diagrams and unit testing techniques, so I love this post he wrote about unit testing to find concurrency bugs.

When I run this test it passes on my laptop. Why? Because it is fairly old and has single CPU. Once I move it to my desktop (TADA) it still passes inconsistently. If I uncomment priority setting line it messes everything up badly. It turns out threading introduces some randomization which makes test non-deterministic. Bad test. We’d better fix it.

He thought about the problem some more and eventually documented a solution.

SharePoint Empowers Users from @meetdux

2009-11-25T13:08:07Z

Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) is writing a series introducing SharePoint to executives. For it, he created this compelling video about how easy it is for a project manager to create their own collaborative intranet without IT.

SharePoint Empowers Users from Dux Raymond Sy on Vimeo.

Why it’s not surprising that SharePoint is being used for Records Management

2009-11-23T19:46:15Z

I just read an article in the midmarket CIO section of TechTarget reporting on Forrester’s finding that SharePoint is gaining market share in Records Management.

The finding is surprising because SharePoint 2007 has some "significant shortcomings" when it comes to records management (RM), said Hill and others. While miles ahead of its portal-centric 2003 version, SharePoint 2007 is a less-than-ideal tool for the exacting task of maintaining records -- from paper, digital documents and databases to physical objects -- throughout their lifecycle. Missing features include:

Physical records management -- for example, the ability to apply retention policies to warehouse boxes.

Federated records management, or the ability to apply controls to objects in other repositories.

Department of Defense certification for records management, (DoD 5015.2-STD V3), required by many federal and other agencies of business partners.

This is only surprising if you think of SharePoint as an out of the box solution. If you plan on using SharePoint with no customizations, then it isn’t an acceptable Records Management System. But, SharePoint is a platform, and all of these missing features are easily added by third-parties or by the IT department of the organization.

Microsoft even got their own records manager, Christina Torres, to write a whitepaper on how Microsoft uses SharePoint and Exchange to manage their records. The opening paragraph talks about how to “implement a records management system”, not install one. In reality, even an out-of-the-box RMS is going to require customization – so Microsoft’s offering is not so different and it offers two big advantages:

It’s quite a bit cheaper
The front-end is fully integrated with Office – making adoption much more likely

Or as Forrester put it:

As for SharePoint's current popularity among records managers, despite the gaps? Hill said a familiar interface is a powerful thing. "I attribute it to Microsoft's extremely bright strategy of tying together SharePoint with its office portfolio and giving knowledge workers a user interface they are very familiar with," Hill said.

Microsoft Guidance on CMIS

2009-11-10T23:21:00Z

Back in July, I noted a CMS Report article about the apparent lack of real information about Microsoft's plans for CMIS. Well, Microsoft has put that to rest -- CMIS is planned to be for SharePoint 2010 -- Microsoft announced it at ARMA, their SharePoint conference, and their ECM blog.

Since that announcement we've gotten lots of requests for additional details ("give me an exact date!", "tell me exactly what functionality will be included", etc.) I wish that this blog post could be the place to provide more detail – but it's simply not possible at this time. Here's why -- those of you who attended the SharePoint Conference last week have seen that SharePoint 2010 is looking pretty shiny and polished. But until the CMIS 1.0 specification is final, we can't realistically commit to exact dates when our CMIS support would be ready. This means that our plans need to be flexible to balance the following needs:

Not rushing the finalization of the CMIS 1.0 specification in a way that would compromise its quality

Release CMIS support as soon as possible for SharePoint 2010 that meets the interoperability needs of our customers and partners

Is Capture where SharePoint’s Next Billion Will Come From?

2009-11-05T14:28:41Z

Jeff Shuey thinks the next billion dollars for SharePoint and their partners is in Document Capture.

I submit that SharePoint can add another $1 Billion dollars to this by focusing on [the Document Capture section] of the ECM market alone. […] which includes scanning, faxing, and otherwise importing paper based documents.

Jeff has written about this opportunity before.

And, he’s not the only one. Ralph Gammon’s Document Imaging Report (the leading document capture industry newsletter) is also tracking SharePoint’s inroads into the capture market:

With the 2007 release, Microsoft first got serious about SharePoint's document management capabilities. With the 2010 version, there are even more document management capabilities.

Although SharePoint doesn't have any inherent document imaging, in many ways (but certainly not all) a scanned image can be managed like another electronic document. Because of this, we are seeing increasing interest in using SharePoint for document imaging.

Ralph is collecting document capture in SharePoint case studies – keep an eye on this section of the site if you’re interested in how SharePoint is disrupting the capture market and providing significant value.

More “8 Things” goodness: SharePoint + ECM

2009-10-27T14:55:04Z

The AIIM Digital Landfill blog’s 8 Things series is still going strong. The latest is Michael Elkins (from the Kestral Group) on 8 Things to Consider when Implementing SharePoint with Another ECM engine.

SharePoint sites are often created with little thought with respect to long term use. As a result, when it comes to linking into another ECM solution, users are hit with unexpected changes and restrictions to sites they have become accustomed to. Understanding the functionality people use, or expect to use, from each system is vital to the successful blending of the capabilities.

What it boils down to is that SharePoint is great for getting work done (collaboration, dealing with living documents, workflow, etc.) and the ECM is great for keeping records and complying with laws. The interesting parts are when documents transition from one to the other type.

More on images in databases

2009-10-26T14:01:12Z

Since I get asked about using blobs vs. the file system for images a lot, and Andrew Chapman is easily the most qualified person I know of to answer it, I’ll just defer to him (he in turn defers to a MS research paper):

The conclusions from the technical report are…

Files less than 256KB are more efficiently stored in the database

Files larger than 1MB are more efficiently stored in the file system

Files between 256KB and 1MB could be stored in either – if in doubt store them on the file system.

It’s interesting that the reason to prefer blobs in the mid-range is because the file system can be defragmented, but the blobs cannot be.

Innovate Holyoke

2009-10-23T13:51:10Z

On Wednesday, I attended the announcement of the plan to build a High-Performance Computing Center in Holyoke for occupancy by 2011. This was the result of an unprecedented 120 day effort by the Massachusetts state and local government, local area colleges and universities, and private industry to put forth a plan that would both help to establish Massachusetts as a global technology leader and take advantage of a resource advantage in Holyoke (cheap power and cooling).

You can learn more about the project and follow its progress at innovateholyoke.com. In keeping with the spirit of the project (openness and enthusiastic promotion of adoption of technology), you can also follow the project on a variety of social media outlets (follow @InnovateHolyoke on Twitter).

I’ll be participating on the education and training subcommittee, and I will share what I can on this blog.

Google’s Apps at Work

2009-10-22T18:57:34Z

Over at Jeff Shuey’s blog, I read about the announcement of Google’s Apps at Work. Jeff’s an absolute expert on what it means to be a Microsoft partner – he was a Partner Manager at Microsoft and in the ECM space, he’s been a Parter/Alliance manager for Kofax and Captaris. His take:

The challenge for Google will be to empower a vibrant group of partners that are willing to adopt, adapt, and accelerate.

I completely agree with him that partners are key to Microsoft’s product strategy (in any market), and that Google has yet to show that can replicate it.

Right now, without partners, they can only replace the parts of enterprise infrastructure that aren’t customized. The obvious one is e-mail, and that’s the main message on the AppsAtWork site: “switch from Microsoft Exchange”, not from SharePoint. They are definitely pushing the envelope of communication generally, but that won’t matter if I can’t tailor it to my specific (custom) needs.

Ironically, part of the problem Google is going to have is that you don’t need help installing their system. It’s already installed in their cloud – you just need to sign up and pay. The first company people turn to will be Google itself, not a partner. In the SharePoint world, you usually need help to get started and then partners can provide value-added services on top of that.

For role-models, Google needs to look at SalesForce and Apex. Not just working together, but copying Apex for Google Apps.

If Google Can’t Make a Great Mobile Web App, Can Anyone?

2009-08-31T11:45:45Z

I recently switched from NewsGator to Google Reader for reading RSS subscriptions, and along with that, I had to switch from a native iPhone app to using the iPhone version of Google Reader’s web application.

The full-size Google Reader is one of the best web applications that I use – it’s just as good as GMail or Google Maps in terms of usability, responsiveness, and feature-set. The mobile version is very similar. It’s been optimized for iPhone, of course, but it’s a comparable to the normal site – they haven’t compromised much.

Even so, on the iPhone, I wish they had made a native application instead.

Here are some of the reasons why:

On my iPhone, I don’t always have a great connection. I don’t feel the sluggishness of web applications on my PC, but on my iPhone, it’s pretty slow when I’m not on WiFi.
iPhone native apps have consistent GUIs, and Reader really stands out like a sore thumb. One simple example is that navigation buttons aren’t always visible. Good desktop applications are more usable than web applications as well, but the margin is much wider on a mobile device. The native controls and look-and-feel are designed to work well on a mobile device, and it's not easy to duplicate that with HTML.
Deployment and updating are not issues on the iPhone. I’d be annoyed if I had to keep upgrading a native Reader application on my PC, but on the iPhone, it’s not really an issue. It’s automatic and fast – so I don’t have a natural preference for web applications like I do on my PC.
Having Reader share state with Safari is annoying. This might just be me, but I have more than one GMail login (personal and work) and every time I log out, it logs me out of Reader. I don’t have this issue as much on a PC because I can use multiple browsers, and I don’t switch as much on a single computer.
No offline mode. I assume that they could do this if they want, since mobile Safari has an offline data store. With native applications, it’s just normal that they would still work offline. I think it’s reasonable to expect an RSS reader to have some caching.

I just switched, so I haven’t taken a look at the native RSS apps that support Google Reader. On first look, the Google mobile version looked like it would be good enough, but even the best mobile web applications don’t stand a chance against native applications.

CMIS and SharePoint 2010 – What will it be?

2009-07-28T12:24:01Z

CMS Report is lamenting the lack of details of CMIS and SharePoint 2010:

While Microsoft announced their support for CMIS in September 2008 there has been little word from Microsoft on when we'll see CMIS available for SharePoint users and whether CMIS will be incorporated into SharePoint 2010.

And he’s right – Bryan gives an exhaustive list of mentions of CMIS, and they are all one-liners, rumors, or extremely vague.

SharePoint CMIS support should mean that they can interoperate with CMIS repositories (which they already can, with custom code) and that they provide a CMIS layer on top of their repository. The latter is also possible now, since anyone can deploy web-services into SharePoint and the SharePoint Object Model is already rich enough to implement CMIS. The issue with third-party solutions is that they are limited to the public interface, but Microsoft would have access to the underlying data model and would be able to do a better job, especially with queries.

For CMIS to be successful, it will need to be a first-class citizen, as I wrote when CMIS was first emerging:

[…] if [each ECM vendor’s] implementation of CMIS doesn't match their proprietary API, then we may find ourselves still writing code for each one. The main reason is that if we have competitors, and if there is a performance benefit, it will outweigh the benefits of a smaller code base. Our customers won't care if we support other systems, only what the best one for their system is. So, the more successful we are, the more likely we'll be writing ECM specific code.

Eventually CMIS will be the right way to interact with repositories, but like Bryan from CMS Report, I’d appreciate some guidance from the vendors on when the CMIS standard will be done and implemented in their products.

Is SharePoint Scary?

2009-07-22T16:47:00Z

Last month, I wrote about a Computerworld article on the cost of SharePoint that concluded:

If CIOs treat SharePoint as off-the-shelf software, the costs will indeed be onerous. However, if CIOs treat it as an enterprise information platform and content management system, SharePoint will yield tremendous value-and potentially at a fraction of the cost of comparable ECM solutions.

I thought about this again while reading this Peter Campbell article on why SharePoint scared him. It’s an overview of the benefits and drawbacks of SharePoint in a specific organization, and concludes:

After four years of agonizing on this, here's my conclusion: When the product matures, if I have organizational buy-in and interest; a large hardware budget; a high-performance Wide Area Network, and a budget for consulting, Sharepoint will be a great way to go.

Ultimately, for Peter, it comes down to cost, because four of his six points are either about cost of licenses, hardware, etc, or a problem in SharePoint that has many third-party solutions (external blob storage, for example). In the comments, Peter explains why hosted SharePoint wouldn’t work for him, which would be a typical suggestion to a small organization that didn’t have the infrastructure in place.

Like many solutions, the costs are very easy to quantify, but the benefits are not. For example, there’s a lot of value to the extensibility of SharePoint – not just in that it allows organizations to standardize on a web-application deployment framework, but that it also enables third-parties to provide common extensions. Peter also mentioned how well it fit in with the rest of his systems (Exchange, Office, Windows Directory), and that would also translate to cost savings. However, the value of those benefits isn’t as clear as the cost of a server.

The challenge to Microsoft and its partners is to help organizations quantify these benefits in a believable way.

5 Killer Features Chrome OS Could Offer

2009-07-09T18:11:43Z

Ok, so Google is coming out with an OS for netbooks. It’s a classic vertical niche market entry strategy. With support for ARM, they keep out Microsoft (at least, for now), and Apple won’t provide OS’s for non-Apple hardware, so the field is wide-open.

Google says that their OS will be created from the ground-up with the web in mind. Their killer features are fast boot-up and immunity from viruses and malware (well, not really).

I’d like to see much more than that. Here are some ideas for what I think an OS that is made to run web applications would be able to do:

Single-sign on to all of my web apps. Right now, when I log into my work PC, I can go to SharePoint or get to any intranet resources based on my Windows Authentication. With a Chrome OS netbook, I expect that my login to the machine is good enough to get me to GMail. Since Google supports OpenID, any other web app could accept that credential as well. Obviously this needs to be done securely, and allow me to invalidate the credential remotely in the case where the netbook is lost or stolen.
Make Google Docs into a filesystem. No matter what they say, I still want to write documents with native apps. I’m using Windows Live Writer to write this blog entry because its interface is much better than anything on the web, and I don’t have internet access everywhere I have my netbook. Even with HTML5 local storage, I just don’t believe I won’t prefer a native app. What would be nice is if my app had some local place that was synched to Google docs, or when I’m online, it just saves back there seamlessly.
Create an HTML standard for devices. It’s 2009 and I still can’t print from a web app. This could be added now, but in the context of an OS, it makes sense to give web apps access to locally installed devices. I want a safe way to interact with any device and simple API’s for common devices (printers, scanners, and digital cameras).
Create a Desktop push web standard. Google makes a gmail notifier already. Just open this up so that it’s easy for anyone to register a service with the OS that allows them to notify the user.
Finally bring App to App and App to Desktop integration to the web. So far, Google has only really had to compete with other web applications, but if they are my OS, then they need to catch up to 1984 technology and give me cut and paste, drag-and-drop, and deeper integration between applications. On my Mac, all of my apps have a media browser into iLife, Mail is integrated into Contacts, any app can expose data to Spotlight. With Gmail, I can’t browse into Flickr for an attachment, or drag a document from my desktop. Again, they should be doing this already, but if they are competing with desktop OS’s, then it’s time to finally catch up.

A lot of this is just thinking of Web APIs in the same way that Microsoft and Apple think of their APIs – so far, Google isn’t really providing me basic application services (like controls, a windowing system, a messaging system, I/O, etc.), but if they are an OS, then this is exactly what I need from them.

Edit: More Chrome OS reaction around the web.