Scalability: A key factor in the success of Document Management Software

We all know when we think of choosing a document management software that there are certain technical requirements and functionality we can't go without: version control, exporting documents in various formats, historical activities (logs) on our documents, etc..

What is often overlooked when choosing a document management software is the way the product is suited to the needs of our organization, not just at the time in which we undertake the document management project, but in the future. Scalability is a factor that is often underestimated or completely ignored,which is crucial in determining the success of a document management project.

The growth of the system (scalability) plays a key role, especially in large and multinational companies, where decisions often depend on good ways to centralize institutions, but the policies of the branches also have something to say. For example, we often find in these businesses that among branches they use different document or content management applications and it's really inefficient to share information between different locations, or sooner or later, these branches are forced to migrate their documents to a particular software application imposed by the parent company.

It is difficult that companies take into account scalability in a comprehensive way in dealing with ECM projects due to different edges of the concept. We understand scalability in many ways:

• System capacity to handle increasing volumes of documents, since a given volume of data can cause serious overloading of the system.
• The system capacity can grow at the hardware level, adding additional servers or memory, for example to reduce the response time of the system when carrying out a large number of concurrent queries.
• System's ability to integrate with other business applications that requireaccessing or storing documents.

How to plan for system growth and whether the system will continue to be useful tomorrow?

1. Quantify the number of documents that are expected to drive the system in the future. What growth rate will have the documents on the system?
2. Quantify the number of users expected in the future. And when we talk about users, you must also think of those who use the system indirectly through other applications that query the document management system.
3. Quantify the number of different physical workplaces where the system will be used, whether branches, offices, countries, etc..

Athento at the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp

Last Thursday May 17th, we showcased Athento Intelligent Document Management at the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp in San Francisco, CA. The event was really interesting and perfectly well organized in the Palace Hotel San Francisco. 

Two of our members of Yerbabuena Software in Sillicon Valley, Antonio de las Nieves and Carmen Mateos attended to this event, where they presented the advantages and benefits that Athento and its intelligent way of document management provides in any business process.

The list of companies presented there was also pretty motivating.

We showcase in AIIM Content Management Boot Camp, San Francisco

This Thursday, May 17th, we showcase Athento Intelligent Document Management at the
Other vendors include Autonomy, IBM, Oracle, Alfresco or EMC.

You can see the complete list of companies presenting here.


I will be attending the event with Carmen Mateos, a recent member of Yerbabuena Software.
Feel free to come and say hi! ;-)


And here is a video about the event:





A list of the sponsors to this series of Content Management Boot Camp events:

Comments on Athento DMS

"I sincerely believe that @Athento is the best #ECM  software out there.  Every new demo I discover innovative and differential improvements"

David Criado,  on Twitter, 10 Mayo 2012
David has benn a Team Leader at Indra (#1 IT company in Spain) and Senior Knowledge Leader at Everis, among others. 
View full Linkedin profile.
Vorpalina initiative webpage from David.

Cloud Document Management Software: Comparing the Top Solutions

Companies in this comparison have been chosen not only because of its popularity, in the case of vendors like Alfresco, Knowledgetree and Nuxeo, but also because of the relevance shown by Google as Cloud Document Management providers.

The first part of this comparison is intended to introduce the products evaluated, while the second analysis is performed in three areas:
Basic functionality, advanced functionality and other features such as support and prices.

Solutions: 

Alfresco Beta Cloud

Simple and fast buying process, which is a non insignificant feature when one wants to have a document management solution running as soon as possible. Another of the strengths of Alfresco is its interface, very easy to use and clean. However, now we just have Alfresco Beta, which leaves out advanced document management features. We have to wait a few months for Alfresco Team and Enterprise versions to become available in the cloud. Right now, users can enjoy up to 10GB storage for free, but this is very little real work for a company, of course. Prices are expected for Alfresco Team to be around 70 dollars per month, but we have to wait a few months to see it.

Athento Cloud

The main strength is that Athento offers advanced functionality for reasonable prices. All products have OCR functionality integrated into Athento cloud as its core functionality. Furthermore, it takes 5 minutes to enjoy Athento. But above all, in addition to existing features, Athento Cloud is a bet on the future. With a large and comprehensive roadmap, Athento will soon have new features such as integration with leading social networks, new interface and a MarketPlace in which users can scale their custom applications.

Knowledgetree

Knowledgetree is an asy to configure and maintain open source DMS, with very good documentation and well covered basics. It also has a strong community, and has been developed using PHP programming language.

The main concerns with Knowledgetree are its scalability, a not so friendly UI or the fact that most interesting features are under the commercial version.

LogicalDoc

A fairly complete solution for document management core functionality, but advanced features which are quite expensive. Around 1800 euros per year. On the other hand, a growth in the number of users will make this product escape many pockets.

With servers in the Netherlands, LogicalDoc is one of the solutions to be considered, although its implementation is one its weakest points, since it misses one of the advantages of the cloud, the reduced time to acquire and enjoy the service.

Nuxeo Cloud

Nuxeo is king in basic functionality, a document management solution that does not take control of documentation lightly. However, many of the advanced functionality gets achieved with integrations with third parties and in the cloud version these integrations are not available. For example, an essential functionality such as OCR is not available in the cloud version. The marketplace, on the other hand, is something to be noted because it will bring many opportunities to its users. Once Nuxeo has an increased number of plugins in its marketplace, users can grow their cloud applications as desired.

However, prices are quite high for Nuxeo, making it one of the most expensive solutions out there.

Basic Feature Analysis

In this section we consider features that should be in any Document Management System, whether SaaS or OnPremise.

Advanced Features Analysis

This section is intended to consider the added value that these document management and ECM offer.

Pricing and Support

One of the most important aspects to consider is support, as Document Management in the Cloud is a service and a service must deal with situations where the client does not get their needs met on the platform. Meanwhile, prices will play an important role, since these systems tend to operate through subscriptions and monthly payments. The continued payment for the service must be viable for the company. Similarly, before hiring such services we should analyze what price system is best for the company: number of users, capacity, number of documents or combinations of these.

Executive Briefing: The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality?

After attending the webinar arranged by the global community of information professionals (AIIM), we can answer that we are gradually coming to the achievement of the ECM dream. Worldwide, a paperless office begins to take shape, specially, at large corporations’ level.

As seen in the webinar, companies use a 15% on average of their office space to store paper documents. This percentage is even higher (>35%) for a significant amount of them. What is avoiding a real paper free office? The AIIM research emphasizes on several items from ECM which should / could be improve in order to dramatically reduce paper use.

Capture maturity

The image capture is still in its very early stages. This action is often performed to file images whereas data capture and extraction from images and further use of them in other tasks are not usual. Why? Lack of useful tools? Lack of habit? Strikingly, the 32% of companies receives the 30.6% of invoices in pdf format, 77% of them going to be printed. This necessity may disappear with a good document management able to identify symbols and characters from an image and then to store them as a data form. So, we can search specific content, classify an invoice, etc…

Inbound mail

The 20% on average of companies usually scans the half or more of their inbound mails with the aim of storing and use them in other tasks. However, companies are becoming to realize of the lack of productivity derived from this procedure. So, if they could somehow automate these tasks, the 61% of such entities thinks that they would achieve a 25% improvement in their productivity.

Outsourcing

ECM outsourcing is thought not to be an additional saving compared to in-house ECM by more than 50% of worldwide companies. However, only European companies still possess forward plans regarding outsourcing.

Mobile capture

By employee role, travelling managers, sales, delivery and transport professionals are the main users of mobile ECM systems. The 38% of employees uses mobile devices to capture images; only the 6% of them by means of smart-phones, and even a less percentage, 4%, using the software OCR.

Additionally in this section, there was shown how strikingly low is the percentage of the surveyed people (21%) performing digital signing.

Security, lost devices and coverage are among the problems found in mobile devices users. On the other hand, mobile capture improvements, data availability, more acuracy and paper out of process are the main advantages regarding to mobile/portable capture projects.  

Cloud ECM

The strategy for capture deployment is still inmature and only the 12% of companies shows to committed to cloud capture in the next months. Largest companies are leading this transition.

Paper free office, dream or reality? In any case, ready to wake up.

Kofax: Less to capture or inadequate capture solutions?

Kofax this month announced a reduction in benefits of 40.6% in the last half of 2011 and is expected in the first quarter of 2012 and continue the decline incompany profits.
Kofax now plans to look "beyond the traditional capture market"  which seems for them to have few prospects for growth. Others, however, don't think the same, according to HarveySpencer Associates Inc., the capture market is expected to reach $ 3 billion. Furthermore, according to AIIM, companies continue printing, copying and faxing a trillion pages annually.

If the market continues to grow and sales are falling, Kofax has to wonder if the solution is meeting market expectations. Some of the weaknesses of the Kofax Capture applications are:

Compatibility limitations
Most Kofax applications have been developed to run on Windows. While it is true that Windows absorbs 84% of the market of operating systems, there is still a 16% market that does not work with proprietary operating systems. In terms of servers, the market changes a bit, according W3Techs in 2011 63.90% of the servers using an OS other than Windows. Kofax Capture 10 (released 08/31/11), the latest version of the capture software leaves out most versions of Windows Server prior to 2008, except for some in 2003. In terms of browsers, Kofax Front Office, in its latest version, 3.5.2 only works with Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9, while Firefox and Chrome in 2011 took over 70% market share and are left out.
As for integration with other document management, Kofax has fewer compatibility hassles. Officially, Kofax supports integrations with EMC Documentum, IBM DB2,FileNet, OpenText and Oracle 10g and SharePoint (although some of its partners have developed other UNOFFICIAL connectors Kofax which are not supported directly). But in Databases we find difficulties again: Virtually it is only recommended the use of Windows SQL Server and Oracle.

For customization, integration and development, more of the same, we can only do it in C# or Visual Basic.

Expensive licenses
Kofax provides a licensing system according to the workload, equipment (or workstations), that will make use of it, but also, modular licensing or specific functionality via plugins. Modular licensing types are often the most beneficial to the user, since they pay for the new functionality, no matter who or how much uses it. To get an idea, let's see how a Kofax product costs. The Kofax Express product, which doesn't offer classification of documents, distributed capture, or various types of documents (which means too much manual work to do), but it helps scanning and indexing batches of documents, has 5 separate licenses. Suppose we choose the license for the average volume of production (which can work at 90 pages per minute). In dollars, just for the right to use the software you're charged around 5,100 dollars, but a maintenance contract is also required which costs almost $ 1,100 per year per workstation. That is, pay for two workstations around $ 7,300 without counting the costs of integration with the DMS.

Software made ​​by developers for developers
Although the latest versions of Kofax products have improved considerably the user experience when installing the application and making it work, this remains one of the weaknesses of the range of capture solutions. For the software to operate in the desired manner, it is required the installation of various modules and the installation itself often requires technical support or some type of training. Kofax Capture 10, has eased much of the initial configuration process, as did the version 9. Now we can use an automatic install, which, however, will require a number of configurations in an initialization file. Kofax requires installation and configuration on both client workstations and servers, and if you choose a different database than the standard (SQL Server 2008) installation is a bit more complicated. However, we repeat, in this sense Kofax has made strides in the last two versions with respect to ease of use, installation and configuration.

Click here to see a comparison between document capture solutions such as Athento, Kofax, EMC Documentu and other useful solutions.

Contact us now! We can help you improve Document Management in your company.