Athento takes a step forward helping e-learning companies

"Yerbabuena Software will soon release the source code of the integration between Nuxeo 5.4.2 and Moodle 2.1, we are going to see some of their benefits and functionalities"
The problem of the companies involved in e-learning or of the departments which are planning training actions is that it generates a big amount of didactic materials which are updated frequently and must be shared with students or with other teachers. Ensuring non-lost of the material, finding a concrete text among many really fast, versioning the material and facilitating the access to a members team is the definition of documental management in the scope of e-learning.


Our engineers have took an important step towards doing these tasks easier with the integration of Nuxeo 5.4.2 and Moodle 2.1 (and version 1.9 but it has less features) using the standard CMIS.

Moodle is perhaps one of the most important 'web based' learning platforms nowadays. This Open Source tool has now more than 72.000 registered sites. Among their users we have the 'Berkeley University',and the 'De Anza College', among others. Moodle allows you to create courses, enrolling students, sharing material, using forums and a wide range of collaborative tools very useful in the education.

Benefits of the integration:

• Creating courses quickly and efficiently: A course normally has basic training material or resources. With the integration, we can create templates of courses in Nuxeo ("Templates") which will be used later from Moodle for creating the different versions quickly. That helps us always have an updated material for the courses as well, because we only have to update the documents of the template and all the courses created will be have updated resources.

• Avoiding lost of training material: All the material of the institution or of the training actions can be saved in Nuxeo. When we want to add material to some course in Moodle, our integration gives us the opportunity of surfing Moodle by the directory tree of Nuxeo and adding any document inside the content manager into the course. This way, we ensure all the documents are in the same place and kept safe under our content manager (ECM).

• Better control over the students activity: For each activity created in the course in Moodle, Nuxeo creates a folder with the name of the activity. Inside this folder other subdirectories will be created with the name of the students that do the activity. This folder will have the documents attached by the student. We keep a unique structure for the documentation generated by the students and, of course, for its preservation in the long-term.

• More speed finding documents: Needless to say the search engine of Nuxeo is far more powerful than the one of Moodle, so in the long-term or in courses with big amount of material it's easier to find a concrete document than if you saved all in a DropBox or a hard disk. Finding documents efficiently promotes the reusing of resources, which results on overall increase of efficiency.

Integrating Moodle with Nuxeo through CMIS, we are getting closer that this will be a feature of Athento itself, independently the documental manager used as a repository.

We will soon release the code of the integration so everybody can enjoy the benefits of Moodle and Nuxeo.

Contact us now! We can help you improve the documental management of your company.

4 Ways to Optimize the Secure Access to My Documents with Athento

“Athento offers you integration with a range of technology possibilities which improve the comfort and the secure access to your documents. Single Sign On, LDAP and HTTPS, are some of them.”

LDAP
Employees seldom use only one application, and you must manage users, passwords and other things for each one of those new applications. LDAP is a “Directory of Users” which help us to solve this problem. Having a unique user and password for all the applications we are using saves time and problems to employees and system departments. With Athento we can take advantage on LDAP twice, not only allowing that the employee has the same access data to the program than the rest of applications but we can create new users who write in the LDAP directory through Athento. Our DMS can work with implementations of this protocol like OpenLDAP, ActiveDirectory of Microsoft, Oracle LDAP amongst other.


HTTPS
When we are surfing on the Net a lot of information is transmitted, like passwords or other personal data, which we do not want to be intercepted and read. Https uses SSL security certificates which encrypt the information transmitted, being almost impossible to decode it without the key that those certificates provide. We can access Athento with this secure protocol to protect our user data and of course, our documents at the end.

Single Sign On (SSO, Unique Login)
With LDAP we solve the problem of having multiple users and passwords, but we must login several times every day when we want to access a different application. SSO allow us, with an unique authentication action, accessing to the multiple applications and systems we are authorized to login. With Athento, we can use SSO systems like OpenAM, NTLM, Shibboleth amongst other.

Time-Outs
How many times have we left our sessions open? An error like this means offer to anybody all the information we can access. Time-outs avoid this problem, because we can say to the system that after an idle time it must logout our session automatically. The most of the modern systems and applications allow to configure time-outs, and Athento is one of then.

Definitely, a lot of options, with all of them you can get a high level of security in the document management of your company.

Contact us now! We can help you improve the documental management of your company.


 

Why should we apply semantic technology to Document Management?

"Semantics is starting to be seen as the ally of document management to address the excess of digital information we have"

Today we work and share all kinds of digital information. We search what we need on the internet, we have information available everywhere. With so much information it begins to be increasingly harder to find what you're looking for. According to a McAfee study in 10 different countries and a sample of 3000 users of new technologies, on average each of these people has 2777 digital files stored in at least one device.

Multiply this figure by the 500 employees of a mid-size company, and we have a volume of more than a million, precisely 1,388,500 files. DMS or ECM systems help us keep them organized, having them safely accessible, decrease the amount of paper, but the truth is it's becoming more difficult to find quickly what we need, and worse, it is increasingly difficult to take advantage of the information contained in company documents, since they are so many that it is difficult to construct knowledge from them.

Neither is easy nowadays to find a document or file using the traditional data by which we identify it, as its name, author or creation date, being that these data are not exactly what people remember accurately.

To help solve all these difficulties we have semantic technology. Defining descriptions over documents or entities such as people, companies, countries, or simply, any relevant data within documents, and getting the documents associated because they share similar content or entities, we can dramatically improve the mechanisms we have to retrieve documents or find information about something we need.

Let's see an example, in the following picture there are two distinct mechanisms to find a document.

The image below is a traditional form that asks you to remember precise details, such as title, description or creation date range. On the right we see a cloud of tags. If we click on a word from the tag cloud we will go to a bunch of documents whose content is related to that term.

Which method is more effective? Well it depends on if we know precisely all the document data, the problem is that we don't always know all that data from our 2,777 files (on average per person). Which way is faster? A click will always be faster, of course, than filing out a form.

But the secret is not in the search mechanism used, that's not an example of semantics, most document management systems have the ability to tag documents. The difference comes when the system itself fails to understand the content of documents and identify relevant information in them, in order to relate all those documents dealing with that same content.

There we find semantics, when the system fails to understand that a document is about "innovation" and group it with others that also address the subject.

The semantics then, in this particular example, saves us work like having to think about what are the words that summarize the contents of the document and helps us find other documents quickly which we may also want to review because they are about the same subject.

This is just one example of semantics applied to document management (Athento autotagging), but we are also developing other applications that will gradually facilitate managing such huge amounts of information.

 

ECM Mobile Advanced: Taking Mobile DM to another level

"ECM Mobile Advanced is a mobile client developed for Athento. Geolocation of documents, publication using Twitter, QRmcodes and search of documents by voice are some of its features"

Aware of the growing importance of mobility within content management, our technicians are working on a new client for Smartphones. Besides ECM Mobile (native app for Android) and ECM Mobile WebApp (Web-based client), our engineers have developed ECM Mobile Advanced, a mobile client that goes two steps beyond the current capabilities in terms of ECM applications for mobile devices.

We describe some of its features.

• Capture documents via your Smartphone camera: Fast and simple. You take a picture with your phone and upload to the repository. Ideal for mobile workforce and sales representatives who have to move from place to place and need a quick way to upload documents to the DMS. 

• Geolocate your documents: Using the internal GPS on your Smartphone, ECM Mobile Advanced is capable of adding the exact coordinates to documents of where it had been created. The next time you need to find a document you will do so with a map from Google maps, or clicking in the tab "Nearby Docs" which will show you based on your location, documents that were created within an indicated radius.

• Share documents: Want to share a document with a colleague? Send a link to the document via Twitter! Do not have Twitter account? Send it to your colleague via e-mail. Want more? Mobile ECM  Advanced can transform the location of a document into a QR code that you just have to send to whoever you want and its receptor may, via their mobile scanner, converted to a URL from which to view that document.

• Find your documents using your voice: If you are someone who doesn't like clicking from folder to folder, use the microphone on your phone and find the document saying its name.

As you see, an app completely built to quickly and easily provide Smartphone users who need to carry access to your repository in your pocket and everywhere. Our ECM Mobile Advanced will soon be available in the Android Market.
Compatible with Nuxeo 5.3.2 and above. Also compatible with Alfresco, Sharepoint, Documentum or FileNet using the CMIS standard.

Best wishes for 2012

May 2012 be a great year, one in which we all reach our professional goals x 10.
And the sovereign debt crisis stops.
And world hunger disappears.
And we stop polluting the environment.
And peace is spread all over the world.

Because if we never dream it, we will never reach it.

A step-by-step ROI on my digitizing project

"Quantifying benefits and real cost of a project is a basic step when deciding to invest money in a digitizing project. We show you how to do it step-by-step"



Throughout 3 different post we will be showing, step-by-step by an example how to calculate the Return On Investment of your digitizing project.

To explain the calculations you must be do we will be suggesting some information, although it is for demonstration proposals its try to adjust realistically.

Size of the company: 50 people
Documents handled per day: 100 documents
Number of filing cabinets: 3
Filing cabinets size: Width 41cm, Length 50cm, Height 104cm
Workers needed to manage this number of documents: 2
Workers who need to find documents for doing their daily tasks: 10
(All the workers in the example earn the current Statutory Minimum Wage in Spain of 641,10 euros)

Step 1: Calculating Cost of the Current System
Determine the real cost of maintaining your paper-based documental system, in order to this, take into consideration cost as followings:

COST OF LABOR
MONTHLY BASE SALARY	641,10 €
PRO-RATA 2 ANNUAL BONUS	106,85 €
COMMON CONTINGENCIES BASE (CCB)	747,95 €
SOCIAL SECURITY COST (32% of CCB)	239,34 €
TOTAL MONTHLY COST OF AN EMPLOYEE	987,29 €
PRICE PER HOUR OF WORK	4,11 €
PRICE PER MINUTE OF WORK	0,07 €
NUMBER OF DAILY MANAGED DOCUMENTS	100
TIEMPO AVERAGE TIME TO MANAGE A DOCUMENT (MINUTES)*	6
LABOR COST TO MANAGE A DOCUMENT	0,41 €
DAILY COST TO MANAGE DOCUMENTS	41,14 €
ANNUAL COST TO MANAGE DOUMENTS (220 Days Worked / Year)	9.050,20 €

*The employee of the example is earning the current Statutory Minimum Wage (SMLV)
*The social security cost in Spain by the current legislation range between 32% and 35%
* According to a study of PriceWaterhouse Coopers (Estimated time for one person filing a document in a well organized documents system )

COST OF STORAGE
SQUARE METERS OCCUPIED FOR A FILING CABINET	0,3075
NUMBER OF FILING CABINETS	3
AVERAGE HIRING PRICE PER SQUARE METER IN AN OFFICE (MONTHLY)*	29,00 €
MONTHLY COST OF STORAGE	26,75 €
ANNUAL COST OF STORAGE	321,03€

* In the calculation of the square meters needed the space required to open the drawers is taking into account
*  In Madrid in 2010 according to Cushman & Wakefield Property Consultants

COST OF SEARCHING DOCUMENTS
NUMBER OF PEOPLE SEARCHING DOCUMENTS PER DAY	5
NUMBER OF DOCUMENTS IN AVERAGE SEARCHED PER DAY	10
TIME IN FINDING A DOCUMENT (MIN)	6
TOTAL TIME SPENT IN FINDING DOCUMENTS PER DAY (MIN)	300
AVERAGE OF LOST DOCUMENTS PER MONTH	6
TIME IN FINDING A LOS DOCUMENT (MIN)	10
MONTHLY TIME SPENT IN FINDING LOST DOCUMENTS	60
COST PER MINUTE WORKED	0,07 €
DAILY COST TO SEARCH DOUMENTS	21,00 €
ANNUAL COST TO SEARH DOCUMENTS (220 DAYS WORKED PER YEAR)	4.620,00 €
MONTHLY COST IN FINDING LOST DOCUMENTS	4,20 €
ANNUAL COST IN FINDING LOST DOCUMENTS	924,00 €
TOTAL COST OF SEARCHING DOCUMENTS	5.544,00€

To simplify cost calculations we avoid the cost, in most of cases, of creating again or recovering a lost document (for example, to contact a supplier to know if he can send a copy of an invoice, to write again a lost report, etc). However, it would be interesting to do a more complete approximation about what the lost of documents can cause.

At least including these cost, we can nearly estimate how much it cost to our company continue working with a paper-based documental system.

TOTAL COST OF MAINTAINING THE CURRENT SYSTEM
ANNUAL COST OF MANAGING DOCUMENTS (220 DAYS WORKED PER YEAR)	9.050,20 €
ANNUAL COST OF STORAGE	321,03 €
TOTAL COST OF SEARCHING DOCUMENTS	5.544,00 €
ANNUAL TOTAL COST OF THE CURRENT PAPER-BASED SYTEM	14.915,23€

“Managing paper documents in this company has an estimated cost of 14,915.23 euros per year”

As you notice, it's not an insignificant amount that your company has to pay year after year. Don't miss our next post where we'll estimate the benefits of the new system.

Athento helps you manage critical information in your emails

“In the following post we'll tell you the most important things about managing critical information in your emails and how Athento can help you.”


Every day it's most frecuent that companies begin to worry about managing information in their emails. The AIIM's report, 'State of the ECM Industry 2010', says that managing emails (like records) is one of the top priorities for ECM nowadays, along with the implementation of a Records Management System and its integration with multiple repositories. The same report states that out of 65,000 companies interviewed, 56% show serious doubts about the capability of their companies to store and retrieve the information contained in emails.

Emails are a special type of content, they have records' treatment because once they are sent and/or received they shouldn't be modified. On the other hand, as emails are increasingly being used by employees of companies in their daily work, the information contained in them begins to be critical in many cases. According to Radicati Group, the average corporate user sends and receives about 110 daily emails. Without question, with these data, it's not weird that different countries begin thinking in emails such as probatory documents. The regulations in this respect, at least in Spain, are not very advanced and there isn't a description of the requirements applicable to an email, but they are now admitted at trial.

Emails are also admissible in trials in the US.


How does Athento IDM help you manage the information in your emails?
Athento IDM and in general all Athento family products include a functionality named 'PopMail Input'. This is really a component of Athento that helps us manage emails in two ways:

Uploading to the document manager by sending attachments to an email account. The platform receives the attached document and stores it doing its information indexing.

Documenting our emails: Input PopMail can convert a received email in a PDF document, including all information contained in it (sender, time, date, subject, body, etc..), identify a unique code and storing it in the manager not allowing further modifications.


Let's see two examples!

Case of use: Managing pharmacological alerts in a Hospital Pharmacy. The Pharmacy of the hospitals typically receive alerts from Spain's Agency for Medicines and Health Products where information is reported about defects or potential health risks that may be caused by medications. The problem with this type of documents is that they usually come in several ways to the pharmacy staff and as a result, the information is duplicated. With PopMail Input it's possible centralizing the receipt of alerts in a single account and evaluating which alerts are into the system already, so we don't end up re-creating them again.


Example of use in processes of incidents and negotiations with customers: Imagine that someone in the sales department of your company reaches an agreement on price and terms with certain customers via email. For some reason, the commercial who got the agreement with the customer leaves the company and the customer is assigned to a new account manager. This new sales person does not have access to all the emails from the last guy, or simply among all too many emails it's really hard to find the email that closed the sale and service conditions. Fortunately, the previous sales person was a smart guy who sent the e-mail to the customer with a copy to an email account that allows PopMail. The new sales rep. will only have to look in the repository, where there's already a folder with the name of the client, all commercial offers that are made available to him/her and the client's responses. The recovery of a document in a repository is almost immediate.

We hope we have explained a little bit more about this functionality of Athento. However, if you have any questions, please, feel free to contact us.