When Washington State voters passed Initiative 502, legalizing Cannabis, on November 6, 2012 the Liquor Control Board was put in charge of developing rules, regulations and policies to support the implementation of this ground breaking law. This presented a unique challenge, as there is no regulatory, operational or practical precedence for the agency to follow for managing the licensing and enforcement for the production, processing and distribution of Cannabis. To get expert assistance the agency published RFP K430 to select a consultant(s) to assist them with the process of implementing I-502.

Challenge

The RFP timeline from publication to closing was only 30 business days. Nearly one hundred vendors submitted responses, and 52 of those were accepted as qualified applicants. A team of nine evaluators from agencies across the state was formed to review and score each bid. The large number of applicants and geographical separation of reviewers made this a more challenging situation than the typical RFP review process.

The evaluation team was given ten business days to complete scoring of the bids. If standard processes for evaluating and scoring bids had been used it would have required significantly more time, duplication of documents and hundreds of emails.  Instead LCB Procurement and IT decided to take a “lean” approach to evaluating the responses. Continue

Use Case:

There are many scenarios where converting an image file such as a JPG, TIFF or PDF to a different format such as DOC, XML or Searchable PDF would be extremely useful.  Below are three specific examples:

1. Expense Receipts:  XML is a useful standard to exchange information between two systems using just a network connection.  Most modern systems can ingest XML which enables easy integration possibilities without costly professional services fees.  In our use case example we capture all the details from an expense receipt including Establishment, Date, Total and all the line-item detail with easy point-and-click operation because this was the reimbursement policy of our organization.
2. Legal:  Imagine a lawyer receives a new case.  Their desire is to gather as much information as possible to best represent their client.  Through the discovery process they acquire many image-only PDF files and need to be able to find information within these image files based on keyword searches.  For this reason they would want to convert these image-only PDF files into fully Searchable PDF’s.
3. Marketing:  You are in the marketing department and you often receive image-only files that you would like to edit but you are limited to applying stick-notes in Acrobat which is not an effective process.  In this use case you can easily import these image-only files and have them converted in fully editable .DOC files in no time.

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Alfresco has been hosting a series of regional events across the country. Today the Content Management Roundtable was held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. The topic was focused on positioning Alfresco One.

In attendance were records and content management professionals from the Government, Legal, IT Services, Environmental Science, Engineering and several software companies including Tibco and IBM. Alfresco seems to be raising the bar in terms of visibility and attracting the attention of industry veterans and competitors alike.

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As consumers, we have totally mastered search. You Google “Where should I eat in Los Altos” and you are directed to a results page that lists the top spots based on community reviews from Yelp and Urban Spoon. Likewise, you can get similar results on Wikipedia, digging into every topic imaginable

Let’s compare that to a legacy ECM system or SharePoint.

Full text search is the key to find ability because it works the way users expect. As consumer I want to type in what I am looking for like “places to eat”, or what we remember “when was Elvis born?” and find the proper results. This process is called semantic search, and works by creating relevance based on ranking queries based on contextual meaning. Continue

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, has been famously quoted on his opinion of cloud computing in terms of saturation-point, as well as technology innovation, for a viable business model.

“This is the heyday of the Cloud. This is the Renaissance. We are in the Great Time. ”

…and he continues…

 “So we’re still at the very, very beginning.

We are in the first innings of Cloud Computing.

This is still the Renaissance. ”

While this is just one man’s opinion I personally happen to think he is absolutely correct.  We truly are in the first innings and, in particularly, as it relates to Capture and ECM moving to the cloud.  Future innings have yet to be played.  In this baseball analogy the convergence of old-school “traditional – behind the firewall” technology and new “innovative – cloud collaboration/mobile” technology are on a crash course of epic proportions. Continue