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BidTree®

Cloud Solutions, , ,

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 reading →

File Conversion for Box secure cloud storage and collaboration

Cloud Solutions,

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.

  Continue reading →

Box Partners

ECM Opinion, ,

Yeah he is nine and he gets it, he is ready for business at the pace of tomorrow. For him and his buddies the use of technology is about playing games. They will be following in the footsteps of today’s millennial gen, they use modern tech not just as a tool, it’s a lifestyle that mixes work and play. They are used to having the ability to communicate instantaneously, giving and getting answers, having fun and completing tasks in the palm of their hand. For them using apps and cloud software is second nature.

This week is BoxWorks 2012 in San Francisco and we are looking forward to hearing about product updates, customer success stories and attending thought provoking keynote presentations. Box provides a dynamic way of managing content and a new communication model for businesses that want to take advantage of mobility. They have done it by taking a simple approach to a problem that many didn’t know existed.

As an example, every day people waste valuable time sifting through massive email inboxes trying to find business documents. Box turned this around, focused on the document instead of the message and created a collaboration tool that provides quick access for managing and sharing of information from any device. Box isn’t the only company doing this but they are a recognized leader and their foot is squarely on the gas pedal. Continue reading →

Content without search is like a day without sunshine

Cloud Solutions, ECM Opinion, , ,

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 reading →

Cloud Wars

Cloud Solutions, ECM Opinion, Social Business, ,

I began researching what we now call Cloud Content Management and Social Business in the fall of 2008. I had spent nearly a decade working with a very dedicated group of professionals to build a nationally recognized systems integration company in the Northwest. Over the years the company worked with many familiar content management products including Optika, Kofax, OTG, Cardiff, Stellent, OnBase, OIT and many others. Like many regional VAR’s and Systems Integrators we worked in familiar verticals like government, transportation, financial services and healthcare to build out accounts payable, claims processing, human resources, electronic health records and many other document centric and workflow oriented business processes. Continue reading →