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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.

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Email Compliance

ECM Opinion, , ,

Your email footer is ridiculous and is taking up valuable space on my screen. Your company legal department requires that its appended to every email. The IT department is automating the footer so you can’t do anything about it. I can delete it when I forward it to someone, then when they forward it and no one downstream knows about the disclaimer. How do you track all this, fact is you can’t. The company is trying to limit liability and comply with federal and international laws. Is this ever really enforced? Everyone does the email ‘disclaimer’, there are even websites dedicated to helping you understand why (?) < Email Disclaimer dot com >

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Enterprise Content Management | Hall.com

Cloud Solutions, Social Business, , ,

Yesterday I stumbled upon a new collaboration tool called HALL. It started because I was followed on twitter by @bretthellman Founder and CEO of the company.  As usual I checked out his profile, made sure it wasn’t some russian spam bot and then clicked the link in his profile.  It took me only a few seconds to join the NFL and Startup Hall’s.  Basically these are groups or subject matters that you can join and engage in collaborative real time chats, document authoring, polls and rank topics of interest in the group.

So next I did what any curious social business aficionado would do, I created a Hall.  At first I was all alone in the Hall, but then I started trolling for tweeps on twitter.  Pretty soon I had a few friends including the collaboration jockeys over at Hall HQ.  I created a poll asking what is the hottest new ECM company and I started to get some feedback.  The most interesting thing about the tool is the ability to create and collaborate using the chat stream, real time document authoring like GoogleDocs. Although not as feature rich as Google it has a very clean interface and is more like a notepad than a word processing APP.  Adding new Polls, Ranking or Notepads is a snap and you can really see how the site can continue to evolve into a very usable collaboration tool.  The site is sleek and easy to navigate, I have found no glitches so far.  During the discussions on the chat stream it was apparent that the developers were actively engaged in soliciting feedback from the group about what could be added to improve an already capable site.  It is amazing actually to think how much ‘in stream’ intelligence you could gather using Hall.

At the prompting of Sanjay Kotagiri I created a notepad and invited peers in the #ECM community to add their thoughts about a File Storage / Sharing APP to the site.  You can check out what we have come up with so far and join the Hall too add your two cents by following this link.  This is a company and a product to watch, you can check out a TechCrunch article by following this link.


Enterprise Content Management | Hall.com.

Check out http://cloudpwr.com

IGLOO® – A new twist on social business

Cloud Solutions, Social Business

An igloo is a shelter made of ice.  The ice acted as an insulator and provided warmth due to the air pockets trapped in the snow.  When I think of igloo I normally think of the popular brand of coolers that accompany anyone going on an outdoor excursion or camping trip.

Corporate Intranet

Well now I can add IGLOO to the growing list of cloud based SaaS solutions that are popping up to help drive collaboration and a social infrastructure for business.  In 2005 the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) launched an initiative to create International Governance Leaders and Organizations Online or IGLOO.  Several noted Canadian technology innovators were involved in the initiative including Tom Jenkins of OpenText (OTEX) and Jim Basillie from Research in Motion (RIMM).  More info…

Beginning in 2008 IGLOO began its journey towards a commercially available software platform in accordance with CIGI’s agreement with the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation.  More info….

More recently IGLOO improved its position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as an emerging Niche player of the Social Software in the Workplace and Externally Facing Social Software reports.   More info…

Headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario the company has seen a 388% year over year growth in 2011 focusing on B2B in the US and EMEA.  The ideal target customer is the mid-market with organizations <2,500 employees.  The product is described as an IT friendly business social software that is different from public social networking and file sharing sites.  Those public sites are designed mainly for fun, they are free and adopted for personal use.  The question is who owns the content, you or the free service provider?

In contrast IGLOO is for work, it is secure (LDAP, AD, Kerberos) and gives you the ability to brand and design websites, team collaboration spaces, blogs, forums, wikis, document spaces and photo galleries.   You build team sites and web pages using a drag and drop widget bar.  Once your widgets are placed each one has a tabbed configuration settings page that makes it simple.  Now managers and power users can create sites that are useful and powerful.

Drag & Drop widget stack

On top of the entire platform is a killer social layer that supports trending, messaging, commenting and sharing.  This gives each user and workgroup the ability to interact with content in a social and meaningful way.  Add a universal search function and user, content and role based security and you have a very capable cloud based platform fully accessible from your desktop browser.

Everything inside IGLOO is predicated on a version control paradigm so whenever you add content, update a page, write a blog, or comment each action is recorded as a new version so there is never any worry that you will overwrite or delete important files or data.  In addition there is a desktop integration feature that gives you the ability to drag and drop documents and related content directly to a secure folder on your desktop.

IGLOO uses an agile development methodology that allows 50% of all new features to be driven by the customers and users in very short cycles.  The company boasts 3,000 customer communities worldwide and has widgets for connecting Salesforce.com and SharePoint.

It’s important to note that IGLOO is running in a SaaS 70 Type II compliant data center so you know your content is safe and secure.  I think Daniel Kube, IGLOO Sales and Business Development VP summed it up well by saying “You can never make software to easy to use”.

Check out http://cloudpwr.com

Huddle and Win

Cloud Solutions, ECM Opinion, ,

Over the last week I have been using a cloud based service called Huddle.

I had a chance to sit down and chat with Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and all around great chap.  His background implementing legacy ECM software solutions in the Insurance and Finance verticals gave him great experience and inspiration to embark on building a whole new way of sharing and managing documents and content.

The company is 4 years old and based in the United Kingdom.  Over 90,000 businesses are actively using Huddle to share large files, get document approvals faster, and keep projects on track by giving users the ability to access files from mobile devices securely using an intuitive and agile interface. The company describes their tool as the number one SharePoint alternative in the cloud.

Great for project managers, wikis, team discussion threads and task based document approval processes.  It can greatly reduce email traffic and confusion over what is the current version of a document.  With built-in audit, workflow and version controls teams can always be sure of what they are working on and what changes colleagues have made or suggested.

When you first register for Huddle you are required to accept the terms of use and license agreement.  Now most of us do not actually read these documents, we click accept and start happily using these types of services.  I did take a few minutes to read through the documents and found several areas of interest.

  • Huddle accounts are given on an individual user basis, you can have only one login
  • You must indemnify Huddle for the content use & rights you upload
  • You may not provide third party access to the service
  • There is an API that can be used to integrate Huddle with other platforms or services
  • If you do embed or integrate a commercial service using the API you must include a “Powered by Huddle” logo
  • Jurisdiction for legal authority is England / Wales

After subscribing to the service Huddle does a good job of communication and follows up with automated email notifications and personal calls to make sure you get familiar with the service.  No kidding, they actually call you and say hello.  It was actually a very nice experience and it showed a significant focus on customer service.  I believe this is smart and that it builds in brand loyalty and a sense of belonging to the Huddle community.

Huddle uses a familiar Dashboard approach when you login to the site.  The interface is laid out with dockable widgets giving each user the ability to show or hide details about items in their Workspaces, Tasks, Notifications and your Calendar.  It also gives a quick chronological view of activity in a ‘What’s New’ list.  By quickly clicking active Workspaces you are taken to a tabbed interface so you can start Huddling.

The tab interface will be easily navigated by new users.  The tabs also provide easily clickable green + signs that are nested above the main tab.  These allow for quick access for adding new files, inviting people to workspaces, scheduling meetings and create tasks or whiteboards.

Document sharing is all about people and the need to work collaboratively with each other.  Whether its colleagues or business partners everyone needs to share content for review, comment, edit and to complete the document authoring or content creation process.  So it is not surprising that no matter where you are in the Huddle interface you get a very handy ‘People’ tab to the left of the user interface.

Accessing and viewing ‘Files’ in Huddle is very straightforward.  The ‘Files’ tab presents the user with a list of documents that can be viewed in detail or as thumbnails.  Thumbnails do show a snapshot of PDF and TIFF files as an image icon but Office document thumbnails show only as a logo placeholder.  After uploading scanned TIFF files I was unable to launch the viewer.  So I contacted Huddle support and they quickly determined that an update to the service was needed to resolve the issue.  This is a prime example of how newer agile focused software development tools and groups can win over the legacy waterfall methods used by most software giants.

Standard metadata and version control fields provide for elementary control and identification of documents within a workspace.  In addition comment fields allow for ongoing communication threads for each participant in a workspace.  Custom metadata fields are not supported at this time; this would be a great enhancement for organizations wanting to add things like customer, patient or account number.  New files or entire folders can be uploaded very quickly; the performance for uploading files is very fast.  In addition a drag and drop interface allows for uploading of 50 files simultaneously in one easy step.

When I accessed the ‘Whiteboards’ tab I took the name of the tab literally and was expecting to be able to jot down notes and draw network diagrams to show Workspace users graphical illustrations of a particular topic or project.  The tab name is more aptly described as a simple wiki for collaboration on text between Workspace users.  The tab is useful and additional features should make this an even more exciting area for collaboration in the future.  There is also a discussions tab that provides a bulletin board-style tool for threaded discussions.

The ‘Tasks’ tab is where Huddle really starts to give you a glimpse of what it could become.  The concept of tasks is based on a simple approach to collaboration for approving documents.  The interface is laid out quite nicely in a list that allows for rolling up task items or creating new ones.  If Huddle were to add some linear workflow capabilities for conditional routing based on status flags or boolean logic it would be a big leap forward.

In order to keep your colleagues and team members on the same page just access the ‘Meetings’ tab. This gives users the ability to schedule online meetings in a Workspace or by invitation only for team members you specify.

Meeting setup is very simple and will be familiar to anyone who has used other web conferencing services.  Huddle meetings can include teleconferencing features in a ‘pay as you go’ model.  Do not confuse Huddle with a full featured Web Conferencing service; you will still need to use your preferred service for desktop sharing features.

I found that Huddle was easy to use and the company really cared about its customers and prospects.  Not surprising for an up and coming cloud based service provider but uncommon for a traditional software company.  If you are looking for document collaboration that is more than just a file sharing service Huddle is a great option, I encourage you to check them out.

Check out http://cloudpwr.com