Turn on the Power with Agile ECM

CMS Wire had some great things to say about Laserfiche and Agile ECM in their blog post today. One of only four ECM vendors that actually deliver on their claims. Here is an excerpt of their post:

Laserfiche and Agile ECM

Lasefiche (news, site) has also developed an Agile ECM, which it demonstrated at last month’s Gartner Business Process Management Summit. It enables organizations to create custom workflows that offer localized flexibility in streamlining business processes while enhancing centralized control over content standards. These workflows automatically perform specific tasks based on activity occurring in Laserfiche as well as other applications such as GIS, ERP, CRM and others. However, with SharePoint 2010 on the way, interoperability with it should help Laserfiche make in-roads in a market that is dominated by IBM’s FileNet.

Laserfiche Combines with SharePoint for Agile ECM

The integration with SharePoint extends Laserfiche’s Agile abilities by offering support to developers who need to control content, extend collaboration and tailor specialized business processes to departmental needs. Capabilities include:

• Access to content from SharePoint pages
• Records center for storing SharePoint information in Laserfiche repository
• Search of content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint repositories
• Custom workflow activities, including SharePoint-specific activities

But it is the LaserFiche Workflow where features expected of an Agile ECM are really apparent. It enables organizations to automate standard, collaborative business processes, such as approvals or routing based on business conditions. Most importantly, it transforms static Laserfiche repositories into dynamic repositories that ensure business processes are performed consistently and efficiently.

Well said CMS Wire, and thanks for the positive plug! Contact Unity Business Systems today and we will show you how to transform your organization with Agile ECM. 

Posted by Paul Neal.

Ouch! Sticks and stones can break your bones but redacted words will never hurt you! Maybe not…This past Thursday, the former Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich’s attorneys issued a subpoena to President Obama requiring him to testify in the former Governor’s “Senate Seat for Sale” trial. The court motion was filed with certain texts redacted, or “blacked out”, but because of the manner in which the redaction was done, the “veil” was easily lifted leaving the motion’s complete text open and exposed for the world to read and dissect.

Although the privacy breach was discovered shortly after the motion was posted on the court’s website, the full subpoena text is now in the public domain – forever. Not only has this gaffe been a bonanza for news outlets and Tweeters, but it has also potentially created liability issues for the staff and organization that released such an unsecure document. Is ignorance a valid excuse? Just how does an organization ensure that its employees are in compliance with privacy laws?

The answer is to utilize an enterprise content management system like Laserfiche with extensive, built-in security controls which prevent this type of information voyeurism. Laserfiche allows authorized users to redact, either in black or white, portions of documents that are secure, or at a minimum not for public consumption. Not only is document-level access controlled by user roles and permissions, but the ability to redact, or to see through redactions, can even be limited to the select few with “need to see or know” clearance. In Laserfiche, documents can be exported to .pdf format for general distribution, but unlike the published Blagojevich motion, the redacted text does not even exist in the exported document – so with no text, no one has the ability to break the code and “see behind the curtain.” Today, with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests surging and the more open and “sharing” Web 2.0 culture, privacy is becoming much harder and much more costly to maintain – but the penalties of not doing so are real. Contact UBS today to discuss how a Laserfiche enterprise content management system can give you the centralized control over document security you need, while allowing local flexibility for more efficient and lower-cost business operations.

Posted by Paul Neal.

I am excited to share that Unity Business Systems has been accepted into Microsoft’s SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) program. This means that we can now provide you SharePoint consulting and implementation services as part of your current SharePoint software assurance plan. You can now have the same quality of ECM services we provide for Laserfiche for your SharePoint system. Laserfiche plus SharePoint equals Agile ECM. Please contact me today at Carl.Long@UnitySystems.biz to learn more about our services and what Agile ECM can do for your organization.

Posted by Carl Long.

Image via Wikipedia

Attorneys of the world – rejoice! Today has to be a field day for lawyers the globe over…Twitter announced yesterday that it was releasing its entire database of “tweets” – that’s every single tweet ever, numbering in the billions, to the Library of Congress for public archival. That’s right – anything you EVER tweeted, whether you meant it or not, whether it was good or not, whether you meant it for public digestion or not, will now be an official record in the public domain. Big “Twitter” brother is watching…

What are the implications of this move? I’m not sure we completely understand them quite yet as the “Law of Unintended Consequences” tends to sneak up and surprise us whenever such sweeping and unexpected changes occur. “I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive” says Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress. I can think of a few possible outcomes:

1. We now have incredible opportunity to study trends in concepts, ideas and behaviors, and the ability to capitalize on that historical record, much like Google does with search terms. The big differences here, though, are these: with Google, the data is anonymous, and the search terms are limited. With this Twitter release to the Library, not only is the data tied to a specific person, but 140 characters of information represent a much deeper picture of one’s thoughts and ideas than a 2 or 3 word search term ever could.
2. There now exist tremendous legal liabilities for tweeters and possibly for their organizations – such as the impact of declassifying operational memos might have. Questions like: “does Tweeting while on the job represent the official position of the employer?” become paramount. For example, could certain historical employee “tweets” be correlated with their company’s stock movement and a case for insider trading be established? How would this impact not only the employee and his company, but also everyone who was a “follower” of this employee’s tweets and happened to benefit from the “public” information?

In the past, those responsible for creating content typically knew what would become an organizational record. And the lifecycle of a record was as follows:

Prior to Web 2.0, this process was much easier to manage as the “creation of content” stage was cleared defined and controlled in most organizations. Now, however, with the continual, ongoing (and many times mobile…) conversation that is Twitter, Facebook, etc., Records Managers and Information Governance Advocates are in a tailspin. Their worlds have been completely upended. Everyone in your organization who uses any social platform (or has in the past) has become an unregulated, potentially harmful, record creator. Welcome to the Brave New World!

The new Web 2.0 record lifecycle reality becomes:

Where everyone is now creating organizational (and public) content, it is delivered immediately, preserved indefinitely, and NEVER destroyed. The national motto during World War II, “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” brought to the forefront of ones consciousness the importance of information discretion, and leaking the wrong kind of information was detrimental to the war effort. Could inadvertently “tweeting” the “wrong” kind of information, like a certain customer relationship issue that is not ready for “prime-time,” cause damage to the enterprise? The answer is undoubtedly yes. The question looms, knowing the “new information reality” that we all face, is just how do you address the challenge without stifling the upside opportunities that openness can foster? I believe the key is to “manage” the process before it begins.

There are three critical steps required to achieve this:

1. Create a behavioral policy that defines the “rules of the road” regarding social media for all organizational members

2. Develop an education plan that teaches, creates awareness of, and reinforces the long-term implications of content creation

3. Implement an enterprise-wide content management system to enforce company policies and disciplines, and monitor not only what is being created internally to your organization, but also what is being said about your company in the Web 2.0 space

With these safeguards in place, the record lifecycle now becomes:

For help solving your challenges presented by today’s new “record reality,” contact Unity Business Systems, who has been empowering enterprises to leverage their organizational data assets for over 15 years.

Posted by Paul Neal.

After sinking his historic putt on the 18th at August National yesterday, Phil Mickelson once again earned my respect. It was not for his amazing talent and focus on the golf course – as I have seen time and again very talented people, and athletes in particular, perform extremely well in their chosen field of endeavor – only to lead pitiful lives dreadfully lacking character off of the field of play. Phil’s loving and passionate embrace of his wife Amy Mickelson was a terrific reminder to me of the power of character and core values that made our nation great. Amy has been struggling with breast cancer for some time, which can bring any family to its knees, but through their struggle I sensed a commitment, a passion and a dedication to each other that is truly heartwarming in an age of almost expected rebellion to the institution. Phil dedicated his victory to her, and watching him play it was almost as if the family struggle actually empowered him to victory. The ability to overcome in the face of life’s challenges is the epitome of success. I think Phil’s behavior and victory was what golf needed yesterday. And it is the kind of thing we all need.

Thanks for being a great example to us all!

Visit us today at www.UnitySystems.biz.

Posted by Paul Neal.

Everyone needs Microsoft Sharepoint, right? It’s all the rage…but just WHAT do you actually do with it? This is the critical first decision you must make to enjoy a successful Sharepoint implementation. Most people have a basic understanding of what it is “supposed” to do, i.e. collaboration, business intelligence, document management, workflow, etc. But where do you start? How can you quickly deploy a solution and realize the value that Sharepoint can bring to your organization? What we typically see is this: an organization has heard the buzz, wants to join the party, and has purchased MOSS with the high hopes of it immediately solving their content management struggles. Then reality strikes. Various Sharepoint sites are thrown up for different business units, document libraries are created where users can store their digital assets, duplication occurs, information sharing is compromised, workflows are created that optimized certain processes, but fail to satisfy most scenarios. Using Sharepoint actually starts to hinder productivity and users begin to wonder why it was implemented to begin with.

A successful implementation begins with the correct mindset of what Sharepoint really is. It is not a solution in itself. I like to think of Sharepoint as a platform on which you can build and integrate solutions to most of your business problems that aren’t already addressed by your Line of Business application (EPR, MRP, Finance, etc). Sharepoint has its obvious strengths, but also has some not-so-obvious weaknesses. For instance, it can greatly enhance a knowledge worker’s productivity by providing a dashboard to manage and execute most of the tasks or projects that they work on throughout the day. It provides an enterprise search tool that allows the worker to easily find the information they need to do their job, no matter where that information is stored. It can also be used to centralize all of the unstructured databases that an organization typically has: spreadsheets, access files, and word document lists. However, there are areas where Sharepoint doesn’t measure up that could cause a deployment to suffer. Document/Records management is one of these areas. Yes, Sharepoint is a fine storage location for the Microsoft Office documents that you create, but what about all the paper records that need to be stored and archived electronically? How do you plan to get them into Sharepoint? When you have scanned a majority of those unstructured documents into Sharepoint your overall system performance can suffer due to the terabyte of files stored and binary objects in the database itself. Then, what is your recourse?

Prior to Sharepoint going mainstream, the document management industry was already mature, with many great products available that do all these things and do them WELL. Sharepoint has all but ignored these major obstacles and still billed itself as a document management system. Don’t get me wrong, the more I know about Sharepoint, the more I love it. It has opened up new doors to organizational efficiency by providing a common space for people to USE the content once its been created. The main point I have today is that when it comes to document management, you don’t have to make the choice between Sharepoint and a traditional ECM system such as Laserfiche (see Agile ECM). The best solutions integrate both, using each system’s strengths along with their shared technologies to create a completely holistic, end-to-end solution. And the add-on benefit is that these integrated solutions drastically reduce deployment time because you no longer have to customize Sharepoint with code to overcome its shortcomings.

Be sure to check back next month, where I will discuss a few concrete examples of where the marriage of Sharepoint and Laserfiche clearly is a synergistic combination with virtually limitless potential.