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The Snowbound Imaging Technology Blog

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Why This Job is So Much Fun

My wife teaches special needs pre-schoolers and finds she can make a huge difference in their lives from what they learn from her. I can’t say what I do has quite the same impact, but the combination of creating exciting technology and making a difference in the way the world operates gives me a sense of pride. Our customers truly value what we provide. When I compare my job to many others, I consider myself lucky.

The best indicator that a company provides value to its market is through its business success. If customers are willing to pay for what you create, it is a true endorsement for what you do. Over Snowbound’s 12+ years, we have provided value to over 1000 customers. And in most cases, it’s not pencil or paperclip value but technology that’s critical to the customer’s success. Without our product, they could have not have achieved what they needed.

And unlike some of my former companies where the technology is buried under the hood and isn’t explainable to your neighbor, the results we provide are viewable and appreciable. We literally are responsible for showing you the photograph, the mortgage papers, the insurance form or the medical record.

I welcome all our readers to submit their most interesting uses of our technology to me. We would love to highlight your innovation!

Some real world examples of how our technology is used:

• Capture of TV images to a computer image format
• Viewing massive airplane blueprints created before CAD
• An online editor for your cell phone photos
• Document conversion for cell phone viewing
• Mortgage application review – speeds the process by 2x over paper handling
• Insurance claims processing – we allow the claims adjuster to review your entire claim with you, without carrying tons of paper around
• Massive conversion of check images to more useful image types
• Presentation of your online photos as thumbnails for quick download and selection
• Viewing and processing freight bills of lading,
• County government letting you see your property titles documents online
• Fast retrieval of your archived medical record for your physician to review

What To Do with Those Legacy Documents and Images?

There are whole industries rising today dedicated to the premise that when you upgrade your ECM system, you must also convert all your corporate documents, if stored in legacy formats, to a new, more modern format. These recommendations are made partially because the old format may not be readable or can’t be manipulated by your new ECM system and partially because you are told the new document formats are better.

In principle, that makes sense. All of us worry about obsolescence. Additionally many of the legacy formats were modified versions of TIFF or IBM’s ImagePlus (MO:DCA and AFP) format that could not be opened by standard software. So when your new vendor recommends you convert to the current standards of unmodified TIFF and PDF, it’s because they are pretty much universally accepted and trusted. If you had to take bets on what would survive the next 50 to 100 years, other than .txt files, TIFF and PDF would head the list.

So what’s the catch? None, if your document repository is small. But if you have terabytes of stored data, like many companies do today, it’s not a simple matter. For those situations, the process is most likely expensive, time consuming and disruptive to your business processes.  And for many companies, the reason those documents are in the repository is because they’re not needed often or at all. So how much sense does it make to spend large sums of money to analyze, convert, verify and store data that may never be needed again.

Is there another way? Sure. Get a system that can read your archived data directly. The nice thing about software systems is that they don’t wear out. The hardware may break but the software will continue to run as before. So, if the system can read your legacy data now, it will do so forever (or at least until that vendor discontinues support and you can’t get hardware with that OS any longer). You gain several advantages:

a) You save on conversion costs

b) You save the time and effort – this translates to big savings on top of the conversion cost savings. Some companies that migrate large amounts of data have 10 year planning horizons.

c) You can utilize your old system, even after migration, to access that data. There are many times that functions from the old systems aren’t carried over to the new. Significant economies could be achieved through continued use of the old system if some members of your staff don’t require the new system’s features.

d) Migration to the new system is far easier and quicker if you don’t have to wait on data conversion

e) You’re not as dependent on the new vendor. Worst case, you can fall back to the old system because the data is still accessible and usable.

Snowbound is in the enviable position of providing products to both sides of the fence here. We read the old stuff or we can convert it to the new. Take your pick.

Why Microsoft Sharepoint is turning the ECM industry on its ear

Given Microsoft claims well over 80 million Sharepoint users, no one in the business computing world is unaware of Sharepoint and how popular it’s become.

Microsoft has cleverly used its virtual monopoly power, its ability to give things away for free (at least to start), and leverage of its familiar user interface to leapfrog into a powerful position in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space. Though the word Enterprise may be an exaggeration for most of the users, who are thought to be storing departmental documents, it is easy to see and project scaling upwards.

A recurring theme from Microsoft is to capitalize on its strengths and position. They can afford to give things away, they can afford to take the long view (to when they can make money on it), and for almost any product they create, they can get instant mindshare by bundling it with Windows.

Clearly Sharepoint is a hit. Cheap entry, familiar interface and easy installation lead to instant utility. Some of our customers already have thousands of Sharepoint installations that are spreading virally – with very little control by central IT.

What should you do? Well, if you’re not in the mood to budget for large steps into ECM, this is any easy way to get started. You simply need a Server 2003 or higher platform and MS Office clients. Basic Sharepoint including database is a no charge download for that audience. So it’s free, it’s effective and it’s easy to use. It may not be compliance ready but for many departmental scenarios, that’s irrelevant. If you need to scale, there’s a higher-end Sharepoint available now and more features will be coming.

And because the established vendors can’t ignore this phenomenon, they offer integration to their higher-end enterprise oriented systems, and that will also get better with time. Meanwhile Microsoft is offering an enterprise growth path as well …and competition is good for you.

So why am I writing this blog? Well it’s exciting to see such change and such rapid acceptance of a new product, but it’s also an opportunity. No ECM vendor does it all. If you need Sharepoint to access more than MS Office documents , you can use our Virtual Viewer to scale up to a greater range of documents including MS Office, PDFs, TIFFs, JPEGs and legacy IBM Plus documents. Other needs that we satisfy include universal tools for annotation and page manipulation functions or for dealing with very large or confidential, repository documents that shouldn’t be transmitted to the client. Specialized viewers like ours and those from other companies fit that niche. And because we can be more nimble than a Fortune 2000, we can be responsive to your special needs.

Comments or suggestions? Pres2008@snowbound.com

How Do You Know Whether the Product You’re Buying Will Work for You?

Over my entire career, as a technical, non-engineer selling to engineers, I’ve always been in a quandary on how to evaluate the products my company has either bought or sold. Too often how a product suits a specific application is at least a partial mystery until you actually implement it. Industry-wide, 50% of all new projects fail; either because the product didn’t work, didn’t suit the application or the engineers didn’t implement it adequately.

Those kinds of statistics make most people cautious when embarking on a new project. But you can’t remain in your cave, you have to act to get things done. Technology does improve and there are many products out there that will help your company and you in your job. If you’re buying a product new to you, what should you do?

Well, nothing beats industry acceptance. I become a believer when users tell me a product is good. You, as a buyer, can benefit from the same approach. With so many products out there, and so many differing situations, it’s still not an easy or certain process but there are ways.

What do I recommend?

• Check industry acceptance by reading white papers, talking to references and product reviews by analysts and reviewers.
• Take your own test drive – whether an evaluation or simply reading through the documentation. Are the product features, documentation and support truly there and not just on a page on the website?
• In today’s world, where websites and emails can be created by anyone, you really need to make sure there’s an entire company behind the website. Does the customer list look real, do other companies know of this company, are they an approved vendor to your company, is the copyright on the website up to date, do they stand behind their technology, and do they tell you who the executives are?
• When you have a question, does someone answer your phone call, do you get a quick reply to your email, and does it feel like it isn’t the first time they’ve dealt with a customer? When you have a problem, do you get a quick, correct answer or at least a thoughtful question back?

Every company and product has good and bad things to relate – do your homework. Never make a decision on the basis of one data point.

In Snowbound’s case, we have twelve years of experience solving problems for demanding developers with challenging requirements. When we can point to so many that have successfully continued to use our product for all these years, we know we’re doing something right.