DocuDude

SharePoint 2010 - Save List as Template is missing

2011-09-25T23:34:00.001+05:30

Saving a list / library as a template is a very useful feature when we need to reuse a list / library. This gives the ability to create any number of lists / libraries based on a template. The ability to include content in the template makes this a very useful feature. As an example we use this feature to maintain all our check lists. (We use a checklist for releasing a new version of our products and this gets updated regularly. So each time when it gets updated we save the latest list as a template. Then for the next version we use this template to create a new check list.)

Recently I came across an unusual bug where the link “save list as template” is not showing under list settings. This happened for one particular list only. After some research I found this blog post by Prasath which gives a simple workaround. All you need to do is go to list / library settings page and change its URL (change the "listedit" to "savetmpl").

Thanks Prasath. That solved my problem .

Naming conventions for SharePoint

2010-11-21T14:48:00.001+05:30

Following a naming convention is definitely an important step in any implementation. When it comes to SharePoint implementations there are several places where we can use a naming convention such as for service accounts, databases, templates etc…

I was trying few methods in SharePoint installations when I found this excellent post, SharePoint 2010 Database Naming Standards in John Powell’s Blog. I think it is a must read for any SharePoint practitioner since the standard explained there can be used by anyone to standardize SharePoint database names.

Read the full post here : SharePoint 2010 Database Naming Standards

Syncing SharePoint Online (BPOS) with SharePoint Workspace 2010 (SPW)

2010-08-22T20:57:00.002+05:30

The ability to work offline has become an essential requirement for today’s content management solutions. Similarly we wanted this feature for SharePoint Online also. [As posted here we use Microsoft Online Services which is also called BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). This post explains how to set SharePoint Online available for offline usage using SharePoint workspace 2010.]
In SharePoint 2007 offline availability was provided by Microsoft Office Groove. As I mentioned in an earlier post Office Groove was renamed as SharePoint Workspace and is available with Office Professional Plus 2010. SPW (SharePoint Workspace) allows users to access documents stored in SharePoint, even when they are disconnected from SharePoint server.
Steps for syncing a SharePoint online document library with SharePoint Workspace
1. Open SPW and click on "New (page tab)" in "Launch bar". Then select "Groove Workspace”

2. Enter a name for the workspace and click options

3. Select 2007 and click create.

4. This will create and open the workspace. In that workspace right click in the content navigation area and select “Add New Tool” and then click “SharePoint Files”

5. This will add a SharePoint Files tool to the workspace. In that SharePoint Files tool click Set up.

6. This will open a dialog box where we need to select the SharePoint library or the list which we need to make available offline.

7. Now minimize SPW and open the SharePoint Online site or sub site which has the relevant library or the list. Then copy the site address from the address bar only up to the site / sub site name discarding the page address.
E.g. : full address -
https://yourdomain.com.microsoftonline.com/projects/default.aspx
Copy only the following -
https://yourdomain.com.microsoftonline.com/projects
8. Now go back to the SPW dialog box and paste the copied address in the address bar and click enter.

9. This will open the SharePoint site in the same dialog box. In that select the relevant library or the list. Then click “select”.

10. Now the workspace is synchronized with the SharePoint library. To test this create a new document in the SharePoint library. Then click the Sync button in the workspace.

11. Click “Synchronize now”. This will create an offline copy in SPW which can be accessed even when the SharePoint site is not available.

8 Image enhancement techniques in document capture

2010-04-06T00:15:00.001+05:30

Two main concerns for any document imaging exercise are the image quality and the file size. Anyone will need to get the best possible image quality while keeping the file size to a minimum for obvious reasons. Thus image enhancement has become an essential step in a well defined capture workflow. The purpose of image enhancement (image cleanup / image processing) is to make the images more readable, and also to remove unwanted noise reducing the storage requirements. This is especially important for forms processing / OCR applications in order to improve character recognition. There are number of image enhancement techniques available today. Described below are 8 such image processing techniques.

1. Deskewing

In a production scanning set up, document pre-processing is the most time consuming step. One objective of this step is to arrange the documents correctly by rotating (incorrectly filed documents) and aligning them together. The De-skew facility in production capture applications helps to reduce this effort by automatically de-skewing misaligned images. The De-skew process can straighten pages which were misaligned during the document feeding process, within a specified range of degrees.

A more advanced feature is available with Kofax VRS called content based rotation. VRS can analyze the content of the image and correct the orientation accordingly.

Here is a nice illustration called “The Effects of Deskewing a Document” in ScanHelp.com

2. Black border cropping & removing

Cropping refers to the removal of the outer parts of an image. In document scanning, black border cropping is one technique that is used to remove the unnecessary black colour borders from an image. Border cropping removes black borders from the image completely also resulting in the reduction of image height and width. However this does not reduce the resolution of the image. (This is an Illustration of border cropping).

The other technique is to replace the black coloured pixels in the borders with white colour pixels which is called black border removal. Unlike cropping this does not reduce the image size.

3. De-speckling / Noise reduction

When scanning old documents we usually get unwanted dots (speckles) in the background. This could be in two forms; black speckles in a white background as well as white speckles in a black background. This is also known as Salt and pepper noise. (This is an example for an image with salt and pepper noise)

Whatever the form, this affects the image compression and increases the file size. De-speckling (also known as noise reduction) is the process of removing such unwanted speckles from the image background. (Illustration : noise removal)

4. Colour drop out

Colour dropout is a proven useful technique for forms processing applications such as census projects. The idea is to discard the text boxes and lines of a scanned image. This will increase the recognition rate of OCR. Earlier scanners used specific colored lamps to achieve this. (eg : Blue Imaging Color Drop-Out Element for Kodak 9520/9500). Now this has been improved and is achieved by software.

Colour drop out accuracy directly depends on the printing quality of the forms. Only selected colors (shades of red, blue and green) can be dropped, which depends from scanner to scanner. Therefore it is essential to use the recommended color pantone (e.g. : Fujitsu PANTONE Dropout Confirmation Listing) for printing the forms.

This is a very informative article on color drop-out by the Document Doctor.

5. Thresholding

Thresholding is a technique used when scanning grayscale images and saving as Black & white. A grayscale image will have 16 bits per pixel (representing 65,536 shades of gray) and a black & white image will have 1 bit per pixel (representing either black or white). When converting from grayscale to black & white (example : scanning a photograph in black & white mode), each pixel having a different shade of gray should be converted in to either black or white. This point of separation is called the threshold. By changing the threshold value the output image quality will change

This is an illustration of thresholding by imagebeat.com

As shown in the above illustration this is a fixed thresholding, which is ideal for separating solid colors (e.g.: text) from background. However for images with various shades of gray a advanced version of thresholding called adaptive thresholding is used. In adaptive thresholding the threshold value is calculated independently from pixel to pixel based on the contrast. Different scanner manufacturers and capture applications have come up with many different technologies and algorithms on this such as Kodak ithresholding developed on Adaptive Threshold Processing - ATP)

6. Line Removal

Line removal is a very useful feature especially for OCR applications. This feature is used to remove unwanted lines from scanned images. These lines could be either actual content or noise. Most application forms such as credit cards, account opening etc.. consist of text boxes. Although such lines are actual content of the document, they interfere in the character recognition process hence are unwanted. Also when scanning documents that are folded or when scanning fax copies, there is a high possibility of getting unwanted horizontal lines in the scanned image. These lines, especially vertical ones can interfere in the OCR process. Also if there are any texts that intersect with these lines, they appear as broken in the scanned image resulting in incorrect text recognition.

When line removal is used, these unwanted lines will not be included in the scanned image resulting in a clean image optimized for character recognition. Also characters that are broken due to horizontal lines will be corrected. Further line removal will also reduce the image size.

Here is an illustration of line removal by Oracle.

7. Punch Hole filling

When filed documents having punched holes are scanned, most of the images will show these holes as black spots. In addition to the distracted appearance of the image, this results in two main problems. First is If the file contains large number of documents and the left margin is not adequate, these black spots could interfere with the actual content of the document. The second issue is that having such black spots in blank pages could interfere with the automatic blank page deletion, since they could be recognized as actual content. Earlier these black marks were removed manually which required lot of time and effort. With the advancement of image processing applications such as Kofax VRS, this can be now automated. This feature will change the color of such black spots with the surrounding image color. Most such applications take in to consideration the dimensions and locations of such black spots and compare with the different manufacturer specifications and standards.

8. Blank Page Deletion

Blank page deletion is useful when scanning in duplex mode where some documents contain information in both sides of the document as it requires the scanner operator to manually delete the blank pages. Automatic blank page deletion will delete the pages based on a threshold value (in bytes) specified. When a page size is less than the threshold value specified, it is considered as a blank page and will be automatically deleted. Selecting this value depends on the document type and the scanner being used and usually done after some testing with few experimental values. For blank page removal to be effective, it is essential to use some of the features described above such as black border removal, de-speckling, line removal and punch hole filling.

A common issue faced when using blank page deletion is the bleed-through effect, where content in one side of the paper appearing in the other side of the page, especially in very thin papers. Because of this the blank page is mistakenly recognized as having actual content. Advanced capture applications such as Kofax VRS, tries to address this by differentiating actual content and bleed through.

Resources

Download "8 secrets of an effective content or records management implementation" (free)

2010-01-30T17:44:00.001+05:30

This is the second book of the 8 things e-book series named “8 secrets of an effective content or records management implementation”.

Download the PDF version

All other versions

Read about the first book here

Microsoft Online Services

2009-11-10T14:05:00.000+05:30

Couple of years back I was looking for an affordable SharePoint hosted services provider mainly to set up a DEMO site. Unfortunately I couldn't implement that idea due to many reasons, mainly the cost.

Not surprisingly last year Microsoft announced the launch of Online services for few products including SharePoint. Recently I had the chance to test this as we just started implementing this for internal use. Online services are offered as a product suite called BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite) as well as individual products including Dynamics CRM Online, Office Live Meeting, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, and System Center Online Desktop Manager.

SharePoint Online is offered in two versions standard and dedicated. The standard version is a shared version (meaning that it is not hosted in a dedicated server). And it lacks some of the enterprise functionality such as mysites, incoming emails, forms services, excel services, content sources, business data search etc.. This review on cmswire is a good starting point for anyone interested.

There is a 30 day trial available so you can start a test run anytime. Further last week Microsoft reduced pricing for the Business Productivity Online Suite, which is now US$10 per user per month, with a five seat minimum purchase, which seems very attractive.

Resources

eBook "8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information — before it's too late" , (free)

2009-10-05T22:08:00.005+05:30

AIIM President John Mancini has published an eBook named "8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information — before it's too late". This eBook (free to download, no registration required) is the first in a series of eBooks that represent the compiled contributions of the guest expert columnists on his blog.

The book is presented in an interesting manner with lot of examples and is a good source for anyone to increase awareness on organisational information management. (download a copy here)

Explorer view in SharePoint

2009-09-28T13:47:00.003+05:30

A very useful feature in SharePoint is the ability to open libraries and lists in explorer view. This helps to copy / organize multiple files very easily rather than going through the multi step upload process.

If you haven't used this;

Go to a document library
In the main tool bar select actions -> Open with windows explorer.

Recently when I tried this with Windows 7 and IE 8, It didn't work and got the message saying "your client does not support opening this list with windows explorer". The issue was with the "webclient service", a service which is required to access internet based files. Once this service is started, the explorer view in SharePoint worked fine.

To activate;

START - > RUN - > type services.msc.
This will open up the services console.
Locate the WebClient service. Right click and select properties.
Make the start up type as automatic and start the service.

(Source : http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-internetexplorer-general/347382-explorer-view-sharepoint-not-working-ie8.html)

Update: (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/f59c1734-1777-426b-a6b4-2681e345cc92)

"Open with Windows Explorer” of SharePoint site will only work for the 32-bit system.

The reason is that Web DAV functionality is provided natively by Web Client Service and extended by the Office installation of Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider(MSDAIPP). Since MSDAIPP is only 32-bit, it cannot be used by 64 bit Internet Explorer.

A workaround is to use 32-bit Internet Explorer in Win 7 64-bit system when the user needs “Open with Windows Explorer”.

Achieved Master Certification @ EE

2009-09-20T13:53:00.005+05:30

	Amila Hendahewa

Last week I was awarded the Master Certification for Document Management at EE (Experts-exchange).

I joined EE last year to get some expert advise on certain questions I was facing in a SharePoint project. Within a very short period of time, I was able to solve my questions with the help of participating experts. Then I realized the importance of sharing knowledge and continued to help others by providing answers. As a result I was able to achieve 50,000 expert points thus being the first one to achieve expert certification on Document Management at EE.

(For those who are not familiar; EE is considered as the best place for finding answers on IT related questions. So if you have a difficult question, give it a try here ) .

Kodak acquires Bell + Howell scanner division

2009-09-04T23:07:00.007+05:30

Last week, Kodak announced that it has completed the acquisition of the scanner division of BÖWE BELL + HOWELL. The initial announcement was made at the begining of this year. They were expecting to finish the deal by the end of first quarter and it took more than expected. Still the financial terms are not disclosed.

Having experienced scanners from both manufacturers this is an exciting news for me. As we know Kodak, a pioneer in document imaging introduced number of innovative models and features (such as straight path paper handling, perfect page scanning, detachable flatbed etc...) On the other hand B&H has a good reputation for high speed, robust scanner models. So we can expect more exciting products as a result of the combined stength of two organisations.

I am eager to see what Fujitsu, another leader in document imaging would do in return.

Read the press release here

Selecting the right scanner, 8 things to consider

2009-08-05T21:24:00.001+05:30

1. Scanning speed

Most of the times when we are presenting a solution to a client, there is one question that always pop up. “ What is the speed of your scanner?”. Almost everyone think that higher the speed of the scanner, higher the output. Well, my personal opinion is that it is not so all the times. Beyond a certain level, the scanner will be idle due to the inability to feed documents at that speed. Especially when scanning mixed documents it is not possible to use the scanner to the full speed.

The scanning speed is measured either in ppm (pages per minute) for simplex scanners or ipm (images per minute) for duplex scanners. Today there are scanners ranging from 20 ppm to 200 ppm. Unless for a service bureau (or a similar operation of scanning very high volumes of the same document type) I prefer a scanner in the range of 40 ppm or below.

2. Document size (max & min)

One of the main factors that decide the price of a scanner is the maximum size of a document that can be scanned. Generally there are scanners which can scan either up to

A4 / legal
A3
larger than A3

Most of the documents that we get are either in A4 or legal size. But in practice I prefer to go for a A3 scanner, since there are lot of non standard size documents. (I wrote a separate post about the importance of document sizes here.)

Also there are few scanners that can scan extra long documents such as

Fujitsu fi-6130 (10 feet)
Kodak i 1440 (20 feet)

3. Feeder : Flat bed / ADF

Production scanners come either with the Auto feeder only or with the flatbed. Some new scanner models (like Kodak 1400 series) have a detachable flatbed which could be very ergonomic depending on the work layout.

A flatbed is required if you need to scan bound documents, books, fragile or very delicate documents as well as files without separating papers etc… Especially when it comes to scanning of legal documents such as contracts or deeds a flatbed would be required since these come in double legal size and cannot be separated.

4. Simplex / Duplex

Most of the today’s scanners are duplex; meaning that it can scan both sides of the document at the same time. However there are Simplex scanners also

Unless if you are specifically going to scan single sided documents, it is always better to go for a duplex scanner.

5. Scanning Mode - Colour / B&W

There are 3 main output formats in document scanning,

B&W / bitonal,
gray scale
Colour

Most of today's scanners can scan in all 3 formats. However there could be models that do not support colour scanning. (one such model is Kodak file master, a book scanner that cannot scan in colour; I think this has been discontinued now)

Also there are some scanners (Kodak – i150 and most of others) that supports dual stream outputs. That is it can scan a colour document and save 2 images in two formats at the same time. eg : B&W and colour.

(This article, "To Scan In Color Or Not?" - by Scott Blau, CEO of Datacap, provides an overview of colour and grayscale scanning.)

6. Resolutions (optical & output)

When it comes to selecting a scanner, (especially for high quality scanning) resolution is a main factor. There are two resolutions to consider.

1. Optical resolution : This represents the actual scanning resolution the scanner is capable of scanning. So this is the important measurement.

2. Output resolution : This is the enhanced or the maximum resolution that the scanner can produce using interpolation. Output resolution is always greater than the optical resolution. But It does not add more resolution but just enlarge the image by adding extra pixels artificially. So this is not an important measurement as the optical resolution.

(This article on scantips.com gives a detailed explanation on image interpolation)

7 . Drivers and capture software

Any of today’s scanner comes bundled with one or several scanning applications and drivers. There are few things to consider here.

drivers : there are two main sets of drivers. Twain and ISIS. Twain is an open and freely available set of drivers intended for consumer level scanners. ISIS is a proprietary standard recommended for high speed production scanners. Most of the scanners support both drivers. However if you intend to use a separate specialised capture application instead of the one that comes with the scanner, you need to check on the driver compatibility. As an example the recently introduced capture tool Kofax Desktop works with Twain drivers only. Also the famous scan snap series by Fujitsu does not support both these drivers and works on a scan snap specific driver only.

Output formats : The combination of the scanner and the capture application will decide what are the file types (TIFF, PDF, PDF/A, etc…) that can be produced.

Image enhancements : There are interesting and very useful image enhancement features associated with different scanners. A good example is the “perfect page” features in Kodak scanners. (pdf – perfect page matrix)

File saving options : Different scanners have different features on saving the scanned image such as the ability to directly scan in to SharePoint.

8. Specialised scanners and accessories

The last area to consider is whether you need specialised scanners such as;

large format / high precision scanners – : kartoscan, B&H infinity
specialised book scanners – kirtas, i2s digibook
mobile scanners – Xerox travel scanner
networked scanners Fujitsu fi-6010N, Kodak Scan Station 100 Plus
Check scanners /MICR readers – MagTek
High speed – high capacity : IBML ImageTrac, B&H ngenuity

Resources

Microsoft & Yahoo combine forces for web search

2009-07-30T00:07:00.001+05:30

As expected for quite some time, Microsoft and Yahoo announced an agreement on web search. Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

With this pact, the two giants will combine forces to compete against Google who is the leader in search having 70% of the market.

Let us see how it goes.

Source : ZDNet
Read the Microsoft press release here

Microsoft Office 2010 Online version - Free !

2009-07-22T20:17:00.001+05:30

Microsoft has announced that the next version of the the popular MS Office suite, Office 2010 will have a web version free of charge. Yes, similar to Google Docs !.

According to PC world,

Microsoft hosted office web apps will be free for users with Live accounts
Customer hosted Office Web apps will be free for enterprise customers with SA (Software Assurance)

This web version will definitely have limited functionality, compared to the desktop version. But I am sure that still it will be more attractive than Google apps. The best part is that with this move SharePoint 2010 becomes even more powerful with online document creation and editing facilities. (check the screen shot here)

Let us see what the Google will do in return.

(Read the source article here.)

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek

2009-07-22T08:38:00.002+05:30

Last week Microsoft released 3 videos allowing a sneak peek of SharePoint 2010 (Twenty Ten). You can view these here. There are 3 videos separately, Overview, for IT Pros and for developers. These are of course embedded in to a Silverlight web part so you need to have Silverlight installed to watch these. (You can download Silverlight from here)

Detailed information is not available yet, below is a summary of these videos together with relevant screenshots.

Overview

New user interface includes the Ribbon
site customisation made easy using web edit with live preview
built in Silverlight web part for rich media
branding made easy suing rich theming
multiple browser support
create and view diagrams with Visio services
manage external content types easily with improved SharePoint designer
Evolution of BDC (business data catalogues) in to BCS (business connectivity services)
Improved offline capabilities with SharePoint workspace (formerly known as Groove; check my previous post here )
Inline video editing with PowerPoint for videos stored in SharePoint

IT Pro

Revamped and streamlined central administration
Best Practice analyzer
Unified logging database
Resource throttling for large lists
unattached content database recovery
Visual upgrade – upgrade without changing the user interface initially

Developer

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools
LINQ (Language integrated query) for SharePoint.
Developer dashboard
Read write access to external data with BCS
Client Object model (OM) – code execution on client machine
Silverlight web part

Looking at this sneak peek, we can expect that 2010 is going to be a really exciting year.

Scan to SharePoint with Kofax Desktop

2009-07-16T06:30:00.000+05:30

Kofax announced the launch of a new scanning application Kofax Desktop, a tool that I have been waiting for a long time. This is a simple tool that integrates in to Microsoft Office desktop applications providing users with one touch scanning capability from office applications. As I mentioned in a previous post, it also supports direct scanning in to SharePoint. Kofax desktop supports scanners using Twain drivers and can scan in either TIFF or PDF formats.

Anyone can download the fully functional trial version and work for 14 days (or 50 saves). And the best part is this costs only $ 29. . As Kofax says I am sure this will make scanning as easy as printing.

Below are the main features;

Scan directly from Office applications

Scan directly to SharePoint

Scan as an attachment in one step

Scan to SharePoint and send the link on email

View scanned images as thumbnails for easy drag & drop

SharePoint SP2 bug

2009-05-29T08:45:00.000+05:30

When it comes to service packs and infrastructure updates I always recommend to wait at least 3 months to install in a production environment. This will make sure that enough real time testing will be done and bugs will be discovered if any. So that Microsoft can get ready with the necessary hot fixes for the same.

SharePoint team blog reported a similar instance last week, where a bug has been discovered in the recently released SharePoint SP2. This activates the SharePoint expiration date incorrectly resulting in converting the license in to a trial installation. This will expire the installation in 180 days after the SP2 in installed, but there is no immediate effect. There is no impact on product functioning, features or data.

A hot fix is being developed and will be released soon.

Read the KB article here

Sharepoint Sri Lanka

2009-05-28T20:15:00.001+05:30

Vinoj, one of my friends currently working in Brunei has recently started a blog named Sharepoint Sri Lanka . I am sure this will definitely be useful not only for sharpeoint practitioners from Sri Lanka but for others as well.

Well done Vinoj ! Keep up the good work.

At last, Microsoft launches SharePoint marketing website on SharePoint !

2009-05-24T16:48:00.000+05:30

Microsoft SharePoint team blog announced last week the launch of Microsoft SharePoint marketing website using SharePoint and silver light. Obviously this is something that should have been done long time back, without waiting for the last stage of MOSS 2007. Anyway the site looks nice and elegant with lot of content especially the videos.

Visit and enjoy

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/

Groove renamed as SharePoint Workspace 2010 !

2009-05-15T21:36:00.000+05:30

While we await the release of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has announced that Groove will be renamed as SharePoint Workspace 2010. According to the Groove team blog, Groove will be added to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, with the name of SharePoint Workspace 2010, together with One note.

This gives a strong indication that Microsoft is paying serious attention to offline content access capability of SharePoint. In MOSS 2007, although we can use local folders, Outlook and Groove for offline file access, it was not up to the expectations of most of the users. Another issue was that Groove has to be purchased separately. With this move, this will be solved and let us hope that it will have more user friendly functionalities as well.

Devil’s advocate

2009-05-14T07:14:00.000+05:30

I am sure all of us have come across the phrase “devil’s advocate”. In general terms this is used to identify a person who keeps on arguing against the popular choice of the majority. In a decision making process if a person is keep on arguing in favour of another alternative, when there is an obvious answer available he is referred to as a devil’s advocate. This phrase has originated from Roman Catholic church in the process of declaring a deceased person as a saint. In the process of deciding whether he is worthy to be a saint or not (a process known as canonization), the church appointed a person, to argue against. His job was to look for negative aspects of the candidate’s character and prove that he is not worthy of recognising as a saint. This function is now known as the promoter of justice.

In management studies, there is a debate among groups about the effectiveness of having a devil’s advocate in a team, when making a decision. Some say this improves the decision making process and especially brings out creative alternatives. The counter argument is that it makes a negative impact on the team since it brings in endless arguments. I agree with the first argument since it prevents a group from coming in to conclusions without considering all the available options. I am a firm believer of this and I try to implement the same as much as possible. However this is a very painful process and needs the commitment of the whole team especially the leader. Many of the times the process could end up with unpleasant arguments so the leader needs to be aware of all possible outcomes and act accordingly.

According to IMC (The Institute of Management Consultants) USA, a similar process could be adopted to review a project plan or a proposal. A person / group called as a “murder board” or a “read team” can be used to review a project plan to identify possible break points of the plan. Obviously this is more applicable for larger complex projects involving multiple disciplines than a simple project. I will write about how we can use this concept when planning a ECM project in a separate post.

If you haven't experienced this yet, wouldn't it be an interesting challenge for you to be a devil’s advocate and experience the difference ?

Source : What is a "Murder Board"? by Mark Haas CMC FIMC

SharePoint Designer is free...

2009-04-05T22:22:00.001+05:30

Starting from 1st of April, SharePoint Designer is available as a free download. Further MS announced that existing customers with Software Assurance will receive upgrade rights to Expression Web for the lifetime of their SA agreement.

This will enable end users to customise SharePoint more easily and to design customised workflows. In SharePoint Page customisation is one major area which should be improved and made more user friendly. At present it is not that easy to customise a page using available out of the box features. This requires some knowledge on HTML which makes it somewhat difficult for power users. SPD helps to a greater extent on this area.

Further Microsoft announced that, the next version of Expression Web will directly support SharePoint page customisation. This will greatly help minimizing the present difficulties that we are facing on SharePoint branding. As Microsoft says This is an exciting time for SharePoint

Scanning in DjVu

2009-04-02T15:56:00.002+05:30

My new project has a requirement to scan the colour documents in DjVu format, so I thought of writing about this somewhat unfamiliar file format.

Have you heard of “Deja vu”.? As i understood in French this means something like “familiar” or “already experienced”. This is used to explain the weird feeling that most of us have experienced, where we come across a new situation or a person and we feel like it has happened before, although we cannot recall the exact situation. There could be several religious interpretations on this, but as I know there is no accepted scientific explanation on this yet. (at least I couldn't find any).

I don't know why they have used the same name, but DjVu is a file format similar to PDF, which is significantly small in size. This has been developed by AT&T and later the commercial rights have been transferred to lizard tech. Last year again it was transferred to Celartem Technology, the parent company of Lizard Tech. However DjVu is a free file format which means the specifications and the reference libraries are freely available. Similar to PDF, any user can view a DjVu document by installing a browser plug-in which is available freely. The commercial ownership is only on the encoding technology.

Below are some interesting comparisons from DjVu.org. (I am yet to test these in practice)

Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.
Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed
For color document images that contain both text and pictures, DjVu files are typically 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG at similar quality.
For black-and-white pages, DjVu files are typically 10 to 20 times smaller than JPEG and five times smaller than GIF.
DjVu files are also about 3 to 8 times smaller than black and white PDF files produced from scanned documents

This is a graphical comparison done by Lizard Tech;

There are several important technologies being used in DjVu that makes it possible to have very clear images in such small file sizes. First is the compression technology that is being used. Unlike other compressions, in DjVu a file is compressed as 3 images namely the foreground image, background image and the mask image. The mask image which is in high resolution is used to store the text layer and uses a special compression technique. It compresses a particular character only once. And instead of recording all other occurrences of the same character it records only the location of subsequent occurrences. The other two image layers are stored in colour in low resolution. Due to this high compression technology a DjVu file with lot of text is significantly lower in size than a similar file in PDF. Also the decompression of a DjVu file is done in several steps. So the user will have an initial view very quickly and after few moments only the full quality image is displayed.

These features make DjVu an ideal format for scanning colour text documents for electronic distribution. Who knows, DjVu may even replace PDF files especially when it comes to scanned colour documents such as text books. The famous million book collection is an example of using DJVU format extensively. They offer more than 1. 5 million full text books freely in the open formats such as HTML, TIFF and DJVU.

Some other useful links;

A new project

2009-03-23T18:20:00.000+05:30

I am in Brunei working on an exciting new project. The project will run for around 1 1/2 years and involves conversion of files, photographs, maps, newspapers, microfilms, Audio and video tapes..... ... in to digital format. Once the formalities are done, I will write in detail later.

More than the technicalities, it seems that managing the project will be quite a challenge. Language is the main barrier, when dealing with the client as well as the other team members. Let us see how it goes.

Document Imaging with SharePoint

2009-03-10T23:08:00.001+05:30

Last week Kodak announced the incorporation of “direct scan to SharePoint” capability in to their smart touch button. There isn't any surprise with this move considering the fact that their main competitors have already implemented this sometimes back. Fujitsu was the first to incorporate direct SharePoint scanning in to all of their scanners, however other players also had this functionality available with some of their products. One Touch button of Visioneer scanners can be configured to scan directly to SharePoint. Xerox also uses the same one touch feature while HP scanners are equipped with Smart Document Scan capable of the same. I think Kodak being the pioneer in document imaging should have done this long time back . Anyway the point is why every scanner manufacturer is moving in this direction and what would be the impact on SharePoint as well as on specialised imaging applications like Kofax.

As we know MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) consist of 6 major feature areas as shown below

Of these six pillars, Microsoft describes content management as “The facilities for the creation, publication, and management of content, regardless of whether that content exists in discrete documents or is published as Web pages”. This is further elaborated under 3 areas;

Document management focuses on working with electronic documents (More specifically with MS Office documents). This includes features such as check in-out, versioning, offline sync, content types and templates, search and workflows.
Records management is about keeping and disposing (at appropriate times) of electronic content. Features such as information management policies, auditing, bar-coding, routing etc…
Web content management provides features such as content publishing and deployment, publishing templates, rendering navigation etc..

When looking at these, clearly we can identify that SharePoint content management feature area does not include document imaging facilities. MOSS is developed with the focus of working with electronic files, specially MS Office documents. It does not provide facilities to convert physical documents in to electronic format before starting to actually work with them. As an example let us consider the steps involved in getting a paper document in to a MOSS document library;

Scan the document using a capture application
saving the scanned image in to a local folder.
Navigating in to the relevant document library and folder.
Uploading the scanned image using the navigation button or drag and drop.
Enter metadata (document properties)

Imagine a user working on a document library. Rather than minimizing the browser window and launching the capture application to scan a document, wouldn't it be nice if it allows the user to scan and directly save the image in to the MOSS library.?

As I wrote on my previous post, any ECM solution should consider on managing of paper documents in the organisation. That is, it should provide the facilities to convert native paper documents in to appropriate electronic format that are suitable for actual processing. MOSS alone does not have this capability and relies on independent software manufacturers to provide suitable solutions to fill this gap.

There are several products that we can use to scan documents and save in to SharePoint;

I haven't had an opportunity to use most of these apps, but they look pretty simple and straight forward. Since all these come at a price, it is not a surprise that scanner manufacturer’s try to get a strategic advantage by incorporating this facility in to their scanner free of charge. This will definitely ease the process of adding documents in to SharePoint document libraries by end users. This move will also make an impact in to production capture applications such as Kofax. I will write about this in a separate post, especially about the Kofax release script for SharePoint.

Terrorist attack on Inland Revenue Dept. building

2009-02-23T23:40:00.002+05:30

For two weeks, I was busy with exams, so couldn't write anything. Hopefully will do some posts this month.

Friday night on week before last, two LTTE light aircrafts entered Colombo on a suicide mission. Unlike previous attempts this time they couldn't accomplish the mission and both aircrafts were gunned down by security forces. However one aircraft crashed in to the Inland revenue department building in Colombo, recalling us the 9-11 attack !. Luckily it was at night and no one was inside the building. However it looked like the building has been damaged extensively and I was wondering what has happened to all the data that was there at that time. According to my understanding they had most of the documents only in the original format, which is obviously paper, without any digital copies. Later it was announced that all the data is intact and they could continue to work in few days.

Anyway this was an eye opener for everyone here, showing how vulnerable our records are. The good news is that several government organisations has just started on digital archiving. (However i believe that most government organisations maintain their vital records in microfilms.) I remember when we started selling these services few years back; it was quite difficult to convince the decision makers as there was no local example to showcase. The sales cycle was 1-2 years and sometimes even several years long . Interestingly we found more opportunities in forms processing rather than in document imaging. In contrast private sector organisations adopted this technology very fast, especially in banking and financial services. However now things are better with government organisations, especially after the birth certificates conversion project that was completed last year.(I will discuss about this project in details sometimes later.)

(This is a video of the first aircraft hitting the IR building)