It was with interest that I scanned the list of essays in 37Signals founders', Jason Freid and David Heinemeir Hansson's, new book on modern work life: Rework

The section on competitors caught my eye and as a product professional the essay entitled “Underdo your competition” piqued my interest. The basic hypothesis of the essay is that it is futile to enter into a “features arms race” with your competition. This “following” approach to product development is costly and time consuming and doesn’t guarantee product success.

The wisdom of avoiding feature for feature duels with competitors is well established in product circles. While duelling doesn't guarantee product success, it does guarantee bloated sprawling products which are costly to support and maintain and that users are likely to find increasingly difficult to navigate to do the things they really need to get done.

New feature requests should be carefully weighed and evaluated with a healthy dose of circumspection. When considering new features it is always helpful to have the research metrics on feature use top of mind. The Standish Group’s 2002 Chaos Report on software project success and efficiency indicates that 45% of features developed are never used, while 19% are rarely used. So a whopping 64%, nearly two thirds of software features written are rarely or never used! Unfortunately more recent reports show these numbers looking worse rather than better.

In essence only 20% or one fifth of software features produced are frequently used. Ouch!

While Fried’s assertion that a features arms race is no way to go about developing a successful software product is nothing new, his proposed alternative is interesting:   [Read more]

I recently read the current report* from AIIM entitled Document Scanning and Capture: local, central, outsource - what’s working best? There were some interesting revelations in here, worthy of several posts, but one in particular stood out to me.

Although 78% of those surveyed have some form of distributed scanning via MFPs [multi-function scanner/printers], desk top scanners or branch-office scanners “many managers still consider it to be a scan-to-archive application, rather than opening up to the possibilities of scan-to-process.”

This says to me that people are predominantly scanning documents to get rid of paper file cabinets and archives – they’re scanning documents that are already “dead.”

Unfortunately, the real value from document scanning comes from those documents that are very much “alive” and that require action. About 57% of respondents identified “improve process throughput (productivity)” as an important business driver for document capture.

Yet, in reality only 37% of survey respondents are scanning over half of their inbound documents. Of those scanned documents, 57% are passed to archive rather than a business process.

In other words far fewer than half the organizations doing scanning are using less than half of those documents to power their business processes, while more than half of them think that improving productivity is important. So where’s the disconnect?    [Read more]

The KnowledgeTree Office Add-in has been available for Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) since early 2009. It uses Office 2007’s Custom Task Panes to display a view into the KnowledgeTree Document Management System (DMS), allowing amongst other functionality quick-and-dirty downloads (both for view and editing) and uploads of documents straight from Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007. This means that users don’t have to log into the web interface to interact with their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents!

Office 2003 does not natively support Custom Task Panes. However, a great number of users (including KnowledgeTree customers) still use this version of Office, and it became vital that we deliver the functionality offered by the Office 2007 Add-in to these users. But how to emulate the Office 2007 Custom Task Panes in Office 2003?

Add-in Express, the third-party library that IMHO is indispensable when creating Office Add-ins, have developed their own implementation of Task Panes that can be used in Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, versions 2000 – 2007. Using this technology, we were able to port the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 functionality to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2003. And to make the solution even more elegant, a single installer can be used for either Office 2003 or Office 2007, meaning we don’t have to maintain two different versions!

KnowledgeTree Office 2003 Add-in:

The same view from Office 2007:

UPDATE 09/03/2010: Please note that the KnowledgeTree Office Add-in 2003 has not been released yet; please watch this space for the release date!

A while ago, we gave you a sneak preview of KnowledgeTree Explorer CP, the next generation of our KnowledgeTree Explorer desktop tool. Now you get the chance to see it in action!

We've prepared a quick video demonstrating its platform independence, powerful desktop integration, intuitive interface and more.

• Thumbnails in Column View
  The thumbnail functionality released in 3.7 proved to be immensely popular. You can now view thumbnails of your KnowledgeTree content in the "Browse Documents" grid - you no longer need to select a single document to view its thumbnail. Clicking on the thumbnail launches InstantView so that you can preview, print or search the document. This functionality can be enabled in "Administration | Miscellaneous | Manage Views", by adding the "Thumbnails" column.
• InstantView
  InstantView has also been extended and now supports the popular file formats used by most browsers, including: .PNG, .JPG, .GIF and .TIFF file formats.
• Search by Document Owner
  It is now possible to search by document owner ("owned by"), which can be found in the advanced search.
• Printing of Electronic Signature Audit Logs
  KnowledgeTree supports electronic signatures as defined by FDA 21 CFR part 11. It is now possible to print these logs if required.

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We're always striving to make things easier and more accessible for the KnowledgeTree community and we've got some great initiatives and plans in store for you. I'd like to take this opportunity to share some of the exciting developments ahead.

Within the next few weeks, KnowledgeTree.org will be home to a new reorganized wiki that will be the main focus for all things community (you might have already noticed a few minor structural changes to our websites to accommodate this). Here, you'll find a single point of access to a wider variety of relevant resources, tools, FAQs and other vital information.

We really value your feedback and we've already received excellent ideas on how we can improve our products on our forums, Twitter and Facebook. Now, we need your help and recommendations on how we can serve you better. Be on the lookout for an anonymous survey where we’ll ask your opinion on issues that affect the KnowledgeTree community. Now is your chance to be heard and there will also be great prizes offered to a few lucky survey respondents.

These are just a few of the great initiatives coming down the road. Watch this space as we keep you posted on more community-related news and updates.

KnowledgeTree decided to partner with Zend Technologies for the release of version 3.7 of its on-the-premise commercial and open-source editions of its offering on Zend Server infrastructure. The combination of Zend Server, which includes a highly optimized PHP stack, with monitoring, ensures a boost in speed and performance of KnowledgeTree on our supported platforms.

As we prepared for the recent release of KnowledgeTree 3.7, one of the key issues that the engineering team had to think about was, how to deploy Zend Server with KnowledgeTree to all our customers on different operating systems seamlessly.

Well the answer to that was crystal clear, we had to change our deployment strategy and implement GnuLinux repositories for our latest offering. Thus, KnowledgeTree repositories were born. For more information on how this works have a look here.

What are Repositories you ask?

Well, there are literally thousands of software programs available out there to meet the needs of users on their preferred operating system. Many of these systems are stored in software archives commonly referred to as repositories. Repositories make it very easy to install new software on Linux systems while also providing a high level of security, as each software is thoroughly tested and built for each version of the Linux distributions. By harnessing the power of the operating system's software management tools already installed on the users system, a user would be able to, install and update KnowledgeTree over the internet, without the need for a CD or binary install scripts.

What does this all mean for us and our customers?   [Read more]

Hi there, Tim the sales guy here again. We’re making it so easy for organizations to capture and store documents that frankly, you’d have to be crazy to keep dealing with paper. It’s so yesterday.

What’s happening today is that we’ve been working with CAPSYS® on an integration that lets an organization capture documents in one place and automatically send them for indexing and storage in another place without any additional infrastructure, programming or scripting. And guess where these documents go? Yep, right into KnowledgeTree.

CAPSYS CAPTURE™ is a web-based, SaaS application with just a thin client that is easy to install.

So, say I’m in a remote office, just me, my scanner and a million receipts because I’m always procrastinating on my expense reports. The old way, I’d scan pages and pages of receipts and then have to upload each file from my PC into KnowledgeTree. I could probably use Hot Folders or Bulk Upload, but I’m not real clever that way, so it is a manual process for me.

Now, instead of integrating with my desktop scanning software, my scanner integrates with the CAPSYS CAPTURE client on my desktop. When I scan all that stuff in, it’s going up into the cloud into the CAPSYS CAPTURE Server for processing. And because CAPSYS CAPTURE has an easy graphical process flow feature, I was able to tell it to send my documents into KnowledgeTree without needing to know how to write a program or script.

And this is just a fraction of what CAPSYS CAPTURE can do. It also does all sorts of processing for bar codes, OCR and handwriting recognition. It will also capture faxes and emails for input right into KnowledgeTree.

So, if you’re like me and want a fast and easy way to get documents into KnowledgeTree, then you need to look into CAPSYS. Have a look here for more information. http://j.mp/kt-capsys

It's always great to see new and exciting projects being actively developed by the KnowledgeTree community. This month, we'll be featuring the KTGPLClient by Jeremy Smith.

Briefly, could you describe this project and what it entails?
The KTGNUClient project is a desktop scanning tool for Windows that is designed to allow scanning of multi-page documents, which can be used to upload documents to KnowledgeTree from within a single application.

What inspired you to create this project?
I found that using the built in Microsoft "Scanner and Camera Wizard" tool for multi-page documents was tedious and painful.

What business problems were you looking at solving specifically with this project?
I was hoping to solve critical business issues of saving valuable time and maintaining consistent document formats in the repository.

What other KnowledgeTree projects have you been involved with?
None, this is the first project that I have developed for KnowledgeTree.

What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement with KnowledgeTree?
KnowledgeTree has help me to increase our data access, data organization and enhance my activity communications.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?
If any community edition users have a need, there's a very good chance that other community members do too! Everyone should try and solve their business problems and share these solutions with others. Whether its sharing tips/hints/guides, participating on the forums or developing tools/plugins.

With KnowledgeTree 4.0 on the road-map, which KnowledgeTree feature would you most like to see included in the next major release?   [Read more]

Hi there, Tim the sales guy here again. This week, my marketing people want me to talk about the new integration between SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree that was developed by our French partner, iNet Process. It’s called iNetDocs, and it’s very cool.

As a sales guy, this is pretty exciting stuff for me! Basically, it means that a sales person — or account manager, or anyone who depends on a CRM for most of their daily work — can access all the documents they need without ever leaving the CRM work space.

So, say I’m a sales guy (did I mention I’m in sales?). I get a lead assigned to me in SugarCRM and want to send out a data sheet. In the old days, before iNetDocs, I would have to go searching on my hard drive, or a shared network drive for a data sheet that I hope would be the latest version to send to my lead. I’d spend 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure out whether I had the right document.

With iNetDocs, I simply switch to the tab within SugarCRM that acts as a window into the KnowledgeTree repository. I navigate to the marketing folder and find the data sheet I need. I know it’s the latest version, because we keep all our current collateral in the DMS. Then, I attach the document from KnowledgeTree directly to the email that I’m sending to my prospect from within SugarCRM. The whole operation takes less than 2 minutes and I move on to the next activity that will boost my commission.

This is a great opportunity for everyone involved:
• I get to sell KnowledgeTree to SugarCRM users who want this functionality.
• SugarCRM gets to sell their application to KnowledgeTree users who need a CRM.
• And iNet Process gets to sell the integration and support.
• Finally, anyone who’s currently using SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree gets an affordable way to make them work seamlessly together.   [Read more]