“Our vision for the future... is that we become a significant entity in helping organizations solve their extreme document pain,” says our president and CEO, Peter Duff, in a new corporate video we are now sharing on our Vimeo and YouTube channels.

Peter expands on what he means by ‘document pain’ in the video: “A lot of the problems have to do with compliance. Some of our customers are in a regulated environment and so they’re required to store their documents for long periods of time; they’re required to report to regulatory bodies and we help them accelerate that process."

No Pain with Much to Gain

"Some customers gain competitive advantage by using our technology. I’ve visited a customer just last week and their process was exactly that. It was about: 'when I make a request, the faster I can get the rendition turned around and distributed to my user, that gives me significant business and competitive advantage,'" notes Jean Ouellette, Adlib's Chief Architect, in the video.

Jean adds, “Our innovation comes from listening to our customers - they often give us great ideas” - and that innovation is carried forth by the many ISV and SI partners that work with Adlib. “It’s interesting to see how our partners are proud to promote our brand to their own customers,” says Peter Duff.

Scott Mackey, our Director, Product Management, describes the business benefits of Adlib's products - Express and PDF for SharePoint - in the video. "It's an integrated solution so you have a single source application for all the different conversion, recognition and publishing capabilities that you require.... Where processes are being handled through manual labour and desktop applications, Adlib offers you a solution that can be centralized deployed across a server and linked in with your business applications."

Watch the video, and leave us your comments at Vimeo or YouTube.

We are developing at Adlib – and while that is a fantastic thing, it means we need to add more people to our team as soon as possible. If you, or someone you know, wants to work at a fast-paced, growing, entrepreneurial company, please be sure to apply, or forward this to someone you know who would be intrigued by what we do. Yes, we are located in beautiful Burlington, Ontario, right off the QEW.

The following are new opportunities we currently have available to the techie superstars out there.

Technical Account Manager: You will provide product application, integration and implementation expertise to Adlib's end user customers and partners. The candidate must effectively communicate product release and roadmap information to customers, and ensure that Adlib's maintenance and support obligations are met. If you think you can be proactive in meeting SLAs, as defined in premium support agreements, please check out the job posting: Technical Account Manager Job Posting.

Solutions Architect: You must be able to understand and articulate the business and technical application of Adlib products to customers, work with sales reps and sales engineers to collect and analyze customers' business needs, design customer-specific product architectures/implementations, and prepare technical proposals. Click on: Solutions Engineer Architect Job Posting.

Senior Software Developer Lead: Responsible for timely delivery of high-quality, unit tested software that meets requirement and design specifications, you will be able to provide technical and process leadership to others on the team, and handle the timely management of assigned personal and team tasks. This role will be a champion of Adlib Standard Operating Procedure and its continuous development, and be able to successfully anticipate and manage all details related to software development. Click on: Senior Software Developer Lead Job Posting.

Senior Software Architect: You will assist in articulating the architectural vision, conceptualizing and experimenting with alternative architectural approaches, creating models and component and interface specification documents, and validating the architecture against requirements and assumptions. A sound sense of business and technical strategy is required to envision the "right" architectural approach to the customer's problem set, given the business objectives of the architect's organization. Click on: Senior Software Architect Job Posting.

You can apply for any of these positions by email to: hr@adlibsoftware.com

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

Here at Adlib, we are spending a substantial amount of time on deep research as part of our ongoing pursuit to be innovators in the online business-to-business software space. We understand that in today’s web-savvy world, consumers rule – and that includes business consumers.

As we waded into competitive intelligence, I expected a fair level of conventional marketing communication (white papers, data sheets, newsletters) but frankly, I wasn’t sure to what extent Web 2.0 best practices would be present in the B2B software landscape.

Aside from the ubiquitous support portal – downloadable media, forums, a members-only knowledge base and the like – many software companies lack a general adoption of social media and other interactive online communications. While there is a decent amount of traction in external social media, such as on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, there seems to be an overall deficit of internal social media (hosted by the company) such as shared user-generated content, member profiles, blog aggregation, RSS feeds, video and podcasting streaming.

However, there are some (outstanding) exceptions, such as:

• The expansive EMC Community Network with labs, galleries, forums, user groups, polls, and a exemplary Partner community (see image, below)
• Nintex Connect: forums, tag clouds, downloadable files, and two SharePoint community blogs
• SwordCTSpace’s YouTube channel with 24 videos in all – including customer testimonials, reports from industry shows, and product presentations (see below)

The end game in all of this “social web” activity is customer retention and attraction, as well as a means to garner user feedback for continuous improvement to one’s products and services. And when it comes to those objectives, we Adlibbers are all over it!

The YouTube channel of Sword CTSpace contains two dozen videos including testimonials, show floor interviews, and product demos.

The Partner Community, part of the EMC Community Network, features videos, forums (discussion threads), member-submitted content, and RSS feeds.

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

Montrium Inc., which provides quality assurance and regulatory GXP compliance services, had a real need to automate the regulatory submissions process for new drugs. So the company streamlined the management and routing of clinical trial records for submission by adopting the newly integrated Nintex and Adlib business process automation solution.

The integration between the intuitive tools that Nintex provides to create complex workflows within SharePoint, and Adlib PDF for SharePoint’s ability to automate document transformations means that document rendering within larger business workflows can be quickly designed and deployed using Nintex Workflow 2010.

Paul Fenton, Montrium’s VP of pharmaceutical processes and technology, says the Nintex and Adlib partnership has significantly reduced the PDF publishing burden on regulatory operations that his company used to face.

Any enterprise facing compliance regulations needs a way to automatically convert and distribute documents in a secure PDF format, after the document is approved and/or converted to PDF/A as part of a mandated archiving process. Converting documents to PDF is often part of a records management process to ensure document controls.

As our president, Peter Duff, explains it, the Nintex Workflow and Adlib PDF for SharePoint combination solves such as issues as “unsearchable documents, legacy or inaccessible formats, longer retention periods, increasingly complex e-records, disparate archiving methodologies, and the need to manage and track document lifecycles.”

Or, as Nintex managing director, Wayne Woolston, puts it, “ease of use and product innovation are stamped all over this offering.”

How does the Integration Work?

The user inserts a ‘start workflow’ action into the Nintex workflow, and then configures it to invoke any of the Adlib workflows for SharePoint that are deployed on the user’s system. A good demonstration of this is shown in the video here.

How Adlib PDF for SharePoint and Nintex Workflow Can Automate Business Processes in SharePoint.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

There is a lot underway for Adlibbers at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) here in Washington, DC. We’re having meetings with partners, and getting the chance to give feedback on the formation of life science partner-related activities for Microsoft’s FY11 plans.

Jon Roskill, Microsoft's new Channel Chief (VP Partner Channel) who walked us through the "A List" - a compilation of cool new technologies from Microsoft and their partners.

The "A List" included Spin, a hip new technology for social media hounds. The technology incorporates additional info available from Bing, such as maps to flesh out the specifics intended in a brief tweet and the location of the person tweeting. Spin also helps you filter the tweets to make better sense of it all.

Also cool on the MS “A List” was a digital camera with a built-in projector: no need to crowd around the tiny camera screen or to wait for printed copies when sharing pictures with friends. Another technology was a visual pivot tool for metadata tagged information on Silverlight. Imagine selecting the relevant filters and seeing the data rearrange itself on the screen instantly - awesome.

Today’s keynote speakers included President Bill Clinton and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, who discussed cloud services. (You’d have to be dead to not hear the word "cloud" once every 30 seconds at this conference!)

One thing Kevin Turner noted that I was personally excited about is the "Microsoft Signature Build" which is a configuration available on new laptops free of annoying third-party software.

Here at WPC, I’ve also had a 1:1 session with a Microsoft staffer to optimize our profile on their PinPoint community. (Watch for our profile in different country PinPoint sites coming soon.) PinPoint has gone through some substantial changes, including the ability to appear on more than one country's pinpoint site, the ability to draft your profile in multiple languages and more.

Back to this very international, busy event – aisles full of chief executives, IT directors and techies-at-large!

Riley O’Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is off and away – with the largest crowd in attendance yet, about 14,000. There was a quirky beginning to the event with a Microsoft employee running across the stage singing “O Cloud” to the popular tune “ole” from the FIFA World Cup that ended yesterday with Spain as victor. A few members of the approximately 10,000-fold crowd in attendance at WPC joined in the singing, although it was a bit too early in the a.m. for raucous behavior.

The reference to "cloud" was the ubiquitous topic of the year in our industry – cloud computing – as our bloggers have reported from DIA, FOSE, EMC World and other shows in recent months. Although the concept of cloud computing has been discussed by Microsoft and others for years, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said this morning, “2010 is the year when the opportunity and transition to the cloud is absolutely clear.” (The VAR Guy blog gives a great summary of Ballmer’s keynote address at WPC.)

I spent some time at the show today getting to understand the new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) and what we at Adlib need to do to maintain gold status on our competencies. The regional support center lounge (shown in the photo above) has been set up to offer on-site support for Microsoft's partners in the transition to the MPN program, with its new rules and requirements.

As at other industry shows, we ran into Nintex who go by the tagline, "Do More with SharePoint." Shown below is Mike Fitzmaurice, Nintex's Vice President of Product Technology, wearing his trademark kilt at the Nintex booth.

We had a lot to talk about, seeing as Nintex is our newest technology partner. This week, Adlib and Nintex launch our tightly integrated solution of using Adlib PDF for SharePoint with Nintex Workflow for the automation of business processes in SharePoint through workflows and the conversion of documents to PDF. (This video gives a demo of the integration.)

Tonight we Adlibbers will be attending Nintex’s launch party for the Nintex Workflow 2010 solution. More updates and insights on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference to come later this week!

Riley O’Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software

Increasingly, businesses are appreciating the fact that content can be created, validated and approved electronically. Seems simple enough – we’ve had word processing software forever, and it seems everyone is using some form of content management system – but the truth is there is still a long way to go with e-signatures.

I’ve heard examples where large organizations create their content electronically but still print the document to have an approver sign it (with ink). Then – and here it gets silly – they scan the signed document as a non-searchable image! To ensure the content is searchable again, they now need to run it through an optical character recognition (OCR) process.

Enlightened organizations have realized that they can avoid these time-consuming and redundant steps by leveraging electronic signatures. We’re seeing more of this corporate awareness in Europe than in North America at the moment.

Regulations around digital signatures vary around the world. Just this year in the US, both Houses of Congress named June 30 ‘National E-SIGN’ Day in support of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (known as E-SIGN).

So, what exactly is an electronic signature? Essentially, it allows an organization to replace legacy ‘wet’ (ink–based) signature processes with an entirely electronic solution that still allows them to ensure the validity and authenticity of the content.

“Electronic signature” is a broadly used term that can mean different things. In some cases, people will simply stamp a scanned image of somebody’s ‘wet’ signature onto a page and call that an electronic signature. Others will simply apply text drawn from the system about who is signing, the reason, date etc. and call that a ‘signature’. Both of these are seriously lacking in terms of true authentication.

A Better Solution: the Digital Signature

A better electronic signature solution leverages digital signature technology. A digital signature is a cryptographic-based scheme to provide assurance that a document has not been modified or tampered with since the signature was applied.

The ‘signing’ process involves the use of a validated “certificate” from a trusted source and given to a user. It lets people sign a document the same way they may have previously applied a ‘wet’ signature to the page. The cryptographic "certificate" validates that a particular user is who they say they are.

The result is a signed document that can be validated from two perspectives: the identity of the signatory, and the integrity of the original document. The integrity is maintained because the digital signature will immediately indicate a problem if any change or alteration to the document is made.

eSig vs dSig

The terms, “electronic signature” and “digital signature” are often used interchangeably, but they can mean different things in different countries.

Speaking to a customer in Argentina recently, I learned that Digital Signature is the term used when the certificates are approved by the government, and all other certificate-based signing is called Electronic Signature – so the confusion is likely to stay with us for a while yet.

Digital signatures can be applied to the original source documents (e.g. Microsoft Office) but often they are applied to the PDF renditions which act as an accessible snapshot of the source file, validated by a digital signature. This process can be performed using desktop tools, but this can cause problems since users have to learn new tools. The application of the technology may be inconsistent across an enterprise, which increases risk and the cost of a fragmented approach can be significant.

Server-based Signing Solution

A server-based signing solution is a significant step toward simplifying the process of using digital signatures in an automated workflow. The user does not need to go through a multi-step process in order to apply the signature, which results in significant savings related to end-user training. Since the process is deployed from a centrally managed service, it can be applied uniformly across an organization, thereby reducing risks and costs.

If you appreciate the value of electronic over paper, and automated over manual processes, then include digital signing as a key weapon in your information management strategy.

No more pens!

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software

This is the third in a 3-part series reviewing the features of Adlib PDF for SharePoint that extends SharePoint 2010. The first post reviewed how to use the Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010 to link your PDF rendition back to the source. The second post discussed using Adlib PDF for SharePoint 2010 to include document conversion workflows created using SharePoint Designer.

Document Sets in SharePoint 2010 are a great way to group related documents in various formats for projects, investment bank pitch books, RFPs, etc.

It is much better to use Document Sets - rather than folders – to group documents in SharePoint because you can also associate workflows with Document Sets to make them more efficient to work with and to automate manual business processes.

For example, in the latest release of Adlib PDF for SharePoint we extend the value of Document Sets by enabling the merging of all files in a Document Set - in one operation - to a single PDF to make it more usable.

The resulting PDF is enhanced with PDF bookmarks and a table of contents for more efficient navigation. This format is much more useful for the end user.

Advantages of using Document Sets over using individual files include:

• Save time opening and examining individual documents
• Easy to search within the collection
• Efficient navigation using the generated table of contents and PDF bookmarks
• Page numbering across the entire document

Metadata is used to control the order in which the documents are merged and whether they are to be included in the report.

This functionality was shown as part of the demo portion of our recent webinar - Go with the Workflow: PDF for SharePoint 2010. The demo begins at the 28 minute mark of the video.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Microsoft® SharePoint Designer - an application included with SharePoint that is used to edit SharePoint web pages and workflows - has greatly improved in the 2010 release with a completely redesigned UI and major improvements in its workflow capabilities.

With the latest release of Adlib PDF for SharePoint, it is possible to include document conversion workflows within larger business process workflows created using Microsoft SharePoint Designer. This enables the creation of "no-code" solutions to automate business processes - reducing the cost of creating a SharePoint-based solution for document management.

SharePoint Designer 2010 includes many new features, including:

• The ability to create workflows that are reusable across a SharePoint site collection
• The ability to edit the out-of-the-box workflows that come with SharePoint

The value of SharePoint Designer is the ability to rapidly respond to business needs by creating "no-code" solutions that automate manual processes. This avoids the cost of developing, testing, deploying and maintaining custom code solutions. It is much quicker and less costly to configure and deploy workflow solutions using a tool like SharePoint Designer.

It is now possible to invoke Adlib Workflows for SharePoint from within workflows created using SharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010. Our latest release of Adlib PDF for SharePoint includes a custom action that is available in the SharePoint Designer User Interface to start one of our workflows. You simply enter the name of the workflow to be invoked.

This functionality was shown as part of the demo portion of our recent webinar - Go with the Workflow: PDF for SharePoint 2010.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

This is the first in a 3-part series reviewing the features of Adlib PDF for SharePoint 2010 that extend and embrace the SharePoint 2010 environment.

Using the new Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010, it is possible to create a link back to the source document from which a PDF file was created. This capability is easily configured with Adlib PDF for SharePoint.

It is often useful to make a PDF rendition (i.e. a PDF copy) of a document so that it can shared in an easily accessible and secure way with employees, partners, or customers. When it is time to make changes to this content, you have to edit the source document and then re-render it. If the original source and PDF rendition are stored in the same document library, folder or document set, it isn’t difficult to find the source because they share a file name. If they are not stored in the same place, search using metadata within SharePoint 2010 can also be used.

A quick way of creating a link between documents rendered in Adlib PDF for SharePoint and the source document is to take advantage of the new Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010. The advantage of using this feature is that the link will remain valid even if the source document is moved within SharePoint.

Our document conversion workflows don’t create a link back to the source document out of the box, but can be easily configured to do so without changing any code. We simply configured the workflows to get the Document ID of the document being converted, and insert it into a SharePoint column for the rendition called “Source Document” (see image below). As long as this column had been defined, it will be populated with the Document ID link.

This functionality was shown as part of the demonstration portion of our recent webinar - Go with the Workflow: PDF for SharePoint 2010.

Stay tuned for Part 2: How using Adlib PDF for SharePoint 2010 lets you include document conversion workflows within larger business process workflows created using Microsoft SharePoint Designer.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Around the Adlib water cooler today, there was lots of talk about what happened at the G-20 Summit this past weekend in Toronto, just 30 minutes down the highway from the Adlib head office.

The G-20 was the global meeting of political minds comprised of 19 country and European Union (EU) leaders. While at the water cooler, this got some of us talking about our company's contribution to international governments, including the European Parliament which uses the Adlib Express solution for converting, recognizing and publishing PDFs. 

During a lunchroom chat about the G-20, it was discovered that some Adlib employees headed to the Summit location where there were also all the protests being held in downtown Toronto. Great photos were taken, such as the ones shown here, and some unexpected discoveries were made.

Most Unusual 'Protest':
While it wasn't certain if this person was protesting anything in particular (world hunger? obesity crisis?) he certainly drew attention, including from a lot of media. An Adlibber 'correspondent' snapped this picture of the mute performance artist (showcased on the right), appropriately garbed in mime-stripes as he prepared to dig into a large chocolate cake. He did not even break fork-stride as a huge wave of people approached him, pouring down the street and diverting into two human streams around his little table!

Most Interesting Attire:
The back of one protestor's shirt stated: "Don't Tase Me Bro".

Most Discouraging Sight:
As the non-protesting Adlibbers moved southward, trying to get a glimpse of the famous security fencing, they found something of an obstacle: a wall made up of our brave men and women in blue (below). However, they were but a few out of an estimated 20,000 police and a security budget rumoured to be approximately $1 billion.

The G-20 Toronto Summit concluded yesterday in a legacy of almost 1,000 arrests and substantial property damage.

Live blogging from the Toronto-area workshop and expert-led discussion, “eCTD Management in an Evolving Regulatory Environment”

These days there is lots of interest in the benefits, and challenges, of going electronic when it comes to submissions to Health Canada, as indicated by the turnout of more than 40 regulatory affairs professionals to an educational day-long workshop in Mississauga, Ontario today.

Representatives from Health Canada were on hand to answer questions and lend their support to the events’ sponsors – Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS), LORENZ Life Sciences and Regxia. Their discussions confirmed that federal health agency reviewers already prefer electronic over paper submissions.

Craig Anderson, manager, regulatory affairs operation at AstraZeneca Canada, did a great overview of their experiences – highlighting the major benefits of eCTD, including the ability to do more with no change in headcount, and to reallocate budget previously spent on paper submissions to go instead into additional training programs for staff.

LORENZ Life Sciences, which is one of Adlib's partners, did a demonstration of their new submission tool, the eValidator. It is used by Health Canada to validate eCTDs. Attendees were encouraged to actively interact with the submission software.

My own presentation – about how your submission success depends upon compliance with the eCTD guidelines and with the format of PDF files contained in it – was well received, with lots of questions about the use of PDF conversion, recognition and publishing solutions in the life sciences industry.

If you have any questions about how you can leverage the power of PDFs for the eCTD process, please drop me an email at smackey@adlibsoftware.com 

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software

Today is a banner day around the Adlib office:

• We launched an update to our Adlib PDF for SharePoint product that supports SharePoint 2010
• We held our well-attended webinar titled “Go with the Workflow: PDF for SharePoint 2010." Demos were given, and questions answered, by myself and Microsoft's Jason Piccola, Technical Solutions Professional – SharePoint (If you missed it live, you can watch the recorded webinar at the follow-up page on the Adlib website.)

Our president and CEO Peter Duff - sums it up well: “Companies are increasingly turning to SharePoint to solve a variety of challenges and improve business process efficiencies, and Adlib is the only software vendor that provides document conversion, recognition and publishing to enhance the inherent value in SharePoint 2010. Adlib PDF for SharePoint automates key business processes by greatly reducing administrative costs, ensuring compliance with company and regulatory requirements, and increasing collaboration and flexibility.”

Key Features of Adlib PDF for SharePoint 2010

• Merging Files in Document Sets – Adlib PDF for SharePoint leverages the new Document Sets feature in SharePoint 2010 by converting and merging files in a Document Set into a single PDF file. This makes it simpler to work with collections of different document types across an enterprise for greater collaboration, reduced administrative costs and increased flexibility
• SharePoint Designer Support – Adlib leverages the updated SharePoint Designer to create workflows that include rich document rendering without any custom coding. Out-of-the-box workflows included with SharePoint 2010 can be simply updated to include Adlib document rendering and are then reusable across an entire enterprise. Leveraging SharePoint Designer provides enhanced flexibility and reduces the cost of enterprise-wide deployments of SharePoint 2010 and Adlib PDF for SharePoint
• Metadata Driven Document Rendering – Adlib PDF for SharePoint leverages the new enterprise managed metadata services within SharePoint 2010 to automate document conversion workflows. Adlib’s unique metadata-driven rendering and publishing centrally applies consistent and reliable document settings such as watermarks, table of contents, headers, footers, timestamps, navigation features, hyperlinks, title page and page numbers to ensure documents meet company and regulatory requirements

Leveraging SharePoint 2010 metadata unlocks the real value of the Adlib PDF for SharePoint solution. Our customers working in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceutical, financial services and government are using Adlib PDF for SharePoint to automate formerly inefficient manual procedures to achieve compliance and minimize costs.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

This Sunday is Father's Day - so to honour that occasion, we've gathered reflections on fatherhood by some of the executive management team at Adlib.

On Commuting

Brian Maguire, our VP, Enterprise Sales & Marketing (right), has chosen a different work/life balance after a decades-long career where much of it included long hours and long commutes.

His drive to work is now 6 minutes; in the past, he had a job across the country from his young family. "The work was interesting," says Brian, "and my wife used to have a travelling job earlier in her career, so she got that. But she certainly appreciates that I can help out with family and domestic life more now.”

Adlib's Chief Software Architect, Jean Ouellette (right), says "I would forfeit many things to minimize my commute to work since this consumes time you can otherwise spend with family. And commuting increases your risk of accidents, not to mention the environmental impact. I have a friend who has had two car accidents in the past six weeks and half on the long commute to work."

On Mealtime

A typical work day for Brian sees him at the breakfast table with his kids, ages 13 and 15, still with time to get to work for 7:30. "Being close also means I can get to their soccer games, take them to guitar, their piano lessons, and play golf with my son twice a week."

Jean also makes a point of having breakfast with his kids, aged 12 and 15, on most days. He says he makes time for this by getting up early to get work done while the house is quiet. And Jean often works through lunch so he can avoid taking work home at the end of the day. "We try to have dinner all together, help with school work, have family time... Then, If necessary, I work when everyone is in bed."

Jean admits that "the work/life balance is always a challenge; I value my family time very much – it is my priority. Nevertheless, it is easy to lose track of that when you also enjoy your work."

Being one of the founders of Adlib Software, Jean is particularly sensitive to getting the family/work balance right for their workforce. The company has summer hours, starting in early June, giving staff the choice to leave work early on Fridays. "We believe in flex hours," says Jean. "I hesitate to ask my employees to work beyond regular hours,"

On the 'Circle of Life'

Scott Mackey (right), our Director, Product Management, reflects that Father’s Day comes and goes quickly like so many other days of ‘celebration’. "It always seems to bring into sharp focus the speed with which life passes us by. When we’re young we think of Father’s Day in a single direction – about our own fathers," Scott observes. "It’s more about a quick thank you and simple demonstrations of appreciation."

He continues: "Those demonstrations are golden - how many of the fathers in your office have a hand-made, slightly misshapen Father’s day gift on prominent display? I have at least two such priceless artifacts on my desk," says Scott, the father of a 15-year-old and 10-year-old.

On Grandfathers

"But when you have a young family of your own, it suddenly becomes a bi-directional event with a new dad and two grandfathers to share in the celebration. Grandad sometimes gets the supporting role treatment, but you’ll never hear him complain. Watch his eyes when the grandkids enter the room. Richest man in the world."

On a sadder note, Scott adds, "hospital visits shift from places of joy where fathers go to see their newborn children, to places of worry where we go to visit fathers who have fallen ill. My own father is in hospital now, but thankfully he’s now recovering quickly. What a great Father’s Day gift!"

On Mothers

Brian thinks it is "much, much easier for a man to balance career and parenthood than for a woman; kids instinctively expect all the nurturing to come from the mother. It’s OK for the father to be swamped by work and let family obligations suffer; but it’s not that way for the mother. The father won’t notice; but the mother will be thinking about 65 things about the kids."

Jean acknowledges, "I’m lucky in that my wife has chosen to either work part-time or stay home since we've had kids, and this simplifies our life quite a bit."

Advice to Dads

Brian has this advice to men in management: "Coaching kids in sports is a good activity for managers; it develops your skills in building teamwork and motivation in your employees. Seeing the effect of one person’s attitude on the whole team is always interesting."

Jean recommends that working fathers "respect the family time, and don’t let the technology, the connectivity, compromise that. It’s easy to let it happen."

Scott says, "I hope you have been able to achieve that ideal life/work balance as you scream down the one-way highway of time."

From all of us at Adlib, we wish you a Happy Father's Day - whether you are a father, stepdad or grandpa!

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

Adlibber Meagan MacPherson, who is an account executive focusing on the pharmaceutical market, as well as other verticals, is attending the Drug Information Association (DIA) Show this week in Washington, DC. She files these highlights from the show floor:

• Attendance, of more than 2,000 people, is up about 30% over last year's DIA Show in San Diego
• The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) the next generation of eCTD - known as Regulatory Product Submission (RPS), specifically the RPS-2 standard - is going to be delayed by a few more years; the RPS-3 standard is coming out in 2013
• Nearly 65% of net new applications in 2008 were SaaS implementations; cloud computing is the way to go these days
• The FDA discussed social media and its uses for pharmaceutical companies and how they can leverage their brands and press releases, etc.
• Product Information Management (PIM) is going to have more delays

• Special mention to LORENZ Life Sciences for their fantastic crab dinner Tuesday evening at Captains Pell in Fairfax, VA

Founded in 1964, DIA describes itself as a "neutral, nonprofit, global, professional association of nearly 18,000 members who work in every facet of the discovery, development, and life cycle management of pharmaceuticals, medical devices and related products."

Did you know that...?

Seven of the world's top Global 2000 Life Sciences companies are Adlib Software customers.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup - the hugely popular international soccer tournament happening this year in South Africa - is underway. One of the nations playing in this esteemed sporting event is Italy; I thought that would be a good jumping-off point for reflections on my recent business trip to Italy.

Meeting with a large Italian governmental organization revealed to me some real-world examples of the following truths:

1. Large enterprises significantly value their relationship with a vendor, even above software functionality! That relationship, ideally, includes:

• Implementation support that is aimed at a successful outcome for customers
• Responsive customer support
• Listening to customer feedback in order to continually improve the customer experience
• Sharing of information about the future product roadmap
• If there are issues, someone is there who is focused on ensuring that customers remain successful (This may seem obvious, but in the real world, not always)

Much to our surprise, our main competitors (not naming names, but these are vendors that serve huge government and private-sector enterprises) seem to fall short in these relationship skills. We kept hearing this, again and again, in talks with large European organizations.

Another recent business trip - this time to NYC for the day - confirmed for me that enterprises  – especially government organizations which are historically bureaucratic – quickly find themselves inundated by a mountain of paper documents if they do not have an innovative document strategy.

Need to Do More than Store

The organization’s initial solution is put something in place to allow them to scan and store electronic images of those documents. Great, that solves their immediate catastrophic pain; but it doesn’t do anything to allow them to extract intelligence or easily retrieve those documents in the future.

Intelligence extraction is typically a result of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that searches text, after which business rules are applied to determine specific metadata. Therein lies the real intelligence hidden within documents – intelligence that is needed to make the right business decisions, quickly and easily.

Sound obvious? It's not to the many organizations drowning in a literal sea of 10s or 100s of thousands of documents – a flow that never slows. So, a successful enterprise must have a plan in place to appropriately deal with that onslaught. And that plan must involve automated workflows.

My experience working with customers is that once an organization has committed to solving the problem of electronically storing their documents, they are very open to using some sort of automated workflow solution.

But they often don’t know the options, or advantages, of automated workflow. It’s my job to get out there, intercontinentally, with our partners and on our own, to help educate organizations on the sea change that automated workflows will make to their bottom line... Man, I love my job!

Peter Duff
President and CEO
Adlib Software

Are you using Microsoft SharePoint 2007, or thinking of evolving to SharePoint 2010, and need to convert documents to PDF? 

Join us for a 45-minute live & interactive webinar on Tuesday, June 22nd, to learn about what is new in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and the Adlib PDF for SharePoint solution.

The Perfect Partnership

The dynamic duo on our webinar will be:

• Jason Piccola, Microsoft's Technical Solutions Professional - SharePoint. He began working on collaborative technologies back in early 2000, including SharePoint 2001,and Jason has worked as a consultant for solutions built on the MOSS 2007 platform. He currently works with enterprise customers in the mid-Atlantic district

• Paul Dyck, Adlib's Product Manager, is a passionate customer advocate, with more than 20 years' experience in product management. He offers insights into how enterprises can unlock the business value of an automated document workflow

What's on the Agenda 

The June 22 webinar will cover the following:

• New features and enhancements to Microsoft SharePoint 2010

• How to support business processes with efficient and secure collaboration between suppliers, business units, customer and partners by automating critical document workflows to convert, assemble, and deliver documents

• Accelerate time to market by generating standardized documents to ensure consistent, high-quality documentation for hundreds of document formats – including Word documents, engineering drawings, spreadsheets and presentations

• Meet regulatory compliance or internal standards with consistent and high-quality document rendering, in addition to providing quick and easy access to find information for streamlined archiving

The webinar is free, but don't wait until the last minute to register... Get ahead of the curve, stay ahead of the curve!

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, ISV /Software Solutions, and a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Front Runner, of course Adlib will be at next month's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

At the July 11 - 15 event, we Adlibbers - our VP, Channel Sales & Marketing, Brian Kernohan, Paul Fratesi, our Global SI Partner Manager, and myself - will be meeting with several Microsoft executives to ensure alignment of future strategies, and we'll be sitting down with many SIs and ISVs to explore the value of working together.

If you are an ISV or SI looking to extend your product or service offering, please reach out to us through the WPC Connect tool to arrange a meeting. (The Connect "wall" is exclusive to WPC attendees. A heads-up: Microsoft Silverlight is used for this site.)

We are especially looking forward to Thursday’s conference sessions, which will focus on Microsoft's U.S. strategies for FY 2011 and beyond, including Azure and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

An annual event since 2003, and happening in Washington, D.C. this year, the five-day-long Microsoft WPC brings together thousands of partners from more than 100 countries to plan their business strategies for the upcoming year, including product innovations, such as SharePoint 2010.

Last year's conference featured more than 228 training sessions led by partners, Microsoft professionals, and industry leaders, as well as 90 hands-on labs, and thousands of meetings responsible for many new business transactions.

Not surprisingly, a key theme at this year's Microsoft WPC will be the exploration of Microsoft's Cloud services, as cloud computing is a topic that keeps popping at 2009 and 2010 industry events everywhere.

We hope to see you, and have a chance to connect, at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference!

Riley O'Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software

In two weeks a group of high-level regulatory affairs professionals, including from Health Canada, will be sharing knowledge in a Mississauga, Ontario hotel - and one of the experts leading their discussions will be our own Scott Mackey.

The Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) symposium is being sponsored by LORENZ Life Sciences, a global leader in electronic submissions and one of Adlib's life sciences partners. It is the first time that an Adlibber has presented at a RAPS event.

Scott, who is the Director of Product Management at Adlib, will hold a workshop at 1:45 p.m. on Tues. June 22, 2010 titled "Populating Your eCTD – Submission Document Rendering." Topics will include:

• How the success of your eCTD submission depends on regulatory publishing compliance with the eCTD guidelines and with the format of PDF files contained in it

• How to reduce document QA times, cut costs, speed up submission preparation, and reduce the potential for rejection due to formatting errors - by delivering flawlessly formatted PDFs that meet regulatory standards

• How some of the largest global pharmaceutical companies centralize and manage their document rendering process to reduce time-to-market and improve profitability

Emerging Global Trends in E-Submissions

Other topics that will be discussed by regulatory professional at pharmaceutical and other life sciences enterprises and government organizations will include:

• The emerging trends in electronic submissions in Canada as compared with other global regulatory leaders
• A critical examination of the eCTD from the perspective of the Health Canada reviewer, pro-eCTD industries, reluctant industries, and regulatory consultants
• Practical aspects of the eCTD including a method of eCTD tool selection that will address company-specific needs, life-cycle management, and cost effectiveness
• The challenges facing companies transitioning to the eCTD
• The permanence of the eCTD in product lifecycle
• A general demonstration of the eCTD tool currently supported by Health Canada Practical aspects and issues related to submission compilation (including hyperlinking, bookmarking, and publishing issues)
• Life-cycle management within the eCTD Validation issues

Part of the reason for holding this event - on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at the Delta Meadowvale Hotel in Mississauga, Ontario - is to discuss the potential for launching a RAPS networking group in the Greater Toronto Area.

Join us, to give your input and learn more about getting involved... at the very least, you'll go home with some interesting perspectives and new information about the eCTD.

To register for Scott's workshop on eCTD technology, visit LORENZ Life Sciences; for more information about the workshop, visit RAPS. 

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

Microsoft wants software vendors to get their heads in the clouds…

That was the key message last week at the 3^rd annual Independent Software Vendors (ISV) Leadership Summit at the headquarters of Microsoft Canada, the event that hosts the annual BlueSky ISV Innovation Excellence Award. (We recently became a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV Partner.)

The emphasis at the event was on the opportunity that the cloud presents for software vendors. Microsoft is “all in" with cloud computing and want us to join them.

About 200 ISVs from across Canada spent the day learning about new Microsoft technologies and strategies for ISV partners. It also gave us the opportunity to interact with Microsoft employees. I don’t know if it was intentional or mandated, but it was easy to spot them in the room because they were uniformly dressed in charcoal suits, black shoes, light shirt, no tie.

Eric Gales, the president of Microsoft Canada, has predicted the rapid adoption of the cloud - figuring that by 2014, cloud computing will account for:

• Over 40% of IT spend
• Over 45% of new enterprise IT workloads
• Over 24% of all enterprise IT workloads

Business advantages of using the cloud are:

• Pay for use
• OPEX vs CAPEX (operating expense vs capital expense)
• Lower and predictable costs

• Faster deployment
• Patch management automatic
• Security
• Reliability

• Latest software is always available
• International access to online services

Gladstone Grant, VP of Developer and Platform Evangelism delivered the technical keynote, providing an overview Microsoft’s “cumulous” offerings. It is important to understand the different categories of cloud products, otherwise it is too easy to get confused by the terminology.

Microsoft Online Services 

Also known as BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), these are SAAS (Software As A Service) products available on a subscription bases. They include:

• SharePoint Online
• Exchange Online
• Office Communications Online
• Office Live Meeting

Windows Azure Platform 

These are the Platform As A Service (PAAS) products, and include:

• Windows Azure
• Microsoft SQL Azure

If you are not a software developer or ISV, Windows Azure will be of little interest to you because it is a platform on which to build an application. Once an application is built on Azure, it can be made available to end users as a SAAS product. One way to remember the difference is this:

SAAS – Consume it

PAAS – Build on it

It is clear that consumers and businesses are getting faster at adopting new technologies. Once businesses get over one of the major hurdles of using cloud resources, trusting that their data is secure, I believe we will see a race towards this technology.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

It's expensive to keep sports cars running and yachts docked at international marinas; so, to that end, we provide a solution that allows investment bankers to save money by working more efficiently (and saving a lot of trees in the process; trees for their property in Tuscany, perhaps?)

Investment banking firms do extensive research on companies, while assisting their customers in raising capital or advising them on mergers and acquisitions. The old-school way of doing this is to have researchers collect all of the required information (R-10K Forms, Annual Reports, CEO Presentations, etc.) and copy them into physical binders that can be referenced by the investment bankers.

These binder volumes were usually very large and cumbersome to work with and update with new information - not to mention the reams of paper consumed in the process.

Using Adlib technology, multiple documents of any file type (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) are assembled into a single PDF file. The resulting PDF file can be enhanced to make it more convenient for the users in these kind of financial services firms:

• PDF bookmarks for quickly navigating through large documents
• Table of Contents with active links to documents and headings within those documents
• Page numbering for the entire document so there are unique page numbers for reference

 This approach has many advantages over the old method:

• More Efficient to Work with: Navigation enhancements such as PDF bookmarks and Table of Contents make it much easier for users to find information and quickly scan the combined document
  
• Simple to Update: If new or updated information is available, the document can be re-generated and is instantly available without manual re-copying and inserting in all of the physical copies in the organization
• Single Source of Information: Using a document management system like SharePoint, investment bankers can collaborate with a single source of information, ensuring that they are using the same data to make decisions
• Less paper: No need to copy and distribute massive volumes of paper that will eventually have to be shredded (another cost)

Other uses for multiple-document assembly, such as assembling board books, meeting agendas, or business proposals will be covered in future posts here at this blog; stay tuned!

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Today’s customers are focused on using software products that can meet the needs of as many of their users as possible. To that end, software companies are either partnering with other technology organizations, or they are acquiring technologies to give customers more from one place. For today’s blog, I’m going to focus on the partnering aspect of product portfolio diversification.

Top 3 Signs of a Good Relationship

1. Having the Right People (doing the right things): Make sure there is an Account Manager who is focused on the relationship so the right voices get heard within your organization.

2. Comprehensive Product Offering: As customers take on a mass software consideration effort, they are increasingly looking for more ways to leverage what they already own and share that resource around their organization. Technology companies need to be enterprise-grade with their product suite – specifically, scalable, fault tolerant, and highly available. There are also high demands for SaaS based solutions along with support for cloud computing environments.

3. Strong After-Sales Support: Communication is critical before the closing of a deal, but what happens afterwards - to maintain your investment in the software? Having varied forms of communication with your customers keeps your company on their mind; for example, quarterly e-newsletters are a great way to engage them on additional capabilities you have or how to use your products more efficiently. Using Twitter is a another great way to get information out to the world. (I personally follow various technology companies to see what’s happening.)

As customers drive us to increase the quality and depth of our products, we’ll continue to see more and more partnership opportunities to ensure these solutions are exceeding customer expectations.

Rupin Mago
Strategic Alliances Manager
Adlib Software

The New York Times recently reported that Apple is bigger than Microsoft in terms of market worth, making the "i-con" company now the holder of the world's most valuable technology. How are we to interpret this, and does it affect the technology decisions we make in the future?

Well, here at our office, we won’t be replacing our SharePoint system, mothballing our SQL servers, swapping out Visio, or shutting down Outlook Exchange any time soon.

Here are some lessons that could be taken from this change in fortune in the long-running competition between Apple and Microsoft:

• The value of sticking to your principles and maintaining your brand

Apple consistently sides with the free-thinking, creative, casually dressed members of the counter-culture. This has been reflected in the famous “1984” Super Bowl ad and “Think Different” campaign that featured a diverse range of interesting  and influential personalities from Mohammed Ali and Ted Turner to Bob Dylan

• The extent that technology is used in our daily life (or should I say, iLife?)

Nobody questions the need for a computer at home anymore; the questions now are: What kind and how many? We rely on them to manage our memories (digital photos), keep in touch with family and friends (Skype, IM, gmail), and amuse ourselves (Farmville on Facebook, etc.).

• The value of (good) design

When someone says that any product (including PCs) is becoming "commoditized," that's an indication of a lack of imagination and innovation. Not so with Apple - who continue to innovate at a rapid rate, designing products that equal objects of desire among consumers

• The benefits of diversifying your business

While Microsoft is clearly the leader in business technology, Apple continues to sprout tentacles of profitable business – computers, music players, phones, ebook readers, digital music, video, and now book distribution, etc.

• The value of anticipating the needs and desires of your target market

In the case of Apple, they've actually gone beyond anticipating needs, and have created needs and markets that did not exist before - for example, iTunes and the iPad for digital content distribution

•  Eventually the righteous will triumph over the evil

The Home/Work Tech Balance

In reality, the true lesson is a combination of all of the above (except for that last thing about good and evil). We have a need for technology in our lives - but those needs domestically are not necessarily met by the same IT solutions that make us productive in the workplace.

While we are all consuming more and more technology (and some of it will overlap home/work), I believe that we will also see the continued divergence of the “two solitudes” that represent our lives at home and at work.

P.S. The ideas for this post were born on an iMac at home, and finished on a ThinkPad running Windows XP at work.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Aka, "Document What you Do, and Do What you Document"

Even the definition of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is dry and robotic: “An established procedure to be followed in carrying out a given operation or in a given situation.”

However, as structured and boring as they sound, many companies live (and die) by their SOPs For example, manufacturing and life sciences - including the pharmaceutical and medical devices markets - are two key industries where SOPs are central to daily operation.

Imagine a worker on the shop floor tasked with making a pacemaker according to a specific SOP – but the version they’re using is 6 months old and missing a key update that will better protect the patient!

SOP Needed to Generate an SOP

I nearly choked on my coffee when I first heard the notion that these kinds of enterprises even need an SOP on how to generate SOPs!  It boils down to documenting what you do as an organization, and then actually following what has been documented. The intent is to ensure consistent, quality output upon which customers can rely.

The following are typical stages involved in a Standard Operating Procedure:

• Create it
• Have it reviewed by experts
• Get it approved by management
• Release it to those that are to follow the guidelines
• Revise as new information becomes available
• Archive it, or make obsolete, when it is no longer needed or relevant

These stages can be greatly accelerated today with electronic formats and automated business processes.

Over the lifespan of the SOP process, the PDF format is being used to share each successive version of an SOP – ensuring that the content is easily distributed and accessible to everyone involved and secure from unauthorized access.

PDF is an ideal format for the SOP process because:

• Everyone has the free PDF Reader (or can get it)
• PDF offers features like watermarking to indicate a document is ‘draft’ vs. ‘approved’
• PDF Security restricts view/print access as required
• The final PDF can be published to the corporate portal with watermarks indicating that it is the Approved version
• Includes a ‘freshness’ stamp that allows the consumer to see that the SOP is only valid for a period of time.

So, while SOPs are a pretty dry topic they are a perfect example of how automating a business process – and using the capabilities in a PDF solution – can provide real-world benefits to a company, both in terms of increased productivity and reduced risk.

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software 

I was honoured to be invited as a top SharePoint partner, and presenter, at the DataLan and Microsoft launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 this week in New York City. (Here I am enjoying Times Square after the event.) There was a good turnout of about 150 people at the day-long "open house" event  held at Microsoft's mid-Manhattan offices.

I led a breakout session about Adlib's PDF for SharePoint product- the only server-based solution that offers PDF conversion, recognition (OCR) and publishing functionality within the SharePoint environment.

More than 30 business people attended my breakout session, and some of their queries were around regulatory compliance, such as FDA submissions, as well as integration into enterprise-level applications such as Documentum and FileNet.

Some of Adlib's own enterprise-level customers were at the event, and attendees came from all sectors - including life sciences, government, legal and financial services industries.

The event was attended by several other of DataLan's partners working in the Microsoft ecosystem, including Nintex, Knowledge Lake, Bamboo Solutions, Syntergy, and Metalogix.

Paul Fratesi
Global SI Partner Manager
Adlib Software

It never rains but it pours... and when it comes to Adlib and Microsoft, our working association is raining down success on our heads these days.

We have just announced that Adlib is both an accredited member of the Microsoft Partner Network Independent Software Vendor (ISV) / Software Solutions competency program, and a Microsoft SharePoint Front Runner.

Being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner (since 2009) has opened up a world of opportunities for us to earn professional designations through Microsoft's Competencies Program.

The way we earned our Gold status was by receiving positive feedback from clients and partners, as well as having extensive experience in software development using Microsoft technologies and working with the Microsoft Certified Professionals on our development team. Being Microsoft Certified Gold puts Adlib among the most competent, successful companies in the world.

Microsoft ISV Partner

The ISV/Software Solutions Competency designation recognizes that Adlib has demonstrated a significant level of industry experience providing services, software and support for Microsoft technologies.

Microsoft Front Runner

As a Microsoft Front Runner - defined as "the early adopter program for Microsoft solution partners" - our solutions are ensured to be compatible with the latest Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010.

Not that we're bragging (OK, we are) but Adlib is the only software company in the world that offers all the functionalities for PDF conversion, recognition and publishing within a SharePoint environment. 

Next month Adlib will release a version of PDF for SharePoint that supports the SharePoint 2010 environment.

It's good to be gold... Microsoft Certified Gold!

Riley O'Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software

In case the recent deluge of PR, launch events, news coverage and blog posts haven’t tipped you off, Microsoft has initiated the global launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. It will be interesting to see how quickly 2010 is adopted.

I believe that Microsoft has done a brilliant job of bringing SharePoint to the market. The ECM market is relatively mature with a short list of dominating players. While they battled to own customers with comprehensive “enterprise” solutions, Microsoft positioned themselves for growth through “reverse positioning, which Harvard Business School defines, in part, as:

"... By stripping away attributes consumers expect in a mature product, and adding some surprising new ones, a company can shift a product backward from maturity into the growth phase." (See Harvard Business School's graph, here.)

In an article from the Harvard Business Review, Youngme Moon writes that "such firms...step off the augmentation treadmill, shedding product attributes the rest of the industry considers sacred."

Huge Sweet Spot on the Tail of ECM Market

It seems to me that Microsoft - with its SharePoint offering - has done just that. They have found a massive sweet spot of companies looking to get control over documents in their organization, while grabbing a firm hold of the tail of the ECM market as well.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Student life is not easy at the best of times. But during the two most stressful parts of collegial life – exams and job hunting – the Adlib Express PDF conversion solution is helping out at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. 

In the bad old days, all exam documents were copied to floppy disks and submitted to school administrators. Extra staff and hundreds of hours were required to offload the documents from the disks, then print and organize the exams for grading.

Today’s students - using their laptop computers ,which are de rigeur on campuses everywhere - generate Excel, PowerPoint and Word files during their exams, which they submit electronically to the school’s intranet.

Our server - integrated with the school’s legacy system for document workflow optimization - performs a one-time bulk conversion into secure, accessible PDFs. This automated process merges them together and adds a cover sheet for easy identification, making them easier for professors to review and grade. The results:

• Significant reduction in the time required to prepare exams for grading
• Elimination of costs associated with extra temporary staff
• Better security for students’ materials

 PDF Resume Packages

Also, when students at the Richard Ivey School of Business are seeking jobs, they can upload relevant documents to the university’s intranet, which are then converted into PDF packages, and submitted by the school to recruiters.

Making university life easier – that’s something we've gotten behind in a big way!

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software

So here we are, day 3 at EMC World Boston 2010.  I’m in the “Blogger’s Lounge” writing up my notes and comments on this years event.

The theme at EMC World is cloud computing (as at other recent shows, such as FOSE 2010) - more specifically, the ‘private cloud’.

Wikipedia defines the "cloud" as shared resources, software and information provided to computers and other devices on demand (like the electricity grid).

A "private" cloud is essentially a ‘Cloud’ within your organizations firewall, which will protect you from a data security and corporate governance perspective.

Here at EMC World during Pat Gelsinger’s keynote address, he gave us a live demo of moving 508 Virtual Machines, which were on rack servers beside him on stage, to a location within 100 miles. To my surprise, the transfer was complete before Pat’s keynote ended! This demo showed us that it is entirely possible to coordinate and execute all kinds of IT related tasks through the Internet - but be anywhere in the world.

Rebranding to Information Intelligence Group

On the software side, EMC has rebranded their Content Management & Archiving Group (CM&A) to the Information Intelligence Group (IIG).  This re-branding effort describes where EMC is taking their product suite in the future. Mark Lewis defined the purpose of IIG as maximizing organizations' ability to leverage the information so they have a business advantage.

EMC's IIG - whose goal is to migrate the products to the cloud, both private and public - have 5 distinct groups:

• Intelligent Information Governance
• Intelligent Case Management
• Intelligent Information Access
• Intelligent Enterprise Capture
• Intelligent Customer Communications

Most Unstructured Content is Also Unmanaged

At this point, 95% of the content in the world is unstructured and growing at a exponential rate. It is estimated that there will be 35 zettabytes of content by 2020.

Of the unstructured content, 85% of it is currently unmanaged. As more regulations and standards are introduced to protect people, organizations and the world, more of this content will need to be managed.

Dr. Victor Spivak, EMC's CMA Chief Architect, talked about CMIS integration and plug version 1.0 is available now and will be commercialized for the EMC Documentum 6.7 launch in Q1 next year.  As a founding member of CMIS, EMC is leading the charge to ensure their products as being CMIS-compatible.

Rupin Mago
Strategic Alliances Manager
Adlib Software

Every time we attend or exhibit at a SharePoint trade show, we run into the people from Atalasoft.

One of the products Atalasoft develops – Vizit SP – allows you to efficiently view, markup, compare, search, print and collaborate on documents in SharePoint.

We always felt that there would be cases when our products could be used together as a valuable solution to a business problem, because Adlib PDF for SharePoint is really good at automating the conversion of documents to PDF, and their products make it efficient to work with them within SharePoint.

Other similarities are that neither product requires software to be installed on the users’ desktop or documents to be downloaded from SharePoint. Adlib and Atalasoft recently presented our products together as a solution for working with CAD drawings in SharePoint.

PDF for SharePoint and VizitSP provide a valuable solution for companies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. These companies work with many Autodesk AutoCAD  (DWG) files from various vendors that require review and approval.

Converting them to PDF within SharePoint has a number of advantages over leaving them in their original DWG format:

• Much smaller file size makes them more easily accessible remotely
• Protects Intellectual Property (IP) within the files when sharing them between vendors
• Eliminates the need for desktop software to review them (AutoCAD, AutoCAD viewer)
• Provides greater visibility into technical information by making drawings easily accessible to all users

Once they are in PDF format, VizitSP can be used  to:

• Review drawings via the SharePoint interface
• Approve changes to drawings
• Make annotations that are communicated back to the designer

The value of using PDF for SharePoint and VizitSP as a solution for AEC companies are as follows:

Reduced Cost

• Replaces manual conversion processes with automated conversion of CAD drawings
• Eliminates the need to purchase and maintain desktop software for viewing and annotating CAD files

Increased User Satisfaction & Efficiency

• Provide greater visibility into technical information by making drawings easily accessible
• Promote collaboration internally and with external suppliers while protecting intellectual property

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

CMIS is short for Content Management Interoperability Services - but a better explanation for the acronym could be Connect My Information Silos!

If all companies kept all of their content in a single repository, there would be no need for something like CMIS - a content management interface supported by AIIM and industry heavies like Microsoft, EMC, IBM, Oracle, and SAP that enables content developed and managed in one ECM technology to be easily access or managed using a different ECM system.

This scenario is coming up more and more frequently in organizations as a result of mergers and acquisitions or the deployment of products like Microsoft SharePoint in addition to existing ECM products.

• The release of version 1 of the CMIS specification - which has just been approved by the OASIS International Consortium (yesterday)
• In April 2010, Microsoft announced the release of a CMIS connector for SharePoint. 

Leveraging CMIS within SharePoint

Here’s a use case of how CMIS could be leveraged within SharePoint. A document library could be created within SharePoint that references content stored in an external repository. This would allow users to interact with the content (browse, view, edit) without leaving the SharePoint user interface. They could even invoke workflows, including document conversion workflows from PDF for SharePoint on documents stored in the external repository.

Other cases where this would be valuable are:

• Archiving content created in one repository to the repository used for Records Management
• Assembling a single document from source documents located in different repositories

We have been following the development of CMIS closely because we agree with many analysts who say that it could transform the ECM industry. And it could help Adlib Software more easily deliver PDF rendering solutions for organizations that is independent of the silos they are currently kept in.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Today marks the 5th anniversary of the approval of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) v1.0 specification as an OASIS standard. Half a decade ago, the campaign began in earnest for "document freedom," with ODF created on the grounds that innovation and interoperability are paramount - and these are based on open standards.

The diagram below (source: ODFAlliance.org) maps out milestones in 3 categories:

• Standardization (yellow bars): approval and publication dates in OASIS and ISO/IEC
• Products (blue): A non-comprehensive sample of support of the standard into particular products
• Adoption (green): Government publication or announcement of pro-ODF policies around the world

We at Adlib Software offer our heartfelt congrats to the ODF Alliance. Like PDF - our bread and butter - ODF is a "public" electronic document output format that lets users access content without forcing them to buy commercial software.

ODF Formats Work Within Office 2010

A beta version of Microsoft Office 2010 indicates that users are prompted as to whether they want to use Office Open XML (OOXML) or ODF - both of which are international standards.

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

We’re in the business of automating business processes – and one of the most popular is turning a seemingly endless flow of images into searchable PDF output.  Scanners, imaging software, legacy content repositories are all loaded with images and starved for usable content – until that content is revealed through the process of Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Since the type, volume and quality of images varies widely, we are often asked: “How much hardware and software do I need?” It’s difficult to answer because it depends on a variety of factors including:

• Image quality
• Resolution
• File size
• Page count
• Server hardware/network performance

All these factors have the potential to create deviations-  large and small - to overall system throughput.

Image Quality

Poor image quality makes the OCR engine work harder, such as when:

• Characters are unclear
• Characters merge with adjacent characters
• Images are warped from the original scan

The lower the quality of the image, the slower the processing speed. Most high-quality software offers configurable settings where image clean-up and de-skewing can optimize the document prior to OCR to help optimize the likelihood of accurate character recognition.

Resolution

If you’ve ever zoomed in on a web image, you’ll know that they are quite pixilated (rough) when viewed up close. Higher resolution images remain clear as you zoom in. Correspondingly, if an OCR engine has clearer characters to analyze, it will have more success at rendering the output accurately.

The balance that needs to be struck is file size vs. OCR level quality. High-resolution scans have much larger file sizes than low-resolution scans, which introduces transmission and storage capacity costs.

Most experts suggest 300 dpi (dots per inch) as the best resolution to provide balance between OCR level quality and file size.  

File Size and Page Count

Large page sizes (think CAD drawings) and documents with hundreds or thousands of pages logically take more time to process. Some systems allow you to segment files with large page counts into multiple files that can be distributed across multiple hardware/software instances for faster overall throughput and reduced bottlenecks. In more advanced environments you may have the option to ‘re-merge’ the newly recognized content if required.

Server Hardware/Network Performance

Faster, more powerful servers will process documents faster than slower ones – no surprise there. For users, the network performance can play a role since files and instructions need to be transferred. This is more of an issue when the server resides in a different geographic region than the user. For enterprise users, look for technology that can be seamlessly scaled out to meet large or dynamic requirements. Our customers often deploy multiple instances of the application to maximize performance while benefitting from the added fault tolerance and redundancy.

PDF/A Requirements

Consider also the overall goals of making the content searchable. The ISO standard PDF/A (PDF for Archive) is a growing requirement – making documents searchable in a format that is an approved standard for long term accessibility.  

Though more popular in Europe at the moment there is a growing wave of interest in both PDF/A and the requirement to – wherever possible – use OCR to make the content searchable.

In the U.S. the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) discusses both PDF/A and OCR on it’s web site:

”Agencies that embed searchable text in PDF scanned images should use OCR processes that do not alter the original bit-mapped image. For example: agencies should avoid OCR processes that substitute OCR'd text for bitmapped characters, and/or use lossy compression to reduce file size.”

As with any project start with the end in mind – what is the intended use for the content – consider the items above as you determine the best setup for your OCR solution. Doing it right will maximize the value you derive from your content.

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software

We recently spoke with a customer that described the problems they were having managing 100s of copies of desktop software used to convert documents to PDF. A server-based approach to document conversion could solve a number of these headaches.

The necessity to install software onto the computers or laptops we use every day is going down all the time. With the rise of Software As A Service (SAAS), cloud computing, and server-based products, many of the shortcomings and challenges of deploying software to each users’ machine can be overcome. This includes the technology required to convert documents to PDF, OCR, and document assembly.

Typically, desktop products are used to handle PDF conversion when the number of users and the volume of documents to be converted are relatively low. At some point though, these numbers will increase and problems and inefficiencies in this approach will become apparent. These include:

• Consistency and compliance
• Cost to maintain and support

 Consistency and Compliance

It is difficult to ensure consistency across different users if the setting for the software used to generate PDF files are local to their machine. This is an especially critical issue for regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical. Funneling all document conversion through a single point at which the standards are applied ensures a consistent and compliant output and removes the requirement that each content contributor understands and applies them. The reduction in user training further reduces the cost of maintaining a compliant environment.

Cost to Maintain and Support

Desktop management is an ongoing IT challenge at many companies. For example, whenever a new version is available, the task of updating employees' desktop computers has many issues:

• How to update mobile employees
• How to update without negatively affecting employee productivity
• Updating computers with different versions of the OS (Operating System)

There is also the cost of maintaining support for all desktops, regardless of how much they use the software.

Another advantage of a server-based approach is that PDF rendering services can be extended to all employees within an organization in a cost-effective way. Rather than purchase a software license for each employee regardless of how often they use it, the needs of the entire company can be considered.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software
  

At one dire moment, it appeared my "best" option was a 12-hour train ride from to Frankfurt, Germany to Madrid, Spain, a plane to Los Angeles via Bogota, Columbia, and then get from LA to Boston, where I live. That was the scenario I faced on Day 4, camped out at the Frankfurt Airport during the lockdown of European flights recently.

I knew there would be trouble the minute we landed in Frankfurt; it was 3 p.m. local time, and the 11-hour flight from Osaka, Japan had been uneventful. However, during the taxi to the gate, the pilot announced that customers connecting to Scandinavia, England and Ireland would have to seek customer service in the airport because their flights had been cancelled.  The reason? A volcanic eruption in Iceland.  (It was not until the next day that I realized this smoking behemoth went by the name “Eyjafjallajökull”.)

I pushed any concern from my mind because my flight to Boston was not until the next day.  Instead, I concentrated on clearing passport control, gathering my bags and getting to my hotel.  The time difference from Japan was a killer; I was ready for bed!

The next day I awoke (at 4 a.m., thanks to my jet lag) to CHAOS. The majority of EU airspace had been closed, and all flights into and out of Germany were cancelled. Uh oh...

I ran through a mental “to do” list: secure a hotel room for that night, get some Euros, get an EU charger for my cell phone, and rebook myself on a new flight. The hotel lobby was a zoo; I’m not exaggerating when I say that about 70 people were in line to speak with one of 5 front desk representatives. I got in the shortest line. (Thank you Starwood Gold Preferred Guest Program.)

After about 30 minutes, I got to speak with an associate, who politely explained that the hotel was fully booked, and they could not extend my stay for an additional night. I protested, and asked her to consult with her manager. Two minutes later, my stay was extended by one night.  (Had I known that this problem would repeat itself two more times, I would have reserved my room for a week.)

My BB: "...I may have a problem getting to AIIM..."

With my hotel room secured for the night, I sent a quick work email via Blackberry; “I think I’ll be able to get out of the EU prior to Monday, but if not, I may have a problem getting to AIIM in Philadelphia.” Luckily, none of my colleagues scheduled to attend AIIM were stranded anywhere, so everyone told me not to worry and to get home safely.

I’ll spare you the account of my next four days in limbo. Suffice it to say, there were several touch-and-go moments at the front desk during which I feared I might lose my hotel room, many boring hours spent watching CNN to see if the ash situation was improving, and many calls to multiple travel agents to evaluate all options for returning home.

In the end, I made it home via my original carrier on Tuesday night, April 20. It was blind luck that I was on the flight. On Saturday, my travel agent had re-booked me for the first available flight, not having any idea if or when the ash would clear.  The EU carriers had opted not to automatically rebook anyone, the reservations numbers were constantly busy (I couldn’t even hold for an agent), and the lines to speak with someone at the airport were about 1000 people deep.

Like I said, it was pure luck that I had a convenient hotel room for the entire “layover”, and that I left on a plane the first day the skies were reopened.  The only unlucky part was missing the AIIM conference.  I guess there is always the next event!

Riley O'Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software

SharePoint 2010 interoperability was all the buzz at this year's AIIM conference and expo this week in Philadelphia. We were there, demonstrating our PDF for SharePoint solution, within the Microsoft Pavilion.

Owen Allen, Microsoft's product manager for SharePoint 2010, came by our booth and chatted with Adlibber Alison Estrop (right).  He was a presenter at AIIM, as well as host of an informal evening event he dubbed "SharePint."

We attended SharePint, where the mojitos were flowing, lots of folks dancing (not we Adlibbers!) and everyone seemed to be having a great time - and some swapping of information about SharePoint 2010 happened too ;) One cool discussion had folks speculating as to whether the future direction will be to connect to repositories of information, or whether intelligent search is going to be the way to get at information.

Also at AIIM was a hands-on lab (below) for show attendees to test drive the various solutions offered at AIIM, which included:

• BPM/Workflow
• Collaboration/Social Software
• Data Capture + Imaging
• eDiscovery
• Document Management
• ECM Essentials
• Records Management
• SharePoint 
• We Content Management/Portals
• Web Services/SaaS
• Mobile Content Management

Brian Kernohan
VP, Strategic Alliances
Adlib Software

We were delighted to run into some of our partners - and companies that integrate our PDF for SharePoint and other rendering solutions - at the AIIM conference and expo this week.

For example, Ian Soler (right), a systems engineer at Sword CTSpace - a global leader in engineering content management and project content management - swung by the Adlib booth within the Microsoft Pavilion. Sword CTSpace was exhibiting within the Oracle booth at the AIIM show.

As partners for more than three years in the energy, utilities and engineering industries, Adlib is Sword CTSpace's preferred PDF rendering technology for their FusionEnterprise solution. They provide document management and collaboration workflow applications for the construction and engineering industry that increases the efficiency and reduces the risks in managing a built asset throughout its entire lifecycle.

Tim Fleet, who is responsible for product strategy at Sword CTSpace, also came by our booth (shown here, far left, with me).

Nintex Launches Products for SharePoint Server 2010

Nintex was also at the AIIM show, their booth (shown below) busy with people checking out their new products for SharePoint Server 2010 offerings, including Nintex Workflow 2010, Nintex Analytics 2010, and Nintex Workflow for Project Server 2010.

Nintex Workflow can be used with our PDF for SharePoint solution to create workflows that include converting documents to PDF. Our product manager Paul Dyck has created a video to demonstrate how Adlib and Nintex integrate.

All in all, we have a great time at AIIM Conference and Expo 2010, and look forward to the next one!

Brian Kernohan
VP, Strategic Alliances
 Adlib Software

Adlib Software is honoured to be invited to speak, by DataLan, as a top SharePoint ISV partner at Microsoft's mid-town Manhattan office this month for the introduction of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. The free event is hosted by DataLan Corporation, on May 19th, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Paul Fratesi, Adlib's Global SI Partner Manager, will be speaking at the launch about how our own product extends the capability of SharePoint, including new information on PDF for SharePoint 2010 (currently under embargo).

Adlib Express - the only server-based solution that offers PDF conversion, recognition (OCR) and publishing functionality within the SharePoint environment - is one of the usability tools listed by DataLan on its SharePoint-related products web page.

Come out to the event to learn about the new capabilities within SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. You will also learn about products, services, programs and solutions that will enable you to leverage an investment in SharePoint to provide comprehensive, cost-effective business solutions to your organization.

DataLan’s Tony Smith, author of “SharePoint 2010 User's Guide: Learning Microsoft's Business Collaboration Platform," will host the event, which will also feature SharePoint and Office experts from Microsoft, DataLan, and other top SharePoint organizations. Highlights will include:

• SharePoint 2010 capabilities presentation and demonstrations
• Office 2010 capabilities presentation and demonstrations
• How to leverage SharePoint and Office to Improve IT services and decrease costs
• Overviews of the Microsoft DPS programs that offer qualifying customers funding to support you in leveraging your software investment
• Discussion on the best-of-breed and best-value third party products for SharePoint
• The chance to win valuable prizes
  

You can sign up for the free event via DataLan's online registration form.

Heather Angus-Lee
Web Marketing Strategist
Adlib Software
 

In the area of product management, you can never have enough knowledge about your customers, what they value most, and how your product/service is contributing to their success.

Leading IT market research company IDC recently studied what enterprises need most from application vendors. Their findings confirm all that we've been hearing from our customers at Adlib.

And what are the top 3 most important features that enterprises look for from their IT vendors?

1. Easy to integrate with existing systems
2. Most cost effective
3. Easy to customize to our changing needs

Now... does this sound like every claim you've ever heard from a vendor? Probably. So, how does an enterprise decipher between lip-service and real value-add products and services?

Explaining Vendor Clichés 

Digging into the IDC study does reveal some deeper explanations of what the following clichéd feature should mean:

• Easy to Integrate”: This is actually more about ensuring that an application becomes an integrated, interconnected application and user experience 

For example, if you are forced to choose between adding transparent, new capabilities for your users through vendor A, and saving a day doing the integration with vendor B, Vendor A should be the obvious choice. A better description might be: “easy integration with existing user experiences.”

• “Most Cost Effective”: Being one of the most common marketing claims doesn’t dilute its importance for technology decision makers. The hard costs are usually fairly straightforward – licensing fees, annual maintenance, services to implement/deploy/train etc. There are other, often significant costs saving opportunities to consider.

Automating a process can allow more work to be done accelerating productivity – often with measurable results. Using a technology that reduces or eliminates error-prone manual data entry, verification and re-work can reduce time wasted by high-value employees. Measuring the time saved for each employee - factoring in their salary - can add up in a hurry.

Besides, automating a process that required manual effort can seriously improve user satisfaction – tough to measure but valuable nonetheless.

• “Easy to Customize": I would suggest this is an accurate statement using inaccurate terminology. Our experience tells us that enabling configuration instead of customization allows an organization to more efficiently deploy and adapt to changing needs.

The IDC report mentions that 30% of an organization’s time is spent maintaining custom code. Our enterprise customers demand flexibility but it must achievable without a lot of expensive customization.

Using an innovative approach that leverages the metadata flowing through an organization, along with a configurable rules engine, our customers can quickly adapt to changing requirements without the need to define, design, build, maintain and train on new, custom code. By the way, this configurability not only provides flexibility but reduces overall costs.

The IDC report contains additional information worthy of a follow up post ... or two.  Stay tuned.

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software

Adlib will be at AIIM International Expo & Conference 2010 next week in Philadelphia. We’ll be exhibiting at Booth # MP6 in the Microsoft pavilion at the AIIM show.

The show includes information about BPM/workflow, collaboration/social software, data capture and imaging, eDiscovery, ECM essentials, document management and many other topics pertaining to information transfer.

AIIM, in cooperation with the content management industry, is committed to evolving various PDF standards – such as PDF/A, PDF/E and PDF/UA –  to accommodate future needs and technologies.

Speaking of AIIM, we just came across an interesting article by the organization this month titled "Not Your Grandfather's Portable Document" that gives an interesting overview of where the PDF is at today compared to at its conception, and where PDFs are headed.

Part of where PDFs are headed is firmly towards integration with Microsoft's juggernaut, SharePoint which is becoming the standard itself in collaboration and content management for enterprises. Adlib has its own unique offering, PDF for SharePoint that makes content stored in SharePoint more accessible, ensures compliancy by centralizing the publishing of SharePoint documents to PDF and reduces costs for SharePoint based solutions by automating document workflows to eliminate inefficiencies.

We will be happy to discuss our SharePoint offering at our Microsoft Pavilion booth (MP6) at AIIM; hope to see you there next week!

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

The PDF/A standard (or, PDF-eh? as we say in Canada) for long-time archiving of documents has been adopted by government agencies across the United States and Europe. That’s great news for us, since Adlib Express and PDF for SharePoint effectively and reliably handle the conversion of documents to PDF/A.

For example, Denmark recently mandated the use of open standard document formats, including the use of PDF/A for storing non-editable documents. As an ISO standard, PDF/A provides freedom from proprietary formats and software, and freedom from dependency on a particular vendor for long-term support.

As well, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) which is responsible for archiving documents and materials created by the US government, accepts permanent electronic records submitted to them in PDF and PDF/A format.

The National Library of Congress is another example of a US government agency that takes advantage of the long-term storage capabilities of PDF/A.


Freedom of Information

One US Government agency that Adlib spoke with recently wants to convert all files related to their projects in PDF/A format, so that it would be more efficient for them to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.  In the past, requests for information had to be handled more than once if the person asking for it was not able to read the file format, making it more time consuming and therefore more expensive for the agency. This agency also required the information to be accessible for many years in the event that there was a litigation related to that project.

Applying for a Patent

The United States Patent and Trademark Office receives electronic patent application documents in PDF format via their web-based patent application and documents submission solution – EFS-WEB. However, they have their own specifications for PDF files that must be met if you want them to protect your idea.  Their guidelines are based on the PDF/A specification, so if your files are PDF/A compliant, they will also be acceptable by their EFS-Web system.

These are only a few examples of how the PDF/A format is being adopted by organizations concerned with accessibility and long-term storage of valuable information.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

When Matt Walz, CTO of NextDocs presented the keynote speech at the ShareFest conference in Philadelphia today, he related how the wave of SharePoint is poised to roll over the life sciences industry.

(Shown here, left to right, Adlibbers Brian Kernohan and myself, Matt Walz, and Rubin Mago, the latter also of Adlib.)

Walz used some interesting facts to illustrate his points, such as the fact that 40 years ago, knowledge workers didn’t really exist and manual typewriters were all the rage! The evolution to the word processor and then the PC has completely revolutionized how people create content.

This (r)evolution has also meant that the quantity of content created has exploded - and is poised to explode again. The impact of SharePoint, including PDF for SharePoint on the way that people share and collaborate documents will be one of the key technologies that exponentially accelerates this growth. It will also be one of the key technologies that help enterprises control and organize that content.

Matt’s presentation started me thinking about some of the conversations that I have had with customers and prospects recently. Some individuals think that using desktop tools to create PDFs for sharing or archiving works great. I guess it does, for now - but I don’t think that progressive organizations really want their talented employees handling documents one by one.

When forward-looking companies learn that we can help automate those manual processes, they are asking us how big we can scale. They see what they are facing today and have seen a glimpse of the future.

They need to store, protect, secure, control and archive that content – automatically. The rate that they need to create PDFs is currently thousands per day and sometimes thousands per hour.  Soon that volume will be measured in minutes - and then in seconds.

Automating key document processes can provide huge productivity improvements, and help prevent organizations from drowning in documents and exposing their enterprise to undue risks related to broken manual processes.

The time to start planning is now. The water is rising quickly.

Peter Duff
President and CEO
Adlib Software 

Imagine getting an insurance quote back to a customer within hours of securing their information... That is exactly what now happens at a leading international insurance corporation who adopted Adlib's conversion solution to render quotes as non-editable, branded PDFs.

The transformation of brokers' emails into professional quotes used to take days, even weeks, to present to potential customers. These frustrating and embarrassing delays were a result of the instability of the insurance company's previous PDF conversion solution, which acted as a roadblock to their efficiency and profitability.

The Waiting Game: Losing Customers Whose Quotes Take Too Long

The fallout: lost sales and higher employee turnover at the insurance company. Brokers found it tough to compete in the marketplace with quote delays. The organization, as a whole, had an image problem when it came to customer service.

However, with Adlib's speedy PDF conversion of insurance quotes, all these problems went away. Rapid response to customer inquiries differentiated the insurance brokerage as a responsive, customer-focused service provider. 

The Adlib Express solution involves "batch" transformation - on a 24/7 basis - of incoming emails from brokers, scanned documents and the like, to be archived on an EDM platform. The Adlib solution requires no support to deal with attachments, password-protected documents, or the daily flows of thousands of documents.

Express takes an editable quote and turns it into a non-editable PDF that is branded with the company's logo and other identifiers.... in a few hours.

This leading insurance company has experienced significant savings in IT time and costs, and - best of all - a significant increase in sales.

Brian Maguire
VP, Sales & Marketing
Adlib Software

Have you ever received an email with a link to a document in SharePoint and then cursed the “webpage cannot be found” page that appeared when you tried to use it? That’s because the author probably moved it to a different document library or folder in an effort to better organize their content. If so, you will be pleased with the new Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010.

This is the last post in my 4-part series on features in SharePoint 2010 that we think will be especially valuable to our customers. So far we have discussed these 3 topics:

1. Enhancements to metadata capabilities
2. The new Document Sites content type for organizing content
3. Workflow Enhancements                                                                                                   

   

The new Document ID capability in SharePoint 2010 allows documents to be assigned a unique identifier, which stays with the document even when it's archived.  This allows documents to be easily referenced by an ID no matter where the document moves.

The Problem with Links to Documents in SharePoint 2007

The problem with links to documents in SharePoint 2007 is that they will no longer work if the document is moved to another location in SharePoint. Document IDs can be used to maintain a relationship between a document and its rendition.

In case your definition of rendering involves boiling pig fat to create lard, the word rendering is also used to describe the process of converting a document to another format such as PDF. Document renditions are created when another format is more appropriate for the intended audience, for example:

• Creating secure PDF files for sharing confidential information
• Publishing documents for the web 
• Creating searchable PDF files from image files using OCR
• Creating a single PDF file that was assembled from multiple source documents
• Converting to PDF/A for archiving
• Converting CAD files to PDF

There are some shortcomings with Document IDs that you should be aware of. The most significant of these is that each version of a document does not have its own ID. If a Document ID is used to identify the source document of a rendition, it is not possible to tell if the source has changed since it was last converted to PDF.

In addition to other enhancement in SharePoint 2010, Document IDs help make SharePoint a much more valuable document management or ECM solution.

Other SharePoint Features We're Watching...

• Document Sets
  • Workflow Enhancements 

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

The Adlib Software blog recently turned 1 year old - and we are celebrating it in the office with a big, awesome "tuxedo" cake: layers of chocolate and vanilla with real whipped cream and chocolated-dipped strawberries, yum!

This time last year, the executive management team at Adlib decided to launch a blog within our corporate site, with the name, Render Your Views (playing off the function of our PDF rending solution).

We look back at a fruitful year of blogging, and showcase here some of our favourite posts of '09 and early '10:

Our Blogging Future

Looking forward, we will be blogging about many new trends in the industry, as well as exciting product launches, including but not limited to:

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and how our PDF rendering solution works within this environment (as well as it does within SP 2007 with our PDF for SharePoint offering)
• Continuing coverage at our presence at industry-leading events, such as AIIM International Expo, and EMC World in May, SPTechCon Boston 2010 in October, and beyond
• Customers stories - their real-world applications of PDF rendering, including at the enteprise level, in manufacturing, energy, education, government, financial services, and more
• The different needs of the European market, versus North American enterprises, when it comes ot automated document transformation
• Regulatory environments: FDA, NRC, FCC, SEC and others
• More on PDF standards, such as PDF/A, PDF/E, and PDF/UA

Which blog posts have you liked (or not) since we started in Spring 2009? And what kind of content would you like to read here in the future? 

Peter Duff
President & CEO
Adlib Software
 

Once upon a time, Enterprise Everywhere needed a PDF conversion solution, so they went with the biggest name in the biz. After all, the behemoth did have a complete suite of products, all the bells and whistles.

The problem: they have all the bells and whistles – whether you need them or not - all in different versions that have to be coordinated to work properly.

One day, when Enterprise Everywhere was merrily working away - filing financial e-docs, meeting regulatory deadlines, or some other mission-critical task – their PDF conversion solution stopped meeting their needs...Oh, no!

But, no sweat, they think; they pick up the phone and contact their big, superstar vendor, Big V.

Big V doesn't call back, not for the longest time. Too long for Enterprise Everywhere to recoup the productivity lost due to PDF rendering downtime. That’s because Big V is too big - too busy, too many customers, with too many product lines to manage well. Oh, no double-time!

Then, on a much finer day, Enterprise Everywhere learns about Adlib: a smaller, more nimble vendor with a true enterprise-grade PDF conversion solution that meets – heck, exceeds – their requirements...

AND customer service that actually, well, serves the customer: On-site installation and training, immediate response from maintenance and renewal, fast follow up on inquiries, the works. Oh, my!

Enterprise Everywhere feels special; they are special.  They decide to abandon Big V vendor and go with Adlib Express. They learn that Enterprises Everywhere Else, around the world, are doing the same.

It's Happily Ever After - except, of course, for Big V.

No, this isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke - but sometimes working with the Big Vs can make you feel like a fool. Big names can bring big headaches.

Little guys stick to their knitting and have their competencies down cold. Oh, and they like serving you.

Lessons learned.

Scott Mackey
Director, Product Management
Adlib Software

You're headed for a world of pain if you're not spending a lot of time thinking about, or discussing, metadata in your involvement with a SharePoint project at work.

The use of SharePoint metadata is what unlocks the real value of our PDF for SharePoint solution. It enables a wide range of business process automation that can replace inefficient manual procedures that rely on individual users to do it correctly.

If you are working in a regulated industry such as pharmaceutical or life sciences, compliance is especially critical to the success of your business. Automating processes is required to achieve compliance and minimize the costs of ensuring that you do so.

Ignore the capability to tag your content so that it be efficiently found - and you might as well go back to the shared folders you just moved all of those documents from. SharePoint 2010 includes many metadata enhancements for managing your content, making it a more powerful document management or ECM solution.

We already discussed the new Document Sets content type in a previous post about SharePoint 2010. This is an important new development for organizing content that we will definitely be supporting in an upcoming release.

Other metadata-related enhancements in SharePoint 2010 make it more efficient to manage your content:

• Enterprise Managed Metadata services
• Content ratings, to leverage the wisdom of crowds
• User level tagging of content, aka “folksonomies”
• Document IDs, a unique document identifier that can be used to link to a file even if it is moved to a different location.

These new features of SharePoint 2010 facilitate the use of metadata in SharePoint deployments, enabling more automation of document processes.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software
 

There’s a lot of excitement around the office right now; our veteran account executive Meagan Macpherson has just landed a major enterprise-wide deployment of Adlib Express at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. 

The company is using our solution across its global organization, in conjunction with Microsoft SharePoint, to meet the strict regulatory compliance requirements of its industry.

It’s all part of a bigger trend that we call ‘the evolution of regulatory publishing through submission-ready PDFs.”

It makes sense that this Big Pharma organization has decided to take document rendering very seriously in order to meet compliance and regulatory requirements - and for them, that meant deploying Adlib's PDF conversion as an enterprise service.

PDF conversion part of enterprise-wide SharePoint implementation

They’ve been our customer for several years now - using Adlib Express in embedded applications implemented through various document management and regulatory compliance systems. But then they saw the opportunity to deploy Adlib more broadly as part of their enterprise-wide SharePoint implementation.

SharePoint is increasingly seen by many organizations as a flexible, configurable platform that can include documents appropriate for compliance requirements - as well as being a collaborative process.

The document trail gets pretty complicated at this pharmaceutical organization. Their 80,000-plus employees produce thousands of documents each day out of facilities spanning three continents – documents that undergo significant collaboration over the course of several months.

This client upgrade means that Adlib Express is now the PDF conversion solution for the top three of the world's largest 'big pharma' companies.

Factors in the organization’s decision to go with Express

• The number of users working on a single document
• The multiple iterations of these documents
• The need for version control
• The requirement of meeting strict regulatory requirements
• The need for control and standardization of documents

The immediate rollout of the enterprise deployment in North America means this company can now create submission-ready PDFs in the publishing of their FDA submissions - such as the 21 CFR Part 11 standard.

In the near future, the Adlib Express enterprise deployment will extend to EMEA submissions in Europe.

Our pharmaceutical client has told us they’ve already experienced increased capacity throughput and decreased QA time required to proofread documents; and they expect it will lead to an accelerated time-to-market for their products.

Brian Maguire
VP, Sales & Marketing
Adlib Software

Adlib account executive Meg Macpherson, shown here demonstrating the Adlib Express solution for government, files the following report from FOSE 2010 today in Washington D.C.

Cloud computing is all the buzz this year at FOSE 2010. Cloud computing is "about making enterprise quality technology available to every company... fully taking advantage of the global Internet, a primed state of commoditization, and the broad adoption of a broad range of virtualization technologies," according to blogger Michael Harries.

Adlib supports cloud computing strategies through the provision of technology that is deployed through a managed, services-oriented architecture. Adlib works with partners who deliver cloud-based solutions for a range of business challenges – solutions which embed Adlib’s powerful document to PDF conversion, recognition and advanced publishing capabilities. A leading server-based technology company, Adlib has a dedicated channel focused on helping partners accelerate the development and deployment of their cloud-based solutions.

Adlib Express is One of Only a Few SharePoint Solutions at the Show

At FOSE 2010, Adlib is getting a lot of attention at our booth for being one of the few vendors at the show who offer a SharePoint solution.

Adlib Express is the new standard in centralized PDF document access, conversion and control within government organizations. The deployment of Adlib as an enterprise service easily supports multiple workflows across various departments and business processes.

One of the speakers at FOSE 2010 - CNN's Candy Crowley - told the crowd that 24-hour news is "rolling news that dials up or down", and that government grants to the media acknowledges the need for journalists to balance all that information. Crowley also admitted that the media is finding the issue of the United States sliding from a creditor to debtor nation "so big it's hard to describe."

FOSE 2010 - DC's largest and longest running government technology show - is one of several international events that Adlib attends each year to network with industry-leading organizations who seek document management solutions.

How often are business proposals or projects summarized in a single document? In many business scenarios it involves a collection of documents of various types that will eventually be assembled into a single report.  The new Document Sets feature in SharePoint 2010 will make working this way much simpler.

One of the limitations of SharePoint 2007 that our customers often have to deal with is that documents are treated as individual units. While it is possible to organize content with judicious use of metadata, it wasn’t easy group related documents together. Compound document assembly is useful for:

• Assembling RFPs
• Business proposals
• Case management
• Regulator submissions

For SharePoint 2007, PDF for SharePoint supports multiple-document assembly via the “Merge Document” workflow.  Invoke the workflow and it will convert and merge all  of the document documents in a document library to PDF. SharePoint metadata columns are used to define the order in which the files are merged and for the user to specify whether a document is to be included in the merged result. The merged document can be enhanced with the addition of a Table of Contents, PDF bookmarks, page numbering, headers, footers, and an automatically generated index.

A Real Compound Document Assembly Solution

In SharePoint 2010, the Document Sets content type will allow users to easily create collections of related documents. Another convenient feature of Document sets is the ability to invoke a workflow on the entire set. We would certainly like to enable the creation of a report in PDF format of the documents within a document set in a single operation. The report would include all, or a subset of the document within the set, whether they are Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Visio, or even an AutoCAD DWG file. 

Looking forward, I see great possibilities for this feature, With the addition of few more user options to control the ordering of documents, and the ability to include documents that do not reside within the Document Set, there are makings of a real compound document assembly solution here.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

We'll be at FOSE 2010 next week - March 23 through 25 in Washington, D.C. - and would love it if you'd stop by and say hi at the Adlib booth (#3116).

FOSE is all about "Technology Solutions for the Business of Government" - with attendance by thousands of government technology professionals at all levels of government.

Adlib is at the show to demonstrate and discuss the Adlib Express solution for government: How our PDF conversion deployed as an enterprise service can meet the need for controlled public access, or effective internal document handling, for regulatory, military, intelligence, and government service applications. Whether that's within municipal, state/provincial, federal or global governments and organizations.

Can't Be There? We'll Cover the Event

Our intrepid enterprise account executive, Meg Macpherson, will be at FOSE and microblogging from this location as well as Tweeting from her Blackberry right on the show floor!

You can check out her Tweets, and those of Adlib on Twitter, via the #FOSE hashtag next week during the show.

FOSE is just one of several upcoming events that Adlib will participate in this Spring. The other shows are:

• Nextdocs ShareFest 2010 Conference, April 8 & 9
• info360 - AIIM International Conference, April 20 - 22

Meanwhile, if you're interested in FOSE, check out the following for more information about this industry-leading event:

Blogging by Riley O'Brien Wolff, Microsoft Engagement Manager for Adlib Software, on location at the SharePointPro 2010 Summit & Expo in Las Vegas this week:

The great conversations just kept coming at SharePointPro 2010 Summit. At the Adlib booth, we had lots of great conversations - like the one between our enterprise account executive, Grant Jurgeneit (left) and Rutherford Wilson, VP of Applications Product Strategy at Atalasoft, Inc. 

People in the aisles were still talking today about the show's keynote speaker, Steve Fox at Microsoft.

Fox's key takeaway - as Tweeted by our own Meg Macpherson - was the following revelation:

Visual Studio 2010 makes it much easier to test within SharePoint, with or without SharePoint Designer. Projections are that this can cut development time by 20%.

Fortunately for us, communications from our crack sales team means that What Happens in Vegas does NOT necessarily Stay in Vegas!...

The following report was filed today by Riley O'Brien Wolff - the Microsoft Engagement Manager for Adlib. She is reporting directly from the famed Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas - home to the SharePointPro 2010 Summit & Expo.

Adlib is exhibiting at Booth #415 - and getting lots of attention with their demo of our PDF for SharePoint solution.

In this photo, Enterprise Account Manager, Grant Jurgeneit, discusses the product with a the CTO of a US company that develops document imaging and capture products for SharePoint-based ECM solutions.

Show organizers are reporting some 1,000 registered attendees (excluding exhibitors) so it's a good crowd.

Observations from the Show Floor...

• There are a lot of universities at the show who are interested (to support their research initiatives) in using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality for documents within SharePoint 
  
• A lot of show attendees - across several industries, including energy, insurance and government sectors - are implementing SharePoint in conjunction with the 2010 launch

Last week, Microsoft got a lot more specific about the dates for the SharePoint 2010 release. According to the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be launched on May 12, 2010. The intent to RTM (a slightly softer date), is announced for April 2010.

Adlib Software has been preparing for the 2010 launch since last summer and will be ready to support this release soon after it becomes available. I can tell you that the PDF for SharePoint workflows run on 2010 as well as SharePoint 2007. Now we are working on how we can leverage new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 in ways that will be valuable to our customers.

Since we use SharePoint workflows to enable document conversion within SharePoint, we are pleased to see all of the workflow-related enhancements in this release. These include:

• The ability to run workflows on the new Document Set content type and folders as well as documents. Several of our customers have expressed the need to efficiently work with multiple documents at once
• Big improvements to the interface for SharePoint Designer, It is also much easier to create workflows that can be reused within your SharePoint deployment with SPD 2010
• The ability to create workflows using Visio 2010 will enable business analysts to design workflows

Come back next Tuesday for Part II of my 4-part series on SharePoint 2010. (Subscribe to our RSS feed and you won't have to try and remember when our next blog post goes up!)

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software  

Although I work for a technology company, my background is in Environmental Sciences. Even in university, I tried to balance the need for sustainable environmental practices with the reality of a market(ing)-driven, consumer-based economy. My thesis looked at the performance and potential for environmental/ethical mutual funds – combining finance and the environment.

To be honest, I got into technology because that is where the opportunities were. A really nice side benefit is seeing that our technology is actually supporting the environmental cause. Software can help companies strike a win-win balance by:

• Saving money
• Accelerating business processes
• Reducing environmentally-unfriendly practices

Take, for example, the elimination of paper from your monthly bill review at home. Not only is it convenient for you, but it significantly reduces costs for your creditors.

Replace Printing, Mailing with PDF Rendering of Client Correspondence

Customers use our software to automatically render client correspondence to PDF instead of printing and mailing paper. It reduces costs and accelerates the flow of information to the client. Win-win.

Imagine you’re a manufacturing company with dozens of suppliers sending thousands of electronic documents in multiple formats. Create a web-based portal that allows them all to upload content in whatever format they choose, and use technology to render it all to accessible PDF before routing it to the next workflow step. This eliminates the need to go back to the suppliers and ask for a different file type which adds cycles, delays productivity and increases costs. The examples are endless.

My point is that technology and profitability are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, if sustainable or environmentally-friendly practices are to be anything more than a passing trend, they MUST provide tangible benefits to the organization. There’s even a new term that has been coined for it “Triple Bottom Line” which measures success in terms of: People, Planet and Profit.

One final comment: I’m a nut for sports cars, which is a challenge when trying to be environmentally aware. Even so, we’re seeing how a love of driving can co-exist with the green movement – hello Tesla!

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

I was contacted by a customer recently who wanted to be able to link several different locations to a main server; he was a little shocked to learn that he had Web services.  With a simple adjustment to his current settings, his idea became reality and the issue was solved  - making him looking like a genius to his boss!

It happens all the time...

Staying current and keeping your software maintenance up-to-date is great; but the question you really should be asking yourself with an upgrade is: What exactly am I getting? 

Understanding what the new functionalities are and what they can do for you and your company is critical. The new functionality may lead you to quicker and more efficient ways to convert your documents.  Understanding the new capabilities can also lead to a different way at looking at your current problem and may lead to a new solution.

For example with the most recent release of Express 4.7 some of the added functionality includes:

• Web Services and Job Management (formerly Exponent) – provides intelligent job management and cross-platform integration options as part of a Services Oriented Architecture.
• Output to PDF/A (archival standard) and PDF/X (print standard) – generates these industry standard outputs from any of the hundreds of formats Adlib supports.
• PDF to PDF/A support - includes the new PDF/A conversion and validation functionality and is ideal for automated high-volume workflows which converts existing PDF documents directly into the PDF/A format.
• Added Support for InfoPath documents – added support for rendering Microsoft’s InfoPath forms to PDF, an increasingly popular form design tool. 
• Enhance image processing capabilities – expands the list of supported image formats and accelerates processing for rendering documents to image output.
• Automated Incident Information Collection – improves system administration by automatically retrying jobs and capturing detailed information for review without restarting the Server.
• nUp PDF Rendering - allows you to render 2 or more pages of the input document to each output PDF page. Now you can create “storyboards”.

Sure, upgrading allows you access to the latest and greatest... but know what you are getting when you upgrade. You might be surprised at the value it can bring to your workplace.

Peter Jonak
Customer Loyalty Representative
Adlib Software

Nuance is excellent at recognizing and exposing text hidden in images; however, processing some PDFs, documents with oversized pages, and certain types of bitmaps can be a challenge. Adlib Software is able to pre-process these types of documents, and manage the success of the Nuance engine, to ensure the best output for a number of conditions.

Adlib provides a simple, flexible interface for performing all different types of document transformation. OCR - for recognizing text on image documents - is one type. The Adlib OCR solution uses the Nuance SDK for the recognition of text due to its superior accuracy and throughput capabilities.

Benefits of Adlib OCR working with Nuance SDK:

• A much simpler interface for integration (.NET Web Service & XML Job Ticket)

• Practically limitless scalability with automatic load balancing and intelligent job management

• Support for processing 300+ file types to PDF or other formats. You can even process images within MS Word files etc. via OCR to make all content searchable.

• Metadata-based rules processing capabilities via our forthcoming Director Web Service

• Pre-Processing capability to enhance OCR accuracy and throughput Enhanced / Extended PDF support (Bookmark retention, PDF annotation retention [image only]. These 4 important elements are lost when processing strictly through Nuance

• Document failure prevention. Our server based tools provide enterprise ready job management and fault tolerance to ensure maximum availability and throughput

• Enhanced automated error handling (based on document recognition quality) so that system output can be tailored to meet requirements

•  Extremely large document support (in terms of # of pages. In house testing of 15,000+ pages, limited by HD space only)

•  Automated OCR zoning to draw content from specific page locations

•  Seamless workarounds to a number of known issues/limitations in the Nuance engine

• Only versions of Nuance which meet our high quality standards for accuracy and stability are included saving our customers and partners valuable testing time

• Access to a rich set of functionality available in our Conversion, Publishing & Recognition products modules through an integrated interface

• Training, Support and Software for ISV Partners

Jeff Brand
Senior Technical Account Manager
Adlib Software

In this post, I’ll discuss how Nintex Workflow can be used with PDF for SharePoint to create workflows that include converting documents to PDF. This is what the finished workflow looks like with Nintex (see right). 

Workflows are used implement these types of business processes within SharePoint. SharePoint comes with a few workflows out of the box, but usually companies need to make their own to suit their particular business requirements. 

There are several products that can be used to create workflows in SharePoint. Some of the most popular workflow building products are:

• K2 blackpoint
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer (SPD)
• Nintex Workflow 2007

I am a fan of Nintex because it is easy to use, it provides an intuitive, graphical web browser interface that allows you to build complex workflows quickly and easily. Within minutes of installing it I was able to create a simple approve and publish workflow that included these steps:

• Request approval of the selected document
• If approved, set Document Status metadata column to TRUE and convert the document using PDF for SharePoint
• If declined, send a notification to the author

How it was done

The integration between Adlib and Nintex makes it very easy to add document rendering to your workflows. You simply insert a “Start Workflow” Action into the workflow you are building in Nintex, and then configure it to invoke any of the Adlib workflows for SharePoint that are deployed on your system. A list will automatically appear within the Configure Action window in the Nintex interface. It is easier and more interesting to show how this was done, watch this 30 second video to see how PDF conversion can be added to an approval workflow using Nintex and Adlib PDF for SharePoint.

See this short video for a visual demonstration of how this is done.

Converting documents to PDF is often part of a larger business process. Two examples of where this is used are:

• Converting documents, such as SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) manuals, to PDF after being approved so they can be published for internal use
• Applying electronic signatures to approved documents

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

If you will be in Las Vegas for the SharePoint Pro Summit, March 16-19, please drop by to chat with us. Adlib Software is Booth # 415.

We will be there to talk about implementing document conversion to PDF using PDF for SharePoint.

Hope to see you in Las Vegas!

In PDF conversion solutions, the user experience is directly related to the total cost of ownership. If the conversion process is too complicated or offers too many options at the user level, the users may neglect important formatting steps. Or worse, they may fail to use the system at all, sabotaging larger objectives of converting documents to universally accessible and portable PDF format. Likewise, desktop-based PDF conversion solutions create work for IT staff in installing, training and maintaining the individual systems. For large multi-user environments, the costs of desktop solutions may also become prohibitive.

Server-based conversion solutions offer benefits to users, IT and cost considerations. Because they can be set up, wholly or in part, as background services that automatically convert documents according to pre-set business rules, they free users from concerns about standard conversions, and enable exceptional jobs to be routed to staff with more extensive formatting skills. The IT staff is relieved of desktop-related work, and the overall licensing costs may be significantly reduced.

Adlib is the leader in server-based solutions for document transformation, OCR and publishing. Its solutions integrate seamlessly into the user interfaces, such as Office applications or SharePoint, that are already familiar to the users.

The corporate requirements for PDF conversion is bound to grow as the benefits of portability and accessibility become more visible in the organization. The ease of scalability is a major factor in system selection.

Server-based conversion systems should offer a simple means to add processors to support growing volume and addition of more processing-intensive file types, such as complex or graphical files. Resource management, such as load balancing, should be a part of the underlying features of the system.

Adlib Express simplifies the addition of another server under the centralized system management to a matter of minutes. Advanced resource management options are built into the software architecture.

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

The quality of rendering output is judged on clarity and fine detail, as well as fidelity to the original. A simple comparative test of the PDF rendering among competing solutions will usually show significant difference in the visual refinement of the pages.

True fidelity to the original is the mark of an advanced solution. Any conversion software will render a word-processed document into PDF, as long as you expect it to reformat it in terms of layout and pagination. But for a “light table match” of a highly formatted document with graphical elements, there are very few contenders in the market. Conversion of complex or graphically dense files requires multi-layered management of page design, graphics and fonts, and navigation elements.

The benefit of this level of quality production extends beyond the dependable reproduction of formatted or graphical pages needed for regulatory submissions or similarly mission-critical uses. It also opens up a world of new opportunities for use of the rendering solution, such as incorporation of digital signatures, conversion of schematics for easy portability for field crews, automated generation of picture-perfect marketing materials and signed correspondence, and flawless digital publishing.

Adlib has been recognized for both the exceptional refinement of its renderings and the “light table match” of its fidelity to the original by corporations that routinely generate complex documents and publish to exacting standards.

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

As a Silver Sponsor at this year’s ShareFest, Adlib Software is able to extend an invitation to the conference to you at a 15% reduced cost. The discount can be obtained at the time of registration by clicking on the Register Now button at www.sharefestconference.com. An access code will need to be used. To receive this code, please e-mail us at communication@adlibsoftware.com. Use of this code will trigger the 15% discount. This discount offer expires February 26, 2010. 

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

Not all PDF conversion solutions are created equal. The needs of a busy document management environment can be complex, varying from one department to another, one file type to another, or the requirements of a specific document type such as invoices or CAD designs. The ideal solution can handle it all.

Important options include optical character recognition to convert non-searchable PDFs or scanned paper documents into searchable PDFs. The system should be easily integrated into workflows and archiving structures of enterprise document management (EDM) solutions, as well as popular platforms such as SharePoint. Efficiency features such metadata enrichment for management of multiple formatting standards and easy job ticket creation to further leverage the rendering engine should be standard.

The depth and flexibility of Adlib’s flagship solution, Adlib Express, reflects the years of meeting individual customer requests for new features, which are then extended to the entire customer base in regular upgrades.

Considering the features offered with a solution could be one of the most important steps to take when choosing PDF conversion software.

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

File transformation capability is the single most important feature of PDF conversion solutions, and a broad range of formatting options is key to making the most of PDF conversion. This begins with the ability to produce any type of PDF, depending on the PDF file’s function, such as archiving, research databases or regulatory submissions. In addition, the solution should be able to convert the full range of original document types that could possibly be presented to the system, from the MS Office applications to proprietary solutions. Finally, the solution should be able to render in other file formats, as well as PDF, such as Word or HTML.

Beyond that, formatting capabilities should address other business issues, such as supporting corporate standards of consistent page design and font, as well as watermarking, time-stamping and document security. Navigation elements such as table of contents, hyperlinks and bookmarks should be configurable to meet organizational or regulatory standards. Merge functions should enable compilation of multiple files into a single document with integrated navigation elements.

When choosing a PDF conversion solution, be sure to choose one that meets the highest standards of formatting. It should also be flexible, with exceptional formatting capabilities. To learn about Adlib’s solution for PDF conversion click here. 

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management
Adlib Software

If you will be in San Francisco for SPTechCon on February 10-12, please drop by the Adlib Software booth. We will be there to talk about implementing document conversion to PDF using PDF for SharePoint. We also are in attendance to learn more about the upcoming release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Hope to see you in San Francisco.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

PDF creation has become ubiquitous. Many common business systems can now generate PDF as part of their normal operation.  The problem is they often don’t do PDF conversion properly.

Many of the PDFs created are extremely important to the consumer or the systems they have been created for.  The shoddy creation of a PDF can significantly impair the intended benefit that an organization could achieve from an automated document workflow.

By way of example, many companies have deployed multi-function devices (MFDs) which can scan, copy, print etc. Scanned images can even be routed via email as PDF attachments. There are significant limitations though. One example is that the PDFs created are often too large in size, overloading networks and storage systems. Even worse, they are sent as non-searchable image documents. We’ve seen many customers who bypass the limited image to PDF capabilities of their MFD devices choosing instead to seamlessly integrate superior conversion and recognition (OCR) capabilities into the process. Server-based tools like Adlib Express render the images to high quality, searchable PDFs that are compressed and optimized for distribution and consumption.

A second example relates to high-end payroll systems which can also generate PDF output. The functionality is, again, very limited which caps the potential benefits the organization can achieve. These systems might create a single PDF output containing payroll information for all employee payrolls instead of as individual PDF's that can be distributed or processed. To make matters worse the content for any given employee is scattered throughout the PDF. Our customers have discovered that they can automate the process of splitting up the document merging employee specific documents back together then instantly delivering them as PDF email attachments. This gives employees the benefit of having an electronic copy to store. It also eliminates costly manual processing and print/mail distribution.

ECM vendors have long had PDF capability - as long as the customer purchased, integrated and maintained the software separately. Many ECM vendors today have embedded PDF conversion, stamping, recognition capabilities tightly integrated into their solution. Look under the covers and you’ll often find Adlib software working transparently in the background.

Be wary when choosing a system. Most will have the 'PDF Conversion' box checked on the feature sheet. Be sure you know more about the depth and breadth of what that means and ensure it meets your current and future needs. If you don't you're limiting your options for extracting maximum benefit from the automation of key business processes.

Collaboration is a word that is often used to describe the core capabilities of SharePoint.  It makes documents readily available to all employees working on a project and prevents multiple people from simultaneously making changes to them.

However, just because we are collaborating on a project, doesn’t mean I want to allow anyone working on the project to make changes to my documents. One way to prevent this is to maintain a parallel library of PDF versions of source documents.

These can be made available to anyone that needs to access the information but is not (or should not be) involved in updating this information. This process can be automated using PDF for SharePoint document transformation workflows.

A “Convert to PDF” workflow can be configured to automatically convert documents to PDF and deposit them into a separate document library whenever a new document is added to the source library and/or whenever a document is updated.  This will automatically maintain a library of secure, non-editable versions of your source documents for collaboration.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Power Up With SharePoint is an online one-day conference for developers, administrators, managers and users of SharePoint taking place on December 8, 2009.

Adlib Software will have a virtual presence at the show, along with other well-known SharePoint technology vendors such as K2, AvePoint, metalogix, and Quest Software.

Please drop by our virtual space and learn more about how using PDF for SharePoint to automate rendering of documents in SharePoint to PDF can help your business.  You can register for the show at www.officesharepointpro.com

Virtual events like are relatively new and offer some key advantages, we are interested to see how effective these shows are for you the consumer.  As someone who has done their share of tradeshows and conferences, I will miss the face to face discussions that happen at live events however, I won’t miss is the travel, bad food, and aching feet.

Power Up With SharePoint information and free registration.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

When implementing a server-based Document Transformation solution, the simplest approach is a ‘Watched Folder’, where you configure your Transformation Application to monitor a folder, and whenever a document appears in that folder, apply the same actions against that document.

Many modern server-based transformation engines such as Adlib Express can provide the ability to create multiple ‘Watched Folders’, but when you have more than a few variations on the transformation requirements, it can become difficult to manage through this approach.

Perhaps we want to have options enabled or disabled based on the file type, or date, or even based on values that are found in a separate file.  In this case, we would need a better approach.

XML Job Tickets with Express is an excellent solution for problems like this because they are fairly simple to create, and provide the ultimate flexibility in defining your transformation parameters.

Case Study: 

A hospital needed to convert physical, tabbed documents into electronic PDF, but they needed to retain the navigation of the documents that was previously possible with the material tabs. They knew that with Express they were able to retain this function by converting the documents into PDF Bookmarks.

The challenge was to then identify the location of the tab sheets, and replace them with a bookmark in the PDF that points to the page immediately following the tab sheet.

Here is how Express and XML Job Tickets solved the problem:

1. The tab Sheets were replaced with slip-sheets which contained two barcodes.  One barcode identified the sheet as a ‘Bookmark’, and the second contained the text that was on the tab.  (This became the text of the Bookmark)
2. The documents were then scanned with the resulting multi-page TIFF documents being directed automatically to the input folder of Adlib Express Server.
3. Express was configured to find all of the barcodes in the document, and export a file containing all of the pages that contained the ‘Bookmark’ barcode as well as the text that was on that document.
4. Express Server was also configured to launch a post-processing script.  This is a simple script in VBScript that reads the resulting file and then generates an XML Job Ticket based on the first scan.
5. The new XML Job Ticket instructed Express to create a bookmark for each of the pages, perform an OCR of the text found on all of the contents, and to remove the physical barcode pages, so the bookmarks could navigate directly to the first page in each section.

 From this example you can see that by using XML Job Tickets in addition to VBScripts, adding flexibility and customized logic to your Document Transformation workflow is easy.

Jeff Brand 
Senior Technical Account Manager
Adlib Software

In my day to day work I come across many stories from our customers about how they are using Adlib Express in their businesses. I would like to share a series of articles that highlight some interesting solutions throughout a variety of industries, each with specific problems. This week I introduce the financial services industry.

Sitting atop a heap of seemingly endless files and forms is the financial industry. In financial services, being able to provide proper documentation quickly to a client delivers peace of mind, assuring them that their investment is being efficiently taken care of. Speedy service and customer relationships are the cornerstones of profit in the financial industry; however, internal business synergy is vital to a company’s success.

With over a thousand employees unable to share files created on different software applications, document accessibility was a major challenge for Assurant, a provider of specialty risk management products throughout North America, Latin America, and Europe.

The inability to share files between employees can often lead to confusion, delay, and an overall drop in productivity. Adlib Express brought Assurant a one-stop solution that empowered employees to easily convert multiple documents from any original format to universally accessible PDFs which could then be easily forwarded to colleagues or customers.

Adlib’s centralized solution eliminated the cost and IT hassle of multiple desktop licenses, and dramatically reduced the workload of the document preparation center. Employees at Assurant were able to quickly convert and share documents, ensuring high efficiency within the office.

Assurant also took advantage of Express’ publishing capabilities and applied watermarks and headers/footers to their converted documents.
 
Next time we will take a look at an example of Express within the government industry.

Scott Mackey
Director - Product Management

One problem that we hear about from customers when we talk about document conversion to PDF in SharePoint is the inability to merge multiple documents into a single PDF file.

There are a lot of uses for document assembly, the most common being the creation of proposals for RFPs (Requests for Proposals), and Meeting Books for Boards or Trustees.

Creating a single, cohesive PDF file from a collection of documents in different formats such as Microsoft Word, financial information in Excel, engineering data in AutoCAD DWG format, PowerPoint presentations, etc., produces a more professional looking result, and makes it much more efficient for the reader to use this information.  The merged PDF file can be made much easier for users to navigate through its contents with the addition of a table of contents and PDF bookmarks for the entire document, and an index of terms used along with a hyperlink to the exact location.

PDF for SharePoint includes a workflow that enables the merging of documents in a document library into a single PDF file.  A “Merge Documents” column is used to include/exclude documents in the library from the merge. A “Merge Order” column is used to define the order of the documents to be merged in the resulting PDF.

Using this method, instead of extracting documents from SharePoint to merge them using a desktop application, will make multiple document assembly of SharePoint content much more efficient and reliable.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

I’m a technology fan. For personal use, computers, home theatre, digital photography all require endless (but enjoyable) research to figure out which new toy offers the best value. For business use, technology requires no less research but, the process tends to be less enjoyable. This could be because technology is an ever moving target.

Whether you’re talking about hardware and software for the office or the latest in home theatre technology – it seems the product evolves faster than it can be implemented. For an IT Administrator it can take months or even years to deploy and get users to actually adopt a new technology. By the time they become proficient it has become out of date. It is also a frustration for the knowledge worker being asked to change from the familiar. Spouses often react the same way when a new TV appears at home but, I digress.

Bottom line, technology is confusing. Open OfficeTM for example showed a lot of promise against the mighty Microsoft office. Adoption; however, has been slower than many expected. Now, new products are entering the fray in an attempt to become the productivity environment that business users ‘live in.’ There are new online alternatives to Microsoft from Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword and even Cisco. We all simply want the best tool to get our jobs done without having to think too much about it.

Transparent technology makes everyone’s life easier. Success can be achieved by implementing technology that adds efficiency or functionality without affecting a one’s daily job. The challenge for vendors and the IT staff who wade through all the marketing – is to determine which products will give the most benefit to users, without disrupting the core work process. They also need to be able to do this with shrinking budgets and project timelines.

As a server software vendor, our success is partially due to the fact that we provide a tool with broad functionality and flexibility that is tightly integrated with whatever core business applications the knowledge workers are used to - even if it changes over time. It is often transparent to the user that anything has been installed - they get the functionality they need without changing the way they work.

Might I also suggest switching to a digital TV signal at home? You’ll see how a little 'transparent technology' upgrade can enrich your life away from work too.

Are you heading to Las Vegas in October for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009? Adlib Software will be there so be sure to come by booth 816 and see us. I will also be hosting a breakout session about (you guessed it), “PDF Conversion in SharePoint – Make Content More Accessible Through Automated Document Transformation.” If that’s not enough of a reason for you to spend five days in the desert, then you should also know that this will be a great opportunity to learn about SharePoint 2010. It looks like this release is going to include some interesting new features like the ability to select and perform operations on multiple files at a one time. I am tremendously interested in learning more about SharePoint 2010 so that we can be ready to support it and take advantage of all the new capabilities found in this new release.

Hope to see you in Vegas.

 


Paul Dyck
Product Manager

When thinking of the benefits associated with software maintenance, two often prominently come to mind; free upgrades and product maintenance. With these two benefits, staying current with the latest software is virtually cost-free and in the event of a technical issue, there is the support to fix the problem. Software maintenance also brings the added value of customer support that can aid in the integration of the product and the way you operate it.

What you may not know is that there is often additional support available beyond that of your standard maintenance for an additional fee. Adlib for example has onsite training available which is a great way to maximize your investment. Personal, interactive training can optimize your software use by uncovering features you may not have noticed before. Another way to get the most out of any product is to know as much about it as possible. Online presentations are a great way to learn more about a product and the support that comes along with it. Webinars are one presentation type and are used by Adlib. To learn about the next upcoming Webinar, contact your Account Representative.

I hope I’ve shown that whichever way you slice it, having and maintaining your software maintenance is a great way to have support for any issues that could arise.

Peter Jonak
Customer Loyalty Representative

There are 2 issues with the way SharePoint 2007 handles PDF files out of the box that significantly reduces the value and usability of PDF files which are stored there.  Fortunately, both of these problems are easily solved, and the solution is readily available and documented on the web.

Let’s say that you have finished setting up a document transformation process in SharePoint to automatically convert your Microsoft Word files to PDF for publishing on the web, or to create searchable PDF files from scanned images using OCR. At this point, you may have experienced some problems because of the way SharePoint treats PDF files.

Problem #1 – The icon for PDF files is a generic blank document instead of the usual icon for PDF, making it difficult to quickly scan document libraries and visually identified them. This problem is easily solved by getting a .GIF version of the PDF icon and registering it in SharePoint.

Problem #2 – PDF files are not showing up in search results. This is because by default, SharePoint 2007 search indexes only the document metadata, and not the contents. This negates the value of using OCR to convert scanned documents or image-only PDFs to searchable PDF and makes finding information in SharePoint much more difficult.

To enable full text searching of PDF documents, a PDF iFilter must be installed and configured. There are several options, including a free PDF iFilter from Adobe and the purchasable Foxit PDF iFilter.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

When selecting your server-based conversion technology, make sure it has the ability to identify any of the issues up front, so that they can be dealt with as needed.  The resolution to the challenges I will review later in this article, are usually a matter of installing a font, or copying a linked file.  In the event a document is from an older version of Word, simply opening it, and setting the margins to match the intended output usually corrects the issue but, can waste an awful lot of time and if not caught can reduce the credibility of the document.

You can enable all of these features very simply in Adlib Express by navigating to the Conversion tab page in the Express Server options window, then clicking the ‘Enable Document Validation’ check-box.  Then, bring up the Document Validation Settings window, and choose which features you wish to enable, and how you would like Express to automatically handle the issue.

With most conversion software, validating the conversion of a file from one type to another is a daunting manual process with a wide variety of things that could go wrong. This is mostly due to the fact that various file formats have different features and translating a certain feature from one format to another can often be tricky.

When converting files from MS Word to PDF, there are occurrences that can alter the appearance of your document. When this happens it is important to make the correction in order to retain the credibility of your document and business. Having thousands of documents converted to files riddled with errors is completely counterproductive. So what can go wrong?

• Missing Resources
  

Additional resources like linked tables from an excel spreadsheet, or any other object that aids a document, needs to be present at the time of the file opening or an error can arise. If that additional resource is not linked, the authoring file will have missing information.

• Re-Flow Text

Particularly with older documents created in Word versions prior to 2000, re-flow can occur when documents are opened causing content to shift to different pages and into different alignments. This is due mostly to the fact that old versions of MS Word used the printer   specifications to automatically calculate margins. This is no longer the case as different printers have different printable regions.

• Missing Fonts

When designing a document in Word, you have a large number of fonts on your system that you can choose to take advantage of, to highlight a point, show your style, or attract a reader’s attention to a particular area of a page but if you open that same document on a different machine without those fonts installed, Word will not know how to render the document correctly and will substitute another font that is closest to the original. This sometimes shifts content from one page to another or changes the alignment.

These and other issues may appear when performing batch conversions of documents, and they may go un-noticed, often times until it’s too late - you’ve sent the output to a client, a vendor, or even worse, a regulatory body who has little patience to figure out why when they click on the Table of Contents item, it does not take them to the correct section of the document.

Finding a solution that can handle these and other format changes can save an incredible amount of time and embarrassment from poor quality documents. To learn more about Express’ conversion capabilities click here. 

Jeff Brand
Senior Technical Account Manager

Most offices are equipped with MFD (multi-function devices) that allow employees to scan paper documents and create an electronic version in PDF or image format.  I have heard horror stories of scan-happy employees that create high resolution, colour scans of 70-page documents and then upload the 100MB result into SharePoint.  Before long, they are using Terabytes of storage space.  So what’s the problem, storage is cheap isn’t it? Well, not really.  Corporations don’t buy the $200 USB hard drives on sale at your local Best Buy. They purchase enterprise quality hardware, and that hardware needs to be supported with backups and remotely-stored disaster recovery. The real cost of storage is closer to $4,000 a Terabyte.  When we consider the ecological costs of the extra hardware, power, and storage space, storage is much more expensive than most people think.  

Another problem with this scenario is that the content of the scanned document is in image format, limiting the ability of other users to search for it.  SharePoint, or other document repositories, will have little information to index the document with.

Storage costs can be minimized either by training people or making it difficult for them to make these types of mistakes.  Providing a centralized solution for converting image files created by MFDs to searchable PDF allows businesses to set up a process that does not require users to understand how to create the optimal file output using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to create searchable PDF files which, are much smaller and will be far more valuable to your business.  If you are using SharePoint, this can be achieved using automated document conversion workflows that will process new files as they are uploaded into SharePoint.


Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Many of our discussions with customers using SharePoint have been about making content searchable using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert image files to PDF.  The converted PDF file looks like the original but also includes a text layer that can be indexed by SharePoint so that the document can be found using the search engine.  Some examples of image files include scanned invoices, image-only PDF files of research material, and legal documents. In many cases, the original image files are discarded after the rendition is created to save storage space because the converted PDF file retains the look of the original as well as the recognized text.

This approach isn’t acceptable for all industries. For example, in the insurance industry the original files must be retained in the event of litigation – a common occurrence in their line of business.  Since SharePoint does not support the concept of document renditions [an alternate representation of a document], establishing a relationship between the original and the searchable PDF is a challenge. They would also like to avoid storing multiple versions of files to keep storage costs down.  One company we spoke with had over 1 million documents in SharePoint and were required to keep them available for long periods of time because claims typically involve large sums of money and take years to settle.

A solution for this business problem is to use our document conversion workflow to perform OCR on image files loaded into SharePoint and use the extracted text to supplement the original file instead of making a PDF rendition.  The text extracted by the Express recognition engine is added to the original image file as SharePoint metadata. This makes it possible for users to easily find the file based on its (previously hidden) content.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Companies often struggle to identify the best method for creating a high-quality, PDF/A compliant, PDF from a word file. Likely the most efficient way to achieve this goal is to use a server-based PDF rendering solution that operates in the background and automatically controls the quality of output by creating renditions of all key documents based on a predetermined, user-defined set of criteria.

On a business level, this solution delivers the following benefits:

• Improved document access across the enterprise
• Reduced work and lowered costs through process efficiency
• Uniform control over enterprise standards of document formatting
• Better service to internal and external customers

Additional advantages of using high-end conversion software include:

• Automated workflows and hundreds of converted file types, including CAD, to PDF without the need of the native application.
• Converted images to accurate and searchable PDF files and leverages document assembly and stamping functions.
• Assurance that documents adhere to the PDF/A standard, maintaining accessibility over an extended period of time (This allows the documents to be consistently and predictably viewed at a later date)

If your work environment requires quality creations of PDF versions of existing documents in a timely manner, you should consider looking at Adlib Express as a total rendering solution.

Peter Duff
President and CEO
Adlib Software

In a previous post about using the power of PDF for a greener world, we discussed how to thwart printaholics in your office with non-printable PDF files.  Another way to save reams of paper is to replace physically signed copies of common office forms like vacation slips, expense claims, etc., with electronically signed versions.  

Most companies make forms available on their corporate intranet.  These are usually completed electronically using Microsoft Word or Excel and then printed, signed, and placed on a manager's keyboard for another signature before ending up in HR or Finance. 

Along the way, everyone will make a copy for their records resulting in at least three paper copies for each request.  When you consider that each employee will make several requests per year, these simple tasks result in an enormous amount of wasted paper, storage space, printer resources, and time to print, as well as wasted time walking these forms through the approval process.

A simple electronic signature process could be used to save paper and time for approving office forms.  Forms in Microsoft Word or Excel could be converted to PDF along with the employee's electronic signature. An electronic signature can be as simple as applying the employee's name and the date. The form would then be sent to the manager for approval, who would apply their electronic signature and forward the form to the appropriate department and copy the employee. 

Everyone would have a copy of the signed form. If your organization is using SharePoint, this process can be implemented as a simple workflow using Express for SharePoint to perform the conversion to PDF and the application of electronic signatures.

Now you can take your vacation with a clear conscience, knowing that no trees were felled in the process.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

In the latest release of Adlib Express, we enhanced support for PDF/A with the ability to convert PDF files to PDF/A for long-term archiving.  As part of the development and QA (Quality Assurance) process, we tested the quality of our PDF/A capabilities using files from the Isartor Test Suite, which was developed by the PDF/A Competence Center.

The Isartor test suite includes 204 PDF/A files that do not conform to the PDF/A standard.

Adlib Express successfully converted 186 out of 204 (91%) to valid PDF/A-1b format.  A score of 91% sounds pretty good, but how does it compare to other products?

Earlier this year, Solid Documents announced the results of their PDF/A conversion testing. According to the press release, their product fixed 90% of cases in the Isartor Test Suite.

They also tested Adobe® Acrobat® 9, which only converted 46% of the test files correctly.

As humble Canadians, we generally do not like to brag about these things so we’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

If you are using SharePoint to manage documents, automated PDF to PDF/A conversion is also available within our PDF for SharePoint product.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

CAD (Computer Aided Design) software is used to bring most products from concept to reality. This includes everything from buildings, consumer products, industrial machines, and automobiles.

Inherent in any design process is the need for collaboration to reach the right design solution. For example, large industrial projects require different contractors to coordinate their designs to ensure that they fit together in the final assembly and architects need their customers to review and approve their designs before proceeding.

However, simply sharing the original CAD drawing file is typically not the best solution.  This approach is fraught with problems, such as:

• There are many CAD software packages in use (AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks): reviewers may not have access to the software or even the expertise to use it.
• The size of CAD files makes it difficult or impossible to share them, especially via email.
• Trouble protecting intellectual property contained in the CAD file.

Converting CAD files to a lightweight and widely accessible format such as PDF solves many of these problems. If you have a large number of CAD files to be converted, or are using SharePoint as a repository for these files, the new CAD Module available in Adlib Express 4.7, and Express for SharePoint, can help you overcome the cost and challenges associated with working with CAD files.

 Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software 

Recent discussions with customers have indicated that there is a need in SharePoint to automate optical character recognition (OCR) of documents once they are already in a SharePoint library.

One case where OCR was needed was with a research organization that deployed SharePoint to manage their research papers, reports and materials received from external sources.   They moved their massive collection of existing content to SharePoint and continue to add new material to their knowledge base.  Unfortunately, most of the legacy content is in image-only PDF format, making it impossible for SharePoint to index content and users to find it. Their existing solution was to process the material manually. Someone would scan the document and add keywords to the document metadata that would be picked up by the search indexer.

There are several solutions for paper document capture and storage into SharePoint from hardware devices, such as Knowledge Lake, but what about scanned documents that arrive via email or are already in SharePoint as in the above example?  These documents will be very difficult to find unless there is some information available to be indexed for search. One customer that I spoke with recently told me that he tried to find an answer to this problem at the recent European Best Practices SharePoint Conference in the UK.  He posed the question in an open session and no one could come up with a solution.

If you are looking for a solution to the problem of making scanned document image files or image-only PDF files searchable within SharePoint, Adlib has an answer for you. Our PDF for SharePoint solution ncludes SharePoint workflows that automate OCR within SharePoint, enabling you to create searchable PDF files and make your content more valuable. 

Paul Dyck
Project Manager
Adlib Software

As full-text indexing and search mechanisms become more and more sophisticated, organizations are finding that not all of their content is accessible to these technologies, even though there is a real and immediate need for them to be.

Information that is stored in image formats like TIFF or Image-Only PDFs (such as scanned documents, faxes, etc.) cannot be included in a full-text search because although the human eye can read the text on the image, it’s merely a bunch of pixels to the computer.

By processing these documents through an OCR engine, the engine is able to ‘Read’ the characters found in the image, and either extract the text found to an external file, or provide a “Text Layer” to the document, making it accessible to search engines.

This also has the added benefit of allowing users who are reading the document to be able to search for key words or phrases.

Jeff Brand
Senior Technical Account Manager 
Adlib Software

Few industries face record-keeping hurdles of the complexity and stringency faced by the pharmaceutical industry.

The business need to confirm and document the safety and efficacy of a new product, the potential threats of litigation if problems arise after a product is launched, and the documentary requirements of the regulatory agencies add up to a perfect storm of record-keeping demands throughout the lifecycle of a product. This documentary lifecycle extends from the earliest stages of research and development to many decades after the product is no longer marketed.

The weight of this task can be measured in the sheer volume of documentation required in regulatory submissions for new product approvals. Documentation for a single research study can be tens of thousands of pages with a full submission including multiple study results.

Though cutting-edge research is conducted using the latest technology, often the key results are compiled and maintained on unconnected Microsoft Word documents and even handwritten notes.

Extend this complexity over multiple regulatory jurisdictions, different languages, patent laws, joint ventures, subcontracted and outsourced research, and it is no surprise that paper submissions were often delivered by the truckload!

I invite you to read our white paper profiling more about the background and solutions that face this challenging industry “Optimizing Regulatory Submission Processing” [PDF].

Peter Duff
President and CEO
Adlib Software

Microsoft SharePoint is a hot topic that is finding its way into many companies – as a departmental tool and increasingly as an enterprise-wide deployment.  Adlib's solutions fill a gap in SharePoint’s capabilities, making automatable document transformation services available within SharePoint. Content transformation is an important part of a document management or ECM solution, getting content into the right format at the right time, and now it’s easy to do with Express.

Some examples of where businesses have benefited from automated document conversion within SharePoint are:

• Automatically converting CAD drawings to PDF and storing them in a library where they can be accessed by partners and employees.  PDF versions can be viewed without CAD software and their small size makes them more easily accessed by staff in remote locations
• Automating the publishing of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manuals for regulated industries. PDF renditions of approved manuals are created for reference by manufacturing staff, with appropriate controls printed on them such as “printed by”, “printed-on date” and “expiry date”
• As part of an invoice approval and payment process, scanned invoices are automatically converted to searchable PDF using Optical Character recognition (OCR). 

As more companies deploy SharePoint to automate their business processes, there are increasingly varied examples of the ways that automated document conversion can be used to reduce costs and streamline business processes. 

Paul Dyck
Product Manager
Adlib Software

Do you know that it is possible to disable printing of PDF files? With many companies using SharePoint for file sharing, documents can be made available to their employees in a central location. By making them available in PDF and using the “no print” option when converting documents to PDF, it will not only prevent unnecessary printing, it will also help avoid outdated copies of company documents from being used when a new version is available.

If you have other interesting ideas or stories on how to cut back on paper, hit the comment button and share.

Paul Dyck 
Product Manager & Friend of the Earth
Adlib Software

Many companies today are taking an aggressive approach to improving efficiency; especially when it can lead to significant cost reductions. If you’re one of these companies, and are looking to improve your business process efficiency, then you should still be investing in IT. Many companies are braving the storm and plan on spending their hard-earned dollars in 2009. Check out what Information Week's recent post has to say about IT spending in 2009. Strategic use of technology can give a company strategic advantage in troubled times. But you have to do it more intelligently than ever before. 

• Buy the right technology for the job
• Be smart about how you deploy it
• Spend the time up front to understand the business requirements
• Don't forget to involve the actual end users
• Consult with peers and experts (you don't know what you don't know)
• Don't force users to learn new processes or tools - it will kill your adoption rates and ROI

There is no doubt there has been a shift in thinking - big projects are being reduced or delayed, all spending is being scrutinized, ROI periods are shorter - but there are still plenty of opportunities. (See what CMS Watch thinks will be hot in 2009). 

There are tools that truly reduce costs, automate and streamline existing processes and ultimately give knowledge workers the functionality they need to do their jobs better - all of which can have demonstrable effect on the bottom line.

Check out the article “Turning Patents into Profits” that details how Life Sciences organizations are automating their mission critical document processes and reaping the efficiency and financial rewards

Is it all wine and roses? Of course not. Companies are struggling and people are losing their jobs. But using technology strategically can help an organization weather, or even thrive in troubled times and it sets them up for great things when the economy recovers.

An event sponsored by the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) about cloud computing and Microsoft’s release of the Azure Services Platform has got me thinking about how the cloud could potentially affect our industry. The value proposition (promise) of the cloud sounds appealing – pay only for what you use, unlimited capacity for peak loads, reduced capital and maintenance costs of running your own server farms, etc. These would be valuable for server-based CPU-intensive applications such as high volume conversion of documents to PDF and using OCR to convert images to PDF.

What are the potential drawbacks? Fear? Many of our customers are in industries such as Life Sciences, Legal, and Financial Services that are justifiably sensitive about the security of information in their documents. I suspect that any business person would feel anxious about transmitting documents outside the “safe” confines of their network into what appears to be a publicly accessible cloud. 

Should we be scared? A few years ago, wireless networks seemed to be a risky venture and we (especially the IT group) were worried that malicious hackers and industrial spies would park near the office and tap into our systems. Now, wireless networks are the norm at work and we happily sip a cup of java while getting work done over the wireless network in the local coffee shop. Most of us at Adlib Software only use the wireless network at the office. Can the cloud be less risky than the current day to day exposure of our business information? A recent study about laptop security from the Ponemon Institute sponsored by Dell reported that over 12,000 laptops per week go missing in airports in the U.S., many of these containing customer, business confidential, intellectual property, and personal information. It will probably be just a matter of time before we build up enough trust in the cloud to start taking advantage of it.

I’m sure that cloud computing will have its place in our business, sooner rather than later.

Paul Dyck
Product Manager

[On May 14, 2010, the following edits were made to this post, originally published on March 24, 2009] 

Many organizations need to preserve documents for a long period of time, for example, decades or more. The challenge with this need is that hardware and software technologies continually evolve and may become incompatible with the documents preserved or archived. Fortunately, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defined a standard a number of years ago, for long term document archival based on the PDF format called PDF/A or PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005). The ISO worked with representatives from government, industry, academia and Adobe to define this PDF/A standard.

A key feature of the PDF/A standard is that documents must be 100% self-contained. That is, all of the information necessary for displaying the document must be contained within the single file. This restriction is significant since, today, when creating a document, it’s very common to reference other documents using hypertext links. [Added] This includes embedding all fonts used for displaying content and using XMP metadata to embed information about the file's attributes. I understand this restriction is logical and necessary, but it makes it difficult to satisfy the PDF/A requirements. [Added] There are a number of things that PDF/A files may not include. Some of these are: Encryption; multimedia; JavaScript; and LZW compression.

Adlib Express now includes the following capabilities:

• Conversion of any supported file type to PDF/A-1b
• Conversion of existing PDF files to PDF/A-1b
• Verification of PDF/A-1b compliancy

One approach to meeting the standard is to remove all external hyperlinks and bookmarks from the documents. This, in my opinion, would not be viable in most cases since it may remove important content. An alternative is to directly embed all referenced documents within the main document. This is the approach taken by Adlib Express, it can automatically merge documents and converts the external hyperlinks and bookmarks to internal links since they can now be references within the same document. This approach achieves ISO’s “100% self-contained” requirement, enabling the resulting PDF/A to be compliant. Check out this link for more details on how Express can help support your document archival processes. 

I invite you to comment on PDF/A as well as on what I proposed above. Let's talk.

Jean Ouellette
Chief Software Architect
Adlib Software

One of the most interesting aspects of being a Customer Loyalty Representative is the opportunity to communicate with our customers on a daily basis. Everyday, I learn about the numerous ways our customers use the Adlib Express document transformation software. I thought I’d share with you one of the most common customer applications of Express – automating a paper-based invoice process. 

Most invoice document workflows involve the consolidation of volumes of information that are resource and time-intensive. With Express, organizations can collect information from source files and automatically merge or reassemble the data into a single PDF. By using Adlib Express’ powerful conversion, publishing and recognition features, the PDF retains all the required information in a secure format. 

Another Express feature our customers leverage is Zonal Recognition. When creating an invoice, standard information is usually required. With Zonal Recognition, customers capture this standard data onto specific regions of their source files using Optical Character Recognition. The recognized data is then extracted from the region and embedded into the customer’s invoice template.

So what are the benefits of automating an invoice document workflow with Express? Customers cite the following:

• A more streamlined, timely and reliable process that allows their workforce to become more efficient and productive
• Greater cost efficiencies in processing a greater number of invoices
• Standardized invoice output for enterprise-wide consistency
• Increased customer satisfaction as a result of their customers receiving invoices on a consistent basis with fewer errors

I’d like to hear from you. If you are currently using Adlib Express to automate your invoice workflow – share your story. If you’re not using Adlib, tell me what your current invoice process is like. Let’s talk.

Peter Jonak
Customer Loyalty Representative

PDF is a commodity like gasoline, or an internet connection right? Right.  

There is no shortage of ways to create a PDF these days.

However - in the same way that the gasoline for your lawnmower is not the same as the fuel used by your favorite NASCAR team - or the quality of your home internet connection is vastly inferior to your bank's high performance connection - tools to create PDF's are not created equal. To believe they are can be a costly mistake.

The costs to re-think workflows or to recover from bad document rendering can be significant. Check out the following article for some (non-PDF specific) costs. 

If you're in the Life Sciences industry the costs are not only direct $ spent doing it right, but the opportunity cost of slowing down your workflow. Check out this article on the impact of creating Submission-Ready PDF's.

I won't bore you with the details (in this post :)) but suffice it to say turning the myriad unstructured content lurking around your network into high-quality PDF output is not as easy as it seems.

Consider the following:

• hundreds of different formats
• versions that can span decades
• special 'issues' that users introduce by embedding other files or leaving behind faulty document elements
• fonts that may or may not be licensed
• document structures that should appear as valid PDF bookmarks
• header/footers/cross-references
• tables of contents
• hyperlinks

Trying to turn all of that user-generated 'gold' into the perfect PDF output using a 'commodity' tool is, to say the least, a challenge.  In fact, many of our customers and partners have told us time and again, that this is a problem that cannot be solved by the commodity tools that plug up your Google searches.

Check out the AIIM blog on PDF if you want to see what others are saying.  Or if you have a question of your own, let me know.

Scott Mackey
Director of Product Management
Adlib Software

Hello, and welcome to our blog. Our goal is to discuss issues around document transformation and document workflow automation. Future postings will include topics such as:

• how innovative companies are streamlining their business processes by automating document transformation
• industry trends
• technology innovations that we are thinking about
• tips for Adlib customers on how to get the most value out of Adlib Express

The people that will contribute postings work at Adlib Software and represent a depth of experience and expertise in the business and technologies around document transformation. We hope that you will find our postings interesting, valuable, and sometimes provocative. If you agree, disagree or have opinions on these topics, I encourage you to engage in the discussion; please hit the comment button and let us know what you think. 

Let’s talk.

Peter Duff
President and CEO
Adlib Software