Universal annotation a realistic prospect

ViewONE and ViewONE Pro now support the widest range of bespoke annotations formats available from any Java image viewer, enabling you to consolidate on a single web viewer across a broad range of different ECM systems.

In the past, if you were either switching ECM providers or had discrete systems with annotated repositories, you'd have needed to maintain viewers for each individual system; an administration and maintenance headache which also impacts heavily on users who have to learn many different viewing applications.

Although some viewers profess to enable consolidation on a single viewer because of multiple file format support, in practice this doesn't extend to supporting the annotations to these documents, negating the claim.

Now, thanks to ViewONE and ViewONE Pro, you can now genuinely consolidate on a single viewer across multiple ECM systems. The viewers can also offer a seamless transition option for users when switching between ECM systems (see the next article below).

In addition to ViewONE's own annotations format (our text-based '.ANT' files), Daeja now includes support for FileNet, Wang, eiStream, Watermark, Pixel Translations and soon ViewStar annotations formats.

ViewONE Pro has the added ability to offer PDF annotation viewing, with the forthcoming options to either convert PDF annotations to ViewONE annotations on the fly or edit PDF annotations whilst retaining their format. Currently users are able to view PDF annotations whilst being able to add and edit ViewONE annotations to the PDF documents.

Thanks to the cross-format nature of ViewONE's own annotations, any file which can be viewed in ViewONE or ViewONE Pro can also be annotated. Work is underway on a Universal Viewing module for ViewONE Pro which would offer support for another 200+ file formats over and above the current list of the key image formats, all of which could then be annotated.

ViewONE and ViewONE Pro are already the leading browser-based image viewers - the addition of universal viewing and annotation is set to extend that leading position still further.

For more information about ViewONE and ViewONE Pro, please visit www.daeja.com.

Helping companies to save $100Ks by offering ECM provider portability

There are many reasons for the inertia that prevents companies changing their ECM provider and chief among them is the belief that the transition from one system to another would be fraught with problems, would require a massive restructuring of data, and would be time consuming for users who would struggle to learn a new software package.

At Daeja we have attempted to smooth out many of problems associated with switching ECM providers by making our viewers supportive of a wide range of file and annotation types, creating genuine portability which can be leveraged by organizations in their efforts to save money.

Recently a US Fortune 100 company decided to switch providers and contacted us for help. Unfortunately due to confidentiality restrictions, we can't name them, so we'll just call them 'F100'.

F100 wanted to switch between two of the largest ECM providers, employing Texas-based consultancy Gimmal Group to perform the proof-of-concept, integration coding for the change and to manage the transition process.

Since F100 had a large repository of annotated files, it was important that these annotations be portable to their new system. Already aware of ViewONE, F100 contacted Daeja to see about a possible transition and new integration.

With ViewONE was able to help F100 to switch systems with zero impact on the user interface, requiring no change management at all.

F100's Document Management Technical Customer Relationship Manager believes that Daeja has helped F100 to save a substantial amount of time and money, a benefit enhanced by the fact that Document Management is of mission critical importance to F100.

Knowing that the transition to an alternative provider is a substantial technical, administrative and financial undertaking, the team were also well aware that user acceptance and the ease of the transition were going to be fundamentals to ensuring success.

Maintaining the same viewer helped enormously with this. Ordinarily this it not possible, because most viewers are tied too closely to the vendor's back-end system (if not actually provided by them). Switching often results in either significant relicensing (to the next vendor's viewer) or development (e.g. to integrate and customise some kind of toolkit).

Annotations is normally always a problem too as virtually all major vendors use their own techniques. ViewONE supports multiple annotation formats including FileNet, Pixel Translations, Watermark, WANG, and soon ViewStar, which made it the ideal solution.

Working closely with F100 and Gimmal Group, the Daeja support team helped to deliver as seamless a migration as possible for users.

Mike Alsup, Chief Executive of Gimmal Group, noted a key feature benefit that ViewONE offered:

"We used single page TIFFs in the conversion, to better manage the bandwidth required for the time to view the first page.  The flexibility of our solution mean that we could set the number of pages sent to the viewer in our implementation.  This wouldn’t be possible for a multi-page TIFF because it requires that the whole document is sent and F100 has users in Eastern Europe and places where high speed Internet connections are either prohibitively expensive or impossible to get.  The flexibility of the Daeja viewer and the new ECM system enable a variety of viewing, annotation, compression, and document types to be viewed."

ViewONE's server licensing also had a substantial benefit. Daeja's server-based licensing policies mean that F100 was able to save tens of thousands of dollars on the licensing cost of the viewing component when compared to other offerings currently on the new ECM's price list.

Competition is fierce amongst the major ECM providers and switching is likely to become more attractive as licensing costs are discounted and professional organisations like Gimmal Group are even more successful in their conversion promotion. In addition to the ECM providers in this example, ViewONE and ViewONE Pro are helping to facilitate switches across a broad range of implementations.

To learn more about how ViewONE and ViewONE Pro can help you to switch providers with minimal impact on your end users, please contact us at marketing@daeja.com.