Location! Location! Location!

Sorry. That's a cheap trick to grab your attention. However, it is an important real estate point that applies to the office struggle of finding the right information at the right location.

Information, like homes, come in many shapes and sizes and where you put them is just as important. For the office, this can be paper-based documents/forms, digital documents, and database stored records. And for what's important to the business, be it customers, products, or research, the trail of information is distributed across all three making it difficult to tie all of this information together – due to the problem of location.

In my professional life, it has always been a productivity loss tracking down all the scattered information needed to do my job. It usually starts with an application where I am looking up some customer's record or order history, but I notice something that seems wrong with the data in the application. I then try to find the original paper forms that were the source of the customer information – which is in a different office. Then, after getting that corrected I have to find the proposal sent out in PDF form to the customer to make sure the incorrect data was not included in the PDF. But the PDF is on a network share under a personal folder or a mish mash of folders and document names.

In addition to the cost in lost productivity there are other costs involved as well. Storing paper documents involves a tremendous cost in storage and maintenance of a physical filing system. There is also a risk of loosing documents by fire or water damage – or more likely misplaced or misfiled.

If you consider digital documents, you might think they are safer from loss, but in reality, it is even easier to loose by deletion or amidst a sea of folders and documents. They are often distributed across many different personal computers and shared network folders.

Application data is by far the most managed and protected information asset an organization has and is less likely to be lost. But information is often dispersed across typical places like customer databases, production databases, and accounting databases. Each of which portrays an uncoordinated picture of what's most important to your organization. Whether it is your customer, the product your customer purchased, or your receivables – you are left missing the complete picture.

This is normally the case because applications are usually focused and optimized for specific areas of the business cycle. They are also specifically designed for optimizing how best to get data in the system with rarely the same effort for designing how to get data out.

In addition to the lack of convenient corroboration as a cause for error, we must also remain vigilant for mis-interpretation of data – where snapshots or data is taken in the form of digital documents or report printouts. When these static views are created, they are often left unmanaged and disconnected from the source data, which can lead to other problems, as databases are in a state of constant change and update.

Lack of corroboration with source documents (input) and snapshot documents (output) are often the cause of flawed decisions based on mis-interpretations of information.

How can this be achieved? By tying it all together in a flexible framework that can support document capture/archive, application access, and document archival. 

One tool that provides this framework is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). SPS is a mature portal application that is geared around a self service concept of website content, creation and collaboration. SPS is built around Web parts — boxes of information on a page that represent a summary or overview of information. This provides capabilities like:

• Browser-based customization of page
• Browser-based content administration
• Aggregation capabilities
• Message board
• Ad-hoc data storage
• E-mail notifications
• Announcements, event calendar and contact list
• Document Repository

These features, and the ability to design solutions that leverage them, make for an excellent framework for document scanning, archival, and management.

What's more, paper scanning devices like Multi Function Printers by Hewlett-Packard can easily scan and digitize original documents. But more importantly they can extend the SharePoint interface to the physical console interface of the printer itself so that the scanned document to be "workflowed" to be stored and associated with application data like customer records directly to SharePoint. See "HP Document Management Solutions® HP and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003" whitepaper that introduces MFP's, HP AutoStore and SharePoint Portal at http://www.hp.com/large/ipg/assets/solutions/autostore_sharepoint_doc.pdf.

SharePoint can also include workflow wizards that allow generated digital documents to be associated with application data as well and stored in SharePoint. 

Couple this with a capability to build intelligent wizards in SharePoint that allow users to upload and tie digital documents like Microsoft Word to database records like customers.

When both source documents and generated digital documents are stored in an organized manner that ties them to relevant application records, you now have an end-to-end solution that makes corroboration an attainable and immediate goal. Improving customer service, reducing production errors, or making research data accountable – the disconnected paper and digital documents that clutter the office and hard drives can now be efficiently organized and stored allowing you to meet these goals.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server can be the right tool to bring it all together:

1. Integration with Document capture equipment
   Document scanning devises like Multi Function Printers by HP that can easily scan, but more importantly, can allow the physical console interface to be integrated with SharePoint allowing the scanned document to be "workflowed" to the right location with meta data in SharePoint. See "HP Document Management Solutions® HP and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003" whitepaper that introduces MFP's, HP AutoStore and SharePoint Portal.
2. Application Integration
   SPS provides a portal concept for integrating all of your applications without little or not application modification.
3. Workflows
4. Document flow and management
   The SPS API allows for intelligent document naming, workflow, and organized storage of digital assets that can be tied to source database entity records.
5. Document change management
   SPS is built on a security model that controls access and modification rights as well as maintaining a change history of digital assets.
6. Web interface
   SPS is managed and provides a user interface via a zero client web based interface.
7. Searchable with metadata
   SPS provides a flexible storage framework for meta data (description information of digital documents) that is automatically and consistently updated with it's built in indexing engine which provides a power search capability.
8. User Benefits
   End users can then search and find document objects or simply navigate folders of organized documents

Written by Tom Falwell, Data Management Group Practice Manager