Paperless Office News & Articles

If everything seems to be in control, you're not going fast enough.”
- Mario Andretti, champion racing car driver

In the world of automotive racing, speed is paramount. When it comes to automotive financing, speed is equally important. However, it is not enough to just move faster. The race to engage and capture new business requires agility, coordination, and control. In this article, I continue my writings on adaptive case management by focusing on how it is being successfully applied in automotive and equipment financing.

  We had dreams of a paperless workforce. By now we should have laser rays shooting out of our eyes that can scan, decode and upload relevant information into our bionic brains, eliminating the need for us to handle paper documents of any kind. For many of us, that simply isn’t the way it worked out.

There was a lot about managing data in the retail sector this week with the launch of a new customer relationship management tool from Autonomy and a survey that shows the public is ready to go paperless . Also, HyperOffice makes data mobile with HyperSynch beta.

Connecticut-based Square 9 Softworks (news, site)  has announced that it has upgraded the image capture function in the recently released v2.3 of its SmartSearch Content Management Suite. With the promise that there is a whole pile of improvements coming in 2010, the company says the current upgrade is in direct response to requests from its client base.

If you were following us two weeks ago you might remember that we were getting all touchy-feely -- at least as touchy-feely as a journalist can get -- about Version One (news, site) and their document management green meter.

Problem was that we didn’t know how it worked and we promised that as soon as we knew, you’d know.

Well, they’ve just announced the details. The meter is part of the company’s Clean and Green initiative and will calculate and report on carbon savings from the following transactions:

• Emailing documents
• Automatic electronic faxing
• Storage of outgoing documents
• Electronic authorization of documents

The green meter calculations are based on a range of formulae, including those obtained from the UK's  Carbon Trust and the UK Department of Environment tables. The information will be issued to users numerically after an action, and will also be displayed as a graphic.

This works by adding one leaf to a graphic of a tree for every one per cent of a tree's potential CO2 that is saved. When 100 leaves are added to the graphic, the tree is moved into a ‘Total Trees' data field -- representing the total number of trees saved. A new graphic appears and the process starts again. Awwww shucks!!!

If you want a better look and happen to be in London for the Green IT Expo on November 10/11 in the Barbican Center, Version One will be at Stand 4.
 

UK-based Version One (news, site)  is underling its green credentials with the announcement that it is to launch a carbon measurement tool later this year to measure how many trees and how much carbon is saved by companies who use Version One’s document management software.

Describing the initiative as an integral part of its “green agenda”, the new tool is part of a wider Clean and Green project that also includes the launch of the company’s Eco Gecko website, which provides information about the company’s green projects.

With all the fuss about document management and the great things that document management software can do for the environment, it’s a bit surprising that more companies haven’t launched ‘green’ manifestos to accompany their new releases.

That could be about to change with Knowledge Tree’s (news, site) announcement that it has launched a green IT promotion that will see the company planting a tree in Africa for every new sale over US $4500.

Each planted tree will be documented with a certificate issued to customers outlining the details of their contribution.

That is not to say that you may wake up some morning to find KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef digging holes in your back yard to plant trees personally. It just means that the company will be sponsoring the climate change and sustainable development organization Food & Trees for Africa (FTFA) to do it for them.

While some cynics will have, no doubt, already written this off as pure PR, there’s really no need to as KnowledgeTree has already acknowledged that it is PR, but also conforms with their concept of paperless and sustainable offices.

Keep in mind that PR it may be, but it will still see KnowledgeTree responsible for planting more trees in Africa and other developing regions. And that is a good thing.

And speaking of KnowledgeTree, while version 3.7 of KnowledgeTree’s on-the-premise commercial edition is due to land between now and the end of the year, there is still no official touchdown date.

Since its creation in 2003, New York-based Speedy Solutions (site) has been providing "mashups" of technology for the document management industry.

Their latest venture, which will be released in September, will see their Speedy Organizer solution, integrated with four of the biggest document management systems on the market.

PSIGEN's (news, site) FileBound Lookup Provider offers improved ways to explore content and manage documents within FileBound repositories. 

The push towards the paperless office continues. This time, it comes in the form of Image XChange, which Square 9 Softworks, a Connecticut-based business solutions developer, has just introduced into its SmartSearch Content Management Suite.

For businesses that are already using the SmartSearch platform, Image XChange enables them to run archive searches in all their business applications from the window they are working in.