Guest post written by Astrid Sutton In this digital era, technology is constantly evolving. Workplaces have gone from pen-and-paper case management processes to advanced computer-based systems. Today, the market for case management software continues to grow. Findings...
GSA Awards Armedia a Spot on $50B STARS III Contract VIENNA, Va, June 29, 2021—Armedia, through its Hartwood–Armedia Joint Venture with Hartwood Consulting Group, was selected by the General Services Administration (GSA) for a spot on its $50 billion STARS III...
Procurement practices using vendor lock-in technologies may thwart the ability to change with mission objectives and cost-efficiency of IT modernization initiatives, resulting in slowing the government agencies’ ability to face new challenges. Fueled by...
A bastion server, also known as a jump box, is a hardened server placed in a public subnet or DMZ to allow administrators to access other servers on the network remotely. Thanks to features introduced by Amazon Web Services (AWS), we no longer need bastion servers in...
Introduction Organizations that process medical Release of Information (ROI) requests are racing against time to respond to requests within 30 days and meet HIPAA compliance regulations. Failure to respond on time is frightening as the HHS lists settlements spanning...
There is a lot going on in the DFARs procurement world lately. As government contractors and government contract officers, it behooves us to stay focused on this critical part of procurement. There were two little talked about rules that were added to the DOD proposed...
Yasser Muwakki (Director of Digital Transformation) and Jon Holman (Senior AWS DevOps Engineer) Introduction We would like to share with you how we rewrote a service that is part of a larger solution we implemented for one of our clients. This new version of the...
With the emergence of data privacy laws in the USA and European Union, companies are facing an uphill battle. The Data Subject Access Request’s legal framework poses strict rules on processing and responding to requests. Failing to respond to a DSAR can mean serious...
Overview Traditional network security protocols involve strategies to keep malicious actors out of the network but allow almost unrestricted access to users and devices inside. These traditional architectures leverage legacy technologies such as firewalls, virtual...
The COVID-19 pandemic forced enterprises into a full work-from-home mode practically overnight. There was no time to test, evaluate and decide. We were thrown into this “new normal” where anything that can be done remotely is being done remotely. “We’re being forced...
The COVID19 pandemic forced most enterprises to send their employees to work from home. While they were busy implementing new solutions, procedures, and guidelines, employees working from home faced their own set of challenges they weren’t prepared for. In one recent...
A pandemic is not on our minds when we talk about globalization. Serious disease and possible death are some of our worst fears as humans. And let's be honest, we don’t really know how to handle this COVID-19 problem. No one alive has had any first-hand experience in...
Laws like GDPR, CCPA, WPA, and others are springing up across the world giving citizens the right to request companies to disclose what personally identifiable information they store about the individual. For states, companies are required by law to respond to the...
With recent legislation developments ensuring citizens’ rights to request their personal data that companies hold, companies are facing a turbulent future. Compliance is not optional. Now, the race is on. Citizens will be reaching out to companies, requesting...
Cyber-security is a hot topic in federal, state and local government agencies. The year 2019 will be remembered as the cyber-security horror year. With hundreds of security breaches that resulted in significant costs to repair the damage, cyber-security is not just an...
Most decision makers will agree that ECM modernization is not something enterprises are keen on doing. The risks that come with modernization are real and can cost a lot, both in terms of stress and in financial costs. However, by not modernizing outdated ECM systems,...
The Access to Information and Privacy Act (ATIP) of Canada came into effect in 1983. With this act, under the control of a federal government institution, Canadian citizens, permanent residents, or other individuals or corporations in Canada have the right of...
For years now, cyberattacks targeting local governments and organizations are making headlines. The most threatened, however, is the healthcare sector. With outdated technologies and a relatively low IT security literacy, medical workers are a perfect target for...
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) codifies government transparency and ensures citizens access to public records of interest. Despite these admirable intentions, often the volume and speed of public records request fulfillment results in frustrated citizens and...
Enterprise content is the currency that moves businesses. And logically, its management is often the key to a business’s success or failure. The very purpose of ECM is managing enterprise content in a way that it stimulates insights and decisions that drive corporate...
Even highly effective legal practices can improve their document organization to speed up locating information. While file organization is vital, it is not always obvious how to improve it, regardless of whether you are using a digital or manual filing system. It’s...
As the volume, velocity, and variety of content changes, so does the way in which that content is managed. The new scale and nature of enterprise content make older enterprise content management (ECM) systems outdated. In today’s information-centric business...
In this next blog, Part 3, I want to go over some important supporting topics for implementation, how this can speed up your progress for compliance and how an IGP can help you in other ways. Information Access Points - Pull it Together in a Diagram One thing that can...
In this next blog, Part 2, I want to go over the phases of the IGP and what goes into the IGP document. Please be sure to read the first part of this three-part blog “Vital Steps to Develop an Information Governance Plan – Part 1”. Phases of an IGP First Phase: Gather...
Today, I wanted to dive into a topic that I don’t see many people writing about; Information Governance Plans (IGP) and how to initiate one. In this three-part blog I will discuss what the vital steps are to create an IGP and how to keep you on track for successful...
As the number of FOIA and public records requests increases, so do the numbers and types of records that must be searched. This is becoming a big problem and is even causing legal issues for FOIA agencies. The Department of Justice received 228 FOIA lawsuits in FY...
The NARA 2019/2022 Deadline is looming. Organizations are scrambling to get organized and meet the deadlines. But, going fully digital isn’t something you can just fly through. There are dozens, even hundreds of questions to consider, from mapping out your content to...
In the first part of this series, I raised the issues of the importance and complexity of meeting the NARA 2019/2022 deadlines. It’s not something you can rush through and companies will need to have a plan before they jump into action. Now I would like to go over the...
In 2012, the Executive Office of the President of USA, Barack Obama issued a memorandum that defined the end of the road for paper-based workflows. The NARA 2019/2022 Deadline, as it’s known in the industry, expects government agencies to fully convert to digital...
The number of FOIA requests backlogs has been rising for years. Now, federal agencies that deal with FOIA request processing are starting to realize they need to improve their processes. One of these improvements should be for agencies to start using FOIA software...
The amount of newly generated data keeps growing every day. From about 150 Exabytes in 2005 to almost 1200 Exabytes in 2010, we now create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Read this again, every day. This is a HUGE amount of data. Just over the last two years,...
The Legal Sector is a workflow-dependent, document-heavy sector that relies on Legal Case Management software to function properly. These software solutions will have some level of Workflow Management and Document Management. And since the daily work of legal workers...
In order to increase the security among Federal agencies, several agencies created the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). These agencies are: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)...
Several years ago, while I served as an Adjunct Professor at Howard University School of Business, I developed a project-based learning course as requested by the Computer Based Information Systems Department Chair. Each semester, student project teams were given a...
Handling FOIA requests without an FOIA software is impossible. So you probably have some FOIA software running in your agency. But, for Federal agencies ‘some FOIA software solution’ is not enough. Nowadays, when working with sensitive data, security must come first....
Did you know that the industry standard for manually transcribing 1 hour of clear audio is 4 hours? That is a 4 to 1 ratio. Poor audio could take as much as 9 hours to transcribe 1 hour (9 to 1 ratio), which means a lot of manual hours are needed to transcribe audio...
In one of my previous blog posts, I touched on the topic of AI-powered transcription services on the market. There, I introduced the idea that, with this pace of multimedia production, traditional, human-powered transcription services is not the solution. In the past...
The world is full of data. And 90% of the world’s total data was created in the last 2 years. Let this sink in for a moment: In the past 2 years, we’ve created more data than our human civilization produced since we started writing. A lot of this data is multimedia...
50 years after the historic Gideon vs. Wainwright, many legal advocates believe that the justice system is still failing the poor. Many think that it’s a class issue, that the poor don’t deserve the same legal protection. But I think there’s a different perspective on...
Western societies take liberty seriously. We have our governments tied with legal frameworks to keep track of everything they do, and after a set time, these documents become publicly accessible through the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). But sometimes, this...
If you are reading this blog post you probably still have contradictory feelings about paper-based and paperless office. Whether we are talking about startups or established vendors we’re all looking for every possible way to streamline operations, cut costs, and save...
Image Source My friend and I ran into each other at the local post office and struck up a conversation. We quickly got into the current events of the recently mailed explosive devices to national political figures. We were just amazed at how fast DHS and USPS...
In the Case Management world, automation is not an unknown word. On the contrary, in Case Management, automation and digitalization have been a hot topic for the last few decades. From classification to automated workflows, automation has been present in the world of...
Then first, let’s understand YOU. It’s really important you understand who you are as a worker and the environment you work best in. Finding the right fit for you is the best thing you can do for the company you commit to employment. When you fit in a company, just...
"The use of smart machines by enterprises can be transformative and disruptive. Smart machines will profoundly change the way work is done and how value is created. From dynamic pricing models and fraud detection to predictive policing and robotics, smart machines...
Now that your firm has decided to finally do something with all the documents in assorted boxes, file cabinets, offices, storage rooms and warehouses, you need to figure out how to really get it done. Most importantly – what is it going to cost? How long will it...
Lots of places offer lots of services. Armedia document scanning and digitization does one thing well. Production scanning to help offices quickly reduce their physical files into manageable electronic files. This means we scan large volumes of documents. Whether...
We all know that price is not always the indicator of quality, and yet, we still tend to make rash judgments based solely on the price tag of a product. You have probably been in a situation like this: looking at the product name, and jumping to the bottom line, and...
How important is a name? Would you believe it holds all the answers? Names are important and, in some cases, critical. Think about the last time you went to the hospital and walked thru a door there – would it matter if you walked in ER or the Contamination unit...
Trust Armedia with your physical documents. Over the last decade Armedia has safely, securely and successfully scanned over 10 million documents at 99.99% accuracy. Armedia offers a clean, safe and security cleared facility to safely care and maintain your documents...
Legal professionals use court case videos to verify the authenticity of information and to increase the transparency of the judicial process. Lawyers, judges, and other legal personnel use these case videos as any other case-related documents. This means that these...
While looking for a replacement for an Alfresco Workdesk solution for our client at USDA, I heard from a co-worker that Alfresco had released their next generation UI Framework, aka Alfresco Development Framework (ADF), to replace their Share framework. After...
If you’ve been dealing with FOIA requests processing for at least a year, you probably can relate with people who are overwhelmed and tired of the amount of work. FOIA requests processing is tedious and tiresome. Especially if you’ve been doing this for years. From...
The UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems addressed the growing need for more efficient Records Management in 2003, reporting: “The world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion...
Being present in the Legal world for so many years, you have probably witnessed a number of buzzes. “Something new, innovative and life-changing has occurred.” “A new technology, an innovation that will change the industry forever.” You’ve been probably hearing the...
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the legal sector evolves, so does the fear among legal workers. Many legal professionals fear that AI will make such a change in the legal sector that human effort will no longer be required. But, the truth is that many of the...
Do you want to learn how a modern correspondence management solution can improve workflows in your organization? How organizations manage correspondence can reflect their professionalism, capabilities, and internal organization. And, if you want to take a serious step...
When most people think about Law Enforcement, they probably imagine a bunch of police officers running down the street, chasing the bad guys. Bringing law to practice. But police work involves digging for clues from surveillance cameras, interviews, court videos etc....
I have talked about Armedia’s Legal Case Management Module so many times now, and every time I finish writing a blog post, I feel like I have left something out. Going through my recent blog posts, I’ve realized that I haven’t spent much time explaining the Artificial...
The Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) and the Chief Records Officer (CRO) constantly observe and analyze the performances of FOIA agencies. The goal is to improve FOIA implementation across Federal Agencies. They do this by relying on the Records...
Established companies struggle to extract value from unstructured data like emails, presentations, videos, images, etc. Managing unstructured data isn’t really about storage and organization. It’s about making that content functional, or in more simple words, deriving...
In March 2018, 50 years after the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act, the US Department of Justice released their Fiscal Year 2017 Annual FOIA Reports. According to these reports, the number of FOIA requests continues to increase. And in 2017, for the...
It’s no secret that cyber security threats loom over federal agencies. According to the report the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued 2 months ago, three out of four federal agencies are at risk from cyber attacks. From 96 federal agencies that...
Software Reliability We live in a society where our dependency on technology is rapidly increasing each day. IoT should make our life easier, at least that’s the idea, and honestly, when most of the people are busy with their careers, having an app that will save you...
In the world of C-Suite managers, a majority of people are well in their fifties. This is especially true for CEOs. According to Korn Ferry’s findings, the average age in the C-level world is 55. The oldest ones, CEOs, on average are 58 years old. Explaining...
We’ve been in the Digital Age for quite a while now, and many companies have adopted a fully-digital mode of operations. So nowadays, you may be wondering if there are still companies that need a correspondence management software in this age of digital omnichannel...
Over the years we've worked with various organizations in modernizing their case management software. And again and again, we find ourselves going back to ArkCase as a solid platform for handling large organizations needs. In this text, we'd like to paint a picture of...
This blog is written for everyone, but my recommendation for the reader is to have: HTML – basic knowledge CSS – basic knowledge JavaScript – good knowledge AngularJS Framework – good knowledge Npm & Bower – basic knowledge Text editor – basic knowledge To develop...
The java “instanceof” operator is used to test whether the object is an instance of the specified type (class or subclass or interface). It is also known as type comparison operator because it compares the instance with type. It returns either true or false. If we...
In the world of Legal Case Management Systems, we don’t raise the issue of the environment too often. But it’s worth discussing, so we can all understand and appreciate the importance of having an environment-helping modern legal case management system. Here’s what we...
We recently had the opportunity to test and evaluate (T&E) the accuracy of a machine transcription product in our lab. Two challenges with testing the product were finding a test corpus we could trust and a scoring methodology that was fair. The problem with...
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that has its own machine learning service, known as Cognitive Services. It is split into five categories: Vision, Speech, Language, Knowledge, and Search, with each category containing several tools, for a total of 26....
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a specialized branch of computer science that focuses on getting computer systems to mimic human-level thinking. This, at least, is the theoretical aim. At the moment, we are far more satisfied with getting computers to take big chunks...
Recently, a client stopped by and asked if Armedia had, or knew of any open source, face matching software that could scan a video and determine if a suspect’s face appeared anywhere in the video. Our team was intrigued. In today’s world, how available and how...
Intro The purpose of this blog post is to explain how blockchain technology, and in particular a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, works by example. A simple blockchain bash script, named bashCoin, will be used for illustration. Digital Currency and Blockchain Overview A...
There is always a clash between established people/companies/products, and new upcoming stars that challenge the status quo. There’s always a Goliath and always a David, eager to challenge the status quo. In every industry, we see a Ford that is challenged by a young...
Intro Beginners to Bitcoin may find the concepts and the scope of the network overwhelming. The idea of trading real currency for digital currency can sound scary, especially when the beginner is not familiar with how blockchain works or even how to send and receive...
The technology-driven world in which we live can be a world filled with challenges for some and a world of promise for others. Some choose to live in a ‘paper-based world’ where their organization suffers from inefficiencies, lack of transparency and inability to...
In 2014, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) formed the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee to improve Federal Agency FOIA Operations. The purpose of creating the FOIA Advisory Committee was to explore procedures and...
The awareness of open and transparent government continually increases. As a result, government agencies find it more difficult to deal with the enormous number of FOIA requests. Responding to FOIA requests in an efficient and timely manner is a huge challenge for...
Would you agree that Legal workers love technology? I think they do. Well, maybe they don’t dream of technology per-se, but they love the benefits of technology more than anyone else. The vast range of General Counsel Operations like compliance reporting management,...
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) also referred to as Release of Information (ROI) allows citizens access to undisclosed information that is managed by the government. As more citizens have become aware of their right this has led to a significantly increased...
As information volume grows daily, companies and organizations are facing the ever-growing challenge of managing all the data, for all their cases, all of the time. To complicate things further, organizations and end-users want this data to be accessible 24/7,...
Many enterprises began their digital transformation journey in 2017. This year, the trend will pick up the pace as more and more organizations decide to go completely paperless, completely on-line. The key benefit that companies expect to gain from their digital...
Technology and the rapid changes in the competitive market force organizations to rethink their Operations Management strategies. Many organizations that stick to the traditional BPM strategy face the consequences of neglecting these changes. Digital Process...
For experienced managers, it’s no news that every once in a while, companies need to adapt and adopt new technologies. This time, it may be the need of replacing Business Process Management to Digital Process Automation (DPA). Many times, you’ve witnessed a painful...
In today’s fast-paced and high-technology world, people have higher and higher expectations that their local, state and federal agencies will provide outstanding service. However, a lot of agencies struggle with delivering decent public experiences. And this can be...
At DevCon 2018, Ben Chevallereau, Sr. Architect at Armedia, presented how to use blockchain to secure an accounts-payable transaction using an enterprise content management system (e.g., Alfresco) to store the content. Ben gave a brief overview of blockchain and then...
Modernizing correspondence management solutions provide complete facilitation and automation for all outgoing and incoming correspondence movement. Such solutions can provide your organization with a central repository that stores data and that can provide a flexible...
Public defenders need legal case management software that can solve their high volume practices and address the specific challenges of criminal defense. By using such software, public defenders will be able to track and manage all aspects, from initiation to...
Public defender offices across the country rely on software solutions to move from one case to the next, as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible. The challenge is that different offices rely on a different set of software solutions to capture, store, process...
Are you looking for a legal case management software that is right for your law firm? If yes, you will find this very interesting. Armedia has been working in the Enterprise Content Management industry for over 2 decades, and we’ve found all sorts of ECM solutions...
Are you looking for ways to improve the productivity in your law department? Perhaps the first thing that comes to your mind is gaining new staff members. However, that is not the only way. A legal case management software can provide your law firm an increase in...
Within the past few decades, IT (information technology) has become a massive part of nearly every organization and office, and it’s difficult to predict how any business can manage their processes and be more productive without the help of the many contributors in...
Do you want to improve the efficiency and client service of your law firm? Then look no further than a modern legal case management software. More and more law firms and legal departments are investing in these systems as a way to boost their efficiency and client...
The first legal case management software rolled out in the early 90s. Since then, thousands of law firms and legal departments have invested in such software as a way to improve efficiencies and provide better client service. Although the benefits of legal case...
Does your government agency have a difficult time keeping pace with responding to FOIA requests? That is likely due to having an old instead of a modern FOIA software solution. The FOIA Project made a study where they submitted an FOIA request to 21 different federal...
Is your agency challenged when handling FOIA requests in a timely and efficient way? Is your agency still processing paper requests manually? If your answer was yes, you are surely frustrated with the number of resources and time it takes to compile, copy, and redact...
For federal government agencies, records and information management is an important part of their everyday work. They must comply with directives and memorandums for record retention and classification. This is partly to enable them to respond to the continuous stream...
Are you looking for ways to solve the overworked staff problem in your department? Sure, each and every agency wants to increase the effectiveness of their staff and the maturity of their department. However, only a few companies understand the core of the problem....
Today, agencies are actively looking for the right software management solution in order to increase the rate and quality for responding to public records requests. Back then, agencies used basic web forms, fillable PDF’s, and even faxed requests. As solutions, such...
With large-scale repetitive processes like FOIA requests management, it makes perfect sense to try and optimize the workflow as much as possible. Even a minor process improvement can mean avoiding tons of unneeded repetitive work. Here are some of the best practices...
More proactive information disclosure and higher transparency are the current needs of federal agencies responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Complying with the FOIA is an essential way that the government agencies serve US democracy. But the...
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which supports release of information (ROI) gives citizens the right to request access to undisclosed information, managed by the government. Citizens are becoming more aware of their rights and are increasingly using FOIA to get...
Even today, organizations still rely on the slow, painful, error-prone manual process of working with data. This can involve scanning various documents, OCR with the mandatory deciphering of bad handwriting, adding needed metadata, properly naming documents to fit...
Many organizations get cold feet when facing the daunting process of migrating to a new ECM. Migrating content that is unattributed, unorganized, and unclassified can fill up the ECM with huge quantities of unwanted data, or it may entirely derail the project. Today’s...
There are many reasons why an organization may face a large ECM data migration. Most of the times companies start thinking of ECM data migration because they want to modernize workflows. Other times, this may be because of a recent acquisition, a part of a strategic...
Having the ability to have a panoramic view of information over the organization in an impeccable and transparent way, has clear business value. The information is no longer just data, but content that can be integrated, interpreted and be more significant to...
How much time and effort do the employees of your organization spend every year looking for key documents, missing reports, e-mail authorizing an action, or data files with important information for verifying some corporate action or making business decisions?...
Content migration is a complex process for every organization. It is an enterprise-wide data management process that is tedious and demands huge amounts of resources. Content migration is a challenging process since it can become extremely difficult if you have a lot...
For successful organizations, it is not good enough just to implement an ECM solution and hope to get the best of it. It takes time to plan, adjust and particularly time to pick the right vendor that will meet all the needs of one organization. As a matter of fact,...
Case management is all about the process of taking a case (medical, law enforcement, complaint, FOIA and so on) from start to finish with as little blind spots as possible. But this work gets harder because the process usually is not rigidly structured. It’s dynamic,...
The cloud is growing to be a very compelling approach for organizations to host ECM applications, offering reliable computing power, flexible cost models, and lots of off-premise support assembled conveniently in an enterprise content management service agreement....
It is almost impossible for one organization to function well without a good enterprise content management (ECM) system. Organizations are generating sensitive and valuable content on a daily basis, so setting up a robust enterprise content management system is...
Armedia Solution Engineering Team Vishal Deshpande Andrew Slade William Phillips Naga Krishna Sumanth Kovvuri When Should I Use Microservices? Microservices are a powerful and useful tool when used appropriately. However, they are not a magic bullet to solve all...
Client Experience heavily influences client retention, loyalty, and advocacy – all important factors for modern organizations. Managing the client experience, however, can prove to be challenging, and there are myriad considerations to weigh when creating a client...
Each time you develop a new product, contact a client or deal with a customer complaint, you probably follow a particular set of steps. These steps are known as business processes. They not only save you time, but they also help your organization run more effectively....
As we mentioned in the previous article, before migrating to a new ECM system you should consider an assessment of your current ECM system that takes a complete view of the tools and processes you are currently using. Comparing your current ECM system to the...
Armedia has created the FOIA module for ArkCase, a flexible, open source, case management system to help organizations easily and successfully navigate the FOIA maze. The administrative appeal process is a critical element of the FOIA system, and it’s a useful...
Does your current ECM system work properly for your organization? Is it easy to use? Or you do find it daunting and even intimidating? If you do get ECM headaches, it may be time for you to start thinking upgrading or migrating away from your current ECM system and...
Armedia Solution Engineering Team Vishal Deshpande Andrew Slade William Phillips Naga Krishna Sumanth Kovvuri How does Armedia Develop Microservices? Microservices are powerful tools, but there can be difficulty in getting them started and off the ground. To...
Agencies must adopt clear procedures for fees and waivers. These procedures include fees for searching for information, the release of information, and duplication of information. Many requesters have expressed frustration with the FOIA fee system; issues such as...
Armedia Solution Engineering Team Vishal Deshpande Andrew Slade William Phillips Naga Krishna Sumanth Kovvuri What Are The Challenges Of Using Microservices? Microservices have become the new architectural cool-aids in the IT world ever since Netflix open-sourced its...
Armedia Solution Engineering Team Vishal Deshpande Andrew Slade William Phillips Naga Krishna Sumanth Kovvuri What Are Microservices? The microservice architectural design is a style of software architecture design which allows for increased encapsulation and...
Many FOIA requesters have raised worries about excessively broad claims of confidential business information limiting access to important public information. Armedia’s FOIA Module is designed to help you avoid excessively broad claims or delayed responses to FOIA...
Destruction of confidential documents is the ultimate means of hiding something. Unfortunately, it’s a practice, or "mistake", that has become far too common. Federal legislation governs the handling of old/classified documents. ArkCase, powered by Alfresco, will help...
Regardless of scheme or size, all agencies must meet the same FOIA requirements and act accordingly. Armedia’s FOIA Module, built on ArkCase architecture, is designed to clearly and proactively communicate with requesters… regardless of the size of your agency or...
Journalists who regularly use the federal FOIA complain about lost requests, long delays, and responses that give no indication if and when the agency will turn over documents. But a new feature promises to make it easier for agencies and requesters to keep track of...
As we mentioned in a previous blog post, we are running a coverage of how the Armedia FOIA Module helps companies use open source software like ArkCase in their case management needs. In this series, we are reviewing how agencies should handle FOIA requests following...
Earlier we posted a blog post on how to navigate the FOIA maze. That blog inspired readers to get in touch with us and ask some specific questions on how to deal with the FOIA challenge, and if Armedia has a simpler solution to this complex challenge. And the good...
Case management software can help a law firm or Office of General Counsel (OGC) manage its cases, firm matters, and clients. While case management software has been around for some time, there are still firms who haven't invested in it yet. But, recently, more and...
Modern records management software is designed to control records retention and disposition within an organization systematically and to offer key personnel an easy and quick access to discover information for various reason to include legal holds. For the most part,...
Usually people think of the Human Resources departments when there is a new hire or there is a problem with someone in the organization. Both big and small HR teams own the task of improving and maintaining the quality of work environment for all employees. Whatever...
‘Our people are our most valuable asset. Every person at Armedia is committed to growing themselves and members of our team. We strive to develop our employees' breadth and depth across our business areas. We emphasize this focus through our employee coaching program...
Background Our company is currently engaged in a series of projects that require us to secure and harden our solutions based on requirements put forth by various organizational and recognized standards ranging from the Department Of Defense (DOD) Secure Technical...
In this video post, the ArkCase experts show you the features available in the new ArkCase 3.1 For more information, email our team for a full demo. Contact us today.
As you know from a previous post, it bothers me that out-of-the-box, D2 does NOTHING. In an effort to help validate D2 v4.5 installations and provide a test environment for my DQL Editor widget, I developed a simple "starter" application that I named "D-Top". D-Top...
Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform. There seems to be sufficient documentation to get a copy up and running for older versions of this offering. Documentation for the newer versions could use a rewrite. After setting up...
In this video, ArkCase demonstrates how to seamlessly integrate Ephesoft's document capture solution with the ArkCase Case Management solution. Contact our expert ArkCase team today to learn how we can help you!
My article for the EMC Proven Professional's 2015 Knowledge Sharing Contest, A Language Translation Service for Documentum, has been published! You can read the article for yourself on the ECN in the Proven Professionals' area (if you have access), or on my personal...
In this video Deja Nichols walks you through creating a legal hold within Alfresco Records Management. For more information about Alfresco Records Management, contact our experts today.
In this video, Armedia Records Management expert Deja Nichols will show you how to use various search features within Alfresco Records Management. Looking for help with your Alfresco Records Management solution? Contact our experts today to learn how we can help!
In this video, Armedia Records Management specialist, Deja Nichols, will walk you through the Un-filed Record features within Alfresco Record Management. Interested in learning more about how Armedia can help you with Alfresco Record Management? Contact us today to...
In today's video blog, Deja Nichols will walk you through how to create a rule within Alfresco.
In today's video blog, Armedia's Records Management specialist, Deja Nichols, will show you how to create a disposition schedule in Alfresco Records Management. Stay tuned for more videos!
In this video, Armedia's Records Management expert, Deja Nichols, gives you an overview of the Alfresco Records Management Module. Stay tuned for more from our Alfresco Records Management video blog series!
In this video, Armedia's Records Management expert, Deja Nichols, gives you an overview of the Alfresco Records Management Module. Stay tuned for more from our Alfresco Records Management video blog series!
I was introduced to this short Ted Talk by Simon Sinek recently. It really resonated with me. I think it speaks to the heart (you'll understand that statement better after watching the video) of what Armedia does and why I am a part of it. In the video, Simon Sinek...
Recently our team has been asked several questions about how to best utilize Alfresco Records Management for their various government and business needs. In response to that, our in-house Records Management specialist, Deja Nichols, will be posting a series of...
A few years ago I started a project with a new customer. When I was granted access to their DEV, QA, and PROD environments I was given a bookmark file that contained all of the URLs I would need to manage and administer their systems (for example: DA, Webtop, and...
Scott Roth, Armedia Director of Technology and Documentum expert, recently conducted an interview with EMC about his whitepaper "A Language Translation Service for Documentum." This Whitepaper was written for the EMC Proven Professionals Knowledge Sharing Program....
OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are compromised with a vulnerability that makes it possible to steal information. Patched versions of the OpenSSL may have been back ported to the "built on" date newer or equal to April 2014 should be a good indicator...
Currently, I am finishing up an EMC xCP project, and I would like to leave behind some tips I have had to discover the hard way. Hopefully, this will save you some time during your xCP project. Tip #1 – Have Well-Defined Use Cases I know it is usually a requirement...
Our minds are so complex, they constantly capture and use context you most likely have never even considered. Many illusions (or the latest blue/black vs. gold/white dress controversy), are due to the fact your mind is working without you really being aware of what it...
In this blog, we wanted to show you another great video from the team at ArkCase! In this video blog, you will see how easily ArkCase allows you to customize your dashboard. This intuitive feature allows for increased user experience through delivering the users the...
We are excited to show another video blog from the team at ArkCase! ArkCase allows users to update their profile based on groups or departments that the end user has been added to. This allows for the user to be able to control the information they receive based upon...
ArkCase intuitive case management solution allows for better management of your electronic case files. Allowing you to track cases throughout the entire lifecycle, ArkCase provides enhanced investigative case management through Collaboration, Automation, and Security,...
New video blog from ArkCase!! In this video, you will see how easily ArkCase allows you to search for information. By just quickly clicking a button, you can access any information you are looking for.
New blog from the experts at ArkCase!! Quick access to your case files is essential when you are on-the-go and in need of rapid application response. ArkCase provides that! Check out the new video to see how this is accomplished.
The upgrade path should be as simple as upgrading Windows Server 2008 R2 Server-Core Domain Controller to Windows Server 2012 Core. However, this is not the case. Most Internet solutions will write of this upgrade path without Active Directory services. This is an...
Providing content in users' native languages is becoming the expected norm. It is not uncommon for banks, credit card companies, insurers, government agencies, and manufactures to provide licensing agreements, rules and regulations, warranties (e.g., John Deere), and...
Webtop has been Documentum's flagship user interface (UI) since its introduction in Documentum v5 (circa 2003) and has an enormous worldwide install base. It's built upon solid (though dated) technology, methodology, and standards. It's also built upon/with a solid...
Is there a way to quickly find similar documents in a Documentum repository? Yes, there is. One approach could be to use the Lucene MoreLikeThis() API. This API call to the Lucene Full Text search engine extracts what it believes to be the most salient words from a...
We have uploaded a new video to the Armedia YouTube Channel! In this video, we demonstrate how users can update or change their profile information within Armedia Case Manager. These changes could include items such as groups that the user belongs to or subscriptions...
Check out our new video blog giving you an inside look at Armedia Case Manager! In this post, Ronda Ringo demonstrates how users can generate a report within Armedia Case Manager. Stay tuned for more videos coming soon! To see all of our Armedia Case Manager Videos,...
In today's video, we give you a tour of the ArkCase configurable dashboard. This dashboard provides a quick an easy way for users to access commonly needed components of their case management solution. The dashboard is also customizable so that users can put things in...
Ultimately many would want to write complex RPMs to install software packages, however, those who are accountable for writing such packages may agree that this task may be cumbersome and impractical. Where the RPM may accomplish the goal of wrapping an application in...
Recently, our team has been working on a series of CMIS Integrations. This video demonstrates the use of the CMIS components that we developed and used to integrate FileNet with SharePoint 2013. This integration has been packaged into SharePoint. During the video,...
It turns out I was wrong...which happens at an alarmingly increasing rate these days—though I chalk that to a thirst to challenge myself...errr, my story! So, for a while now, I had convinced myself that I knew what the most important thing was about successfully...
For a few months now, I and our fellow team members have been working on developing a CMIS integration to seamlessly allow for Alfresco to be accessed from other platforms. This video demonstrates the components that we built on top of the standard CMIS 1.1 and that...
I recently needed to make a change to have Alfresco 4's Activiti call an object managed by Spring instead of a class that is called during execution. Couple of reasons for this: A new enhancement was necessary to access a custom database table, so I needed to inject...
You may have seen the news that the U. S. Government has established the U.S. Digital Service, a small team designed to “to improve and simplify the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government.” On the heels of that announcement came the...
My previous post, "Allow WordPress Users to Upload Images" discussed the use of the functions.php file to implement capabilities to the contributors' role that isn't there by original design. As the functions.php file is part of a Wordpress theme, and if an alternate...
WordPress offers six different roles ranging from Super Admin to Subscriber. There is one role that permits a user to write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them; that is the contributor. Writing a post and submitting it for approval to publish without...
Armedia has a customer using Captiva 7 to automatically capture tabular information from scanned documents. They wanted to export the tabular data to a CSV file to be analyzed in Excel. Capturing the tabular data in Captiva Desktop proved to be simple enough, the...
Image Source: Oracle TL;DR version: if you run multiple VirtualBox VMs on the same desktop, setup 3 network interfaces on each such VM (one NAT, one internal, one bridged). Now for the long, more entertaining (hopefully!) version: Recently I switched from...
In the 1st part of this blog “Alfresco Records Management; An Approach to Implementation - PART 1,” I went over the business case and planning phase for a medium-sized agency that wanted a seamless records management configuration, leveraging Alfresco’ s Enterprise...
Image Source: Wikipedia AFB Consulting (AFBC), the consulting division of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), conducted a comprehensive accessibility and usability evaluation of the Discover 508 for SharePoint software from Discover Technologies of...
Background ArkCase is a framework for developing case management applications. Data Access Control ensures each user sees only records they are authorized to see, and are prevented from seeing unauthorized records. Data access control is applied to individual...
Overview of Ephesoft Security With an introduction of Single Sign-On (SSO) and other great new features, such as new Extraction (Fuzzy Key Field, Zone Extraction, Regular Expression Builder) and Classification (Test Classification Tool, Advanced DA Switch,...
What, No Full Text Search Already? My project ArkCase is a Spring application that integrates with Alfresco (and other ECM platforms) via CMIS - the Content Management Interoperability Standard. ArkCase stores metadata in a database, and content files in the ECM...
The Issue Mule ESB provides a built-in mechanism to call a Spring bean. Mule also provides an entry point resolver mechanism to choose the method that should be called on the desired bean. One such method is the property-entry-point-resolver. This means the...
Implementing Records and Information Management (RIM) can be a juggling act. Many record managers are faced with several major issues in applying RIM best practices to their businesses. In this two part blog, I want to go over how I helped implement a...
ArkCase is both a framework and an application. As a framework, ArkCase provides a scaffolding to write case management applications tailored to custom-fit a specific customer. As an application, ArkCase provides pre-built web application archives (WAR files)...
I picked up a book in Armedia's technical library by accident the other day, but have come to really appreciate the rewards of that serendipitous event. I first grabbed the book because of its author, Don Knuth, is a well-known innovator in the computer science world....
A while back I said Armedia was investing in the next generation ArkCase. I promised occasional updates. Since then I've written a few technical stories (CLICK HERE to view all of our ArkCase blog posts). Today I want to describe how we've started to achieve...
For those of you who may not have heard, Ephesoft 3.1 is now available and last week an in-depth demo of the new features was recorded. You can view the Ephesoft feature demo here: For those without the 1 hour and 18 minutes to spare, below are some of the...
Spring MVC's message conversion feature is the bomb. I love it; I wish I'd started using it long ago. Just make sure your JSON fields match your POJO property names, and your MVC controller includes a POJO parameter or return value. Then Spring MVC auto-converts...
An enterprise size company should require enterprise level software to meet the demands of it's infrastructure and user community. Software vendors offer enterprise class applications and solutions, however, miss the mark when deploying agents to clients. A case may...
I've written about using Mule with Spring on my personal blog. In this article I described how to integrate Mule into an existing Spring MVC application. That approach involved configuring the web.xml file to setup a Mule context: <listener>...
Big data is a term that is the main talking point of most companies that deal with the vast amounts of data out there from sales figures to trend analysis. Most of the time the task that is assigned to the ‘Big Data’ team is to find a way to get the information,...
Activiti out-of-the-box supports Mule tasks. When Activiti encounters a Mule task, it launches the configured Mule flow. This integration is exactly why my new project uses Mule in the first place. But Activiti also supports execution and task listeners: code that...
When it comes to in-house IT services, every company has different practices. We will stick to the basics, unless our company’s core product is cutting edge hardware or software. Usually businesses follow the pack, and their system architects color within the lines....
Over the past several months, I have written several blogs about my project, the ArkCase framework. In this post, I will cover how we have gotten ArkCase to work with Spring Security. It is important to note that each organization has their own user directory, their...
An approach for enhancing a customers’ satisfaction with Documentum’s built-in full text search capabilities is to provide them with a thesaurus of terms relevant to their industry, region, or business process. For example, suppose a user needs to find all the...
Enterprise Alfresco 4.1.2 has two methods that control content and metadata indexing to facilitate search capabilities that apply to all content nodes. In this blog, we will explore the two methods, experiment with changing out-of-the-box capability, and verify those...
In case you missed today's webinar in which we walked through our ArkCase solution framework with Alfresco Records Management, here are the slides from the presentation!! Acm and seamless records management integration webinar 3-4-14 from Armedia LLC ArkCase is...
I just finished my first Mule flow. My flow receives an Alfresco node reference and declares a corresponding record in the Alfresco Records Management Application. I learned about Mule and Alfresco RM along the way... specifically, I learned to think like a Mule,...
Part of a solution that is being implemented for a current client involves implementing a custom retention framework. Before you ask, no, Alfresco RM was not chosen. Now that question is out of the way, testing retention is painful. The reason why I say this,...
November 2013 was an important month for the travel industry as the Final Rule for the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) was implemented and the formation of the Rail Vehicles Access Advisory Committee was approved by the Access Board. So what does that mean to your...
One of the great joys of development comes when you learn about a program making your development task very simple. Apache Tika is one of those programs, and before I even begin to talk about Tika, I have to tip my hat to the developers. Thank you very much for...
Reporting is on every manager’s mind. “How can I provide the real-time facts about the progress of my department?,” “How do I get the funding I need?,” “How can I be sure changes in my organization are getting done correctly?” These are some of the questions we have...
It wasn't that long ago when a development environment required multiple physical computers to perform tasks from the mundane to the most sophisticated. While the virtualization of these environments became more adopted, software vendors introduced new products and...
Thank you to everyone who turned out for our presentation this morning at Content.gov!! In case you missed the presentation, here are our slides from the event. For more information about ArkCase, CLICK HERE to learn about our upcoming webinar! Content gov2014 armedia...
In my last blog, I introduced a complete backup and restore strategy for Alfresco and a custom application that has synchronized data (Alfresco holds repository documents, Application DB holds application specific data). PROBLEM BACKGROUND: Another issue I ran into...
As a business analyst, I’m often asked the types of daily activities that I perform and how I can best serve my customer. First, and most importantly, Business Analysts (BA’s) are the customer’s advocate. We’re the good cops....
It's been a long time (OK, a few years) since I last wrote about ArkCase. What's been happening since then? We wrote the ArkCase framework using Spring and Spring MVC. It was successful: we supported a few customers. One customer was very large and required many...
Over the Christmas holiday, a colleague gave me The Go-Giver, by Bob Burg and John David Mann. It’s a charming little parable with huge lessons. While reading the authors’ five laws for success (stratospheric success!), I thought to myself: these are principals I...
When creating an ECM charter, one of the first things that should be accomplished is deciding who within your organization should be a member of this core team. This step is extremely important, as these members will be responsible for the project scope within the...
Recently, while working with a client I went through the course of understanding their business processes. What transpired was a fairly complex process. It started out simple: Complete form, submit to manager. Manager reviews, either rejects for more...
There are some basic initial configurations we can set to get a better performance out of our CQ instances. An average performance target value can be defined. Once this value is proven to be both achievable and maintainable, it can be used to monitor the performance...
In today’s information-centric age, government organizations face the daunting challenge of offering enhanced services to citizens while simultaneously improving efficiencies and cutting costs. Let’s face it, whether you’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, the...
The ability to search and finding the right document is one of the biggest challenges in the ECM industry. The volume of electronic documents grows really quickly and often is stored into a number of different systems and repositories. One solution to this is to use...
For part 4 of this series we will discuss Adobe CQ Security Configurations. This group of configurations will help us ensure proper access to our repository (CRX). Demo users need to be removed, bulk access to the repository needs to be denied, developer’s console...
As we discussed in our previous blog, Federated Search can provide extreme benefits to organizations that have numerous databases and need to search for information across them. In today's world of ever changing Healthcare technology, federated search can provide an...
Information: The Lifeblood of the Enterprise Timely access to critical information separates the winners from the losers in today’s information economy. Yet all too often knowledge workers fail in their quest to obtain the information they need. There are many reasons...
This group of configurations can be performed after installing Adobe CQ, just as we did with the previous group (See Part 2: Custom Configurations.) This group of configurations is slightly different in that they can also be applied after having your instance running...
In the previous post on this series, Creating a Gold Copy of Adobe CQ Part 1 we mentioned the 4 major areas of configurations that System Administrators must deal with when recovering a crashed instance of Adobe CQ. In this post, I will be covering the first of the...
A Gold Copy is an image of a fully patched and Custom Configured Adobe CQ instance that leverages the use of run-modes and sling:OsgiConfig nodes. Once established, the Gold Copy can be “cloned” by System Administrators to efficiently create reliable subsequent...
Ephesoft is a great open architecture capture platform, and it is easy to find blogs and articles that support this. However, not as much is available out there to provide solution or development tips for the platform. So, as one of the frontier Ephesoft developers...
For federal record managers, the importance of the DoD 5015 Chapter 2 Certification is widely understood as the de facto records management standard in North America. It defines the basic requirements that must be met by records management applications acquired by the...
As system integrators and specialists in enterprise content management (ECM), Armedia is often called upon to migrate customers from one ECM system to another, or to upgrade their current system to a new platform -- or some combination of these things. Inevitably, we...
As most of you know by now, Section 508 is about providing access to information technology for disabled Americans. Since its implementation, the rush to become Section 508 compliant has led to most all of the focus having been placed on the Internet and other...
Armedia's Caliente is a high-performance content migration tool designed to quickly and easily import content and metadata into a variety of leading content management systems (CMS). Caliente has been used in numerous projects delivered by Armedia and is currently in...
Did you miss our recent presentation at Alfresco Content.gov? No worries! We've posted the slides here as well as additional information about the use of Alfresco within the Federal Government. Armedia fda cstar doc man_content gov_alfresco_20130305 from Armedia LLC...
1. Adopt a Social Responsibility Perspective for Accessibility Private Sector businesses unintentionally erect barriers to participation and inclusion for people with disabilities; however, a shift in perspective can fundamentally change their approach to...
In order to gain a different aspect of Section 508 Compliance, I wanted to gain key insight from an industry expert. One such expert is Debra Ruh founder of TecAccess and now Ruh Global. Question 1: Debra, as we both know there is much work to be done in the world of...
In the previous post we learned that Disabled Americans are the fastest growing minority group in America and that 20% of the total population has reported some type of disability and there are still many that are not reported or are counted separately like disabled...
Armedia is breaking down the IT barriers so people with all abilities can realize their full potential. I became interested in accessible IT back in 1998 when Section 508 was first coming on the scene. Like most of you, I had never even considered how disabled...
In case you missed us at Alfresco DevCon San Jose, Here is a copy of our presentation. This presentation focused on illustrating how Alfresco and other open source technologies can be leveraged for government agencies.
Recently, some colleagues and I were discussing whether the Content Server truncated result sets for large queries. They insisted that it did and that the largest result set Documentum would return was 1000 rows or 350 rows from any single source (the default values...
Did you miss our presentation at DrupalCamp Atlanta? No worries, here is the presentation detailing the integration of Drupal with PhoneGap and how the Armedia team used that integration to deliver a mobile app for The Well Project. Drupalcamp armedia...
You probably know that Documentum (in its default state) stores content on the file system and retains a pointer to the content in its database. Likely, you have navigated the file store on the Content Server and discovered directories like...
In our last blog we discussed the value and inherent benefits of integrating Alfresco, the open source enterprise content management platform, and Ephesoft, the open source intelligent document capture solution, in an enterprise solution. In this blog, let’s look at...
Did you miss our webinar yesterday with Alfresco? No Worries!! Here is the presentation highlighting our ArkCase Case Management and Alfresco ECM Integration:
In today’s world, it is critical that businesses and government organizations are able to capture and fully utilize all of the information they have at their disposal, this includes information found on both paper and electronic documents. This is where intelligent...
When we first arrived at Armedia a few months ago, we did a quick inventory of the internal tools we use for development. We were excited to find JIRA; yes, the open source, issue-tracking system from Atlassian. We had previous experience with JIRA from previous...
Now that the Adobe FrameMaker application has been successfully connected to the Documentum Content Server Repository, it is time to open a project file. Opening a project file can be accomplished through several methods. The methods include browsing the repository...
Once you have successfully completed the steps from Part II and the application has restarted following the steps takes to create a connection to the Documentum repository from my previous blog, you will need to establish the connection to the Documentum Content...
Once you have completed the steps taken in Part I of this series, you need to create the connection. In order to utilize the integration between the Adobe FrameMaker application and the Documentum Content Server Repository, connection information must be added and...
With the release of Adobe FrameMaker version 10, comes the ability to connect directly to a Content Management System (CMS). This enables users to perform search, read, write, delete, update, check-in and check-out operations on configured repositories. One of the CMS...
Over the past several years there has been a significant growth of interest around paperless office initiatives, as well as usage of enterprise-wide Records/ Document management solutions. However, a vast number of office-related tasks are still being conducted on...
Building software is more like creating a work of art, it requires creativity in design and ample craftsmanship to complete. Don Wells made this statement in his essay Agile Software Development: A gentle introduction at www.agile-process.org. He made the statement in...
There are a number of blogs out there that talk about the EMC products that integrate SharePoint 2010 with Documentum along with the pros and cons of each product. However, I found the task of locating authoritative references to be infinitely more challenging....
I have SharePoint 2010 installed locally on my laptop where I do my development. I don't develop for SharePoint all the time so there are gaps between when I might be looking at my local SharePoint. Getting back to SharePoint development I attempted to deploy my new...
In this blog I document an issue with SQL Server Management Studio freezing and what I did to resolve the issue. So while trouble-shooting a SharePoint issue (that's another blog) I found that the SQL Server Management Studio froze as soon as it loaded and I could...
Like many, Armedia has customers who are upgrading their desktop computing environments from Windows XP to Windows 7 (Did anyone use Vista?). We recently ran into an interesting situation with one such customer who was using a customized WebDAV solution to allow users...
Scope In the first article in this 3-part series The New Data Visualization - This is Not Your Father's Pie Chart we discussed the three main categories of data and the standard methods used to best portray each of them. If you haven’t read that one yet I’d like to...
Spring Security also provides domain object level security in addition to the other types of security discussed in this Spring Security blog series. In simple terms, ACL provides a way to specify permissions based on a combination of role, business object (referred to...
Since version 2.0, Spring Security has improved support significantly for adding security to various service layer methods. Method Security, in nature, is slightly more complicated than the simple allow or deny system seen in URL Based Spring Security. This security...
Perhaps the simplest type of security for beginners to think of is URL-based security. Spring Security allows the securing individual pages using role-based authentication. You can define the roles and the pages to secure, the url to go to when login is successful, or...
Spring Security, formerly known as Acegi Security, is an open source security provider that is used extensively in Java based web applications. Due to its power and ability to be customized, Spring Security has evolved itself into the de-facto standard for securing...
In today’s technology landscape, migration to the Cloud is compelling not just for the cost and time savings over standing up your own infrastructure, but many other important reasons including on-demand spare capacity for seasonal or peak traffic loads, as well as...
In the growing world of information governance, organizations are finding that grasping the monolithic amount of unstructured data and information that exists in the social web world is making an already complex process all the more complicated. From a marketing and...
Today’s Government IT sector is challenged with overcoming obstacles that have never been faced before. When the Freedom of Information Act was enacted in 1966, no one considered the monolithic quantity of information that would need to be accessed or the complexity...
The excitement is palpable. The benefits of a Drupal/ Alfresco integration are considerable, both from a developer and an end-user's perspective. And users of one of these open source systems have already recognized this. So, what are the two system's at play in this...
Let’s start with understanding why Metadata is important for search. Metadata provides the descriptive tags that act as a reference point for the search engines in determining what should be associated with that specific piece of content. As depicted in the image...
I’ve been thinking about source code management, because I recently encountered two very different approaches to it. Let me begin with a quick overview of some key source code management terms and concepts. First, what do I mean by source code management (SCM)? SCM is...
I recently built a SharePoint (SP) Visual Web Part (VWP) with two calendar controls and a literal control. The calendar controls are used to filter the content of a specific list and the results are displayed in the literal control. The literal control only has the...
When implementing a bpm automation solution, it is important to first understand what the customer’s current workflow really looks like. With all of the talk about business process optimization, a common problem is that companies and organizations often do not go into...
As I sit here eating apple pie and ice cream – yes, I’m a southern kid – I’m reflecting on our Leadership Offsite that ended yesterday. On the heels of Mother’s Day, I remembered an essay I wrote about 13 years ago at Sapient in response to a contest with the topic...
Now that we are on part four of my “what is CMS” blog series, lets talk about the different types of CMS. Content Management Systems (CMS) come in various shapes and sizes, each possessing different purposes and functions. So, if in the last post you took the...
For the third part of my “What is CMS” blog series, we will look into helping you answer the question “Do I need CMS” In case you missed my previous posts in the “What is CMS” Series, a CMS is the industry acronym for a “content management system.” We also talked...
In our last blog, we talked about the benefits of case management. Now lets look at a presentation showing how the Armedia team implemented a Case Management solution. This presentation shows how Armedia implemented an open source case management solution to help...
The benefits of case management solutions are similar to other types of information management solutions: they help companies and organizations optimize and effectively use information and content in order to gain a competitive advantage. In this vast growing...
Armedia has done several presentations now on how software for case management can be extremely beneficial in enabling federal it solutions to experience increased efficiency in handling FOIA requests. With a large portion of the United States Federal Government now...
To really be able to answer the question “Why Open Source?” you must have a thorough understanding of the different benefits of open source software that businesses can experience. Today, there are open source office solutions available for almost every common type of...
In a Statement by Dr. David McClure, Associate Administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technology, at an April 2011 Senate Subcommittee Hearing, McClure stated one of the biggest challenges federal agencies face in migrating to the cloud is...
In a Statement by Dr. David McClure, Associate Administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technology, at an April 2011 Senate Subcommittee Hearing, McClure stated one of the biggest challenges federal agencies face in migrating government IT solutions to...
For information technology workers in the government sector, the cloud computing initiative is no new news, though understanding the unique implications of cloud computing challenges may be. The goals of the initiative were to leverage federal cloud computing in order...
Part 1 Beginning to Understand Methods What is Data Visualization While there are a few different schools of thought on what Data Visualization really is, ranging anywhere from Excel spreadsheets to 3-foot-long Infographics, in general, it is the practice of turning...
For the past few months I have been deeply engaged in a Captiva InputAccel project. The requirements for this project were fairly simple and generic: scan documents (capture), enhance (de-skew and read bar code), extract (OCR and index), and export (to Documentum and...
In the IT project world, conversations are technically based. In the business world, focus is on applications and business needs. This can (and often does) lead to the true personal value of these systems being overlooked. Armedia had been awarded a contract with...
Let’s take a look at “Nirvana Health System,” a hypothetical 1000 bed system in the City of Nirvana. The system has 7000 employees, 7 hospitals, more than 200 doctors on staff, with another 800 or so who independently perform services in the area. Historically they...
As solution integrators, our greatest value comes from understanding the ins and outs of “the spaces between” our clients existing systems, but we expect stares as blank as a freshly cleaned whiteboard when offering such an explanation. Our challenge then becomes “How...
Did you miss Alfresco's Content.gov event today in Washington, DC? Dont worry!! Here are the slides from Armedia's presentation. https://www.slideshare.net/ArmediaLLC/armedia-nci-content-govalfresco20120124v10 For more information about ArkCase CLICK...
In church on Sunday, the pastor stated that Christianity was based on the person and work of Jesus Christ. The text of the lesson was from Matthew 16:13-20. In these verses, Jesus asks His disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" then later He asks His disciples, "Who...
Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges government it solutions have had to overcome in recent years is handling FOIA requests. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is the law which requires federal agencies to provide access to documents and information that...
Cast software, the maker of software quality tools, released their second annual CRASH (Cast Report on Application Software Health) report in December. The report examined the "health" of world-wide software applications by examining the source code of 745...
When responding to RFP’s, the natural temptation is to respond at the level of most of the information in the RFP, assuming that the bulk of the detail denotes the solution that they are looking for and actually need, but many times it can be quite the opposite....
I came across a very interesting blog post by Jonathan Rasmusson. This post discussed The Agile Inception Deck, a project chartering technique that a co-worker created to help agile software development teams get their projects started off on the right foot. Like all...
In my last post, I talked about the ins and outs which help in answering the question "What is CMS." Now that we have covered the technical side of it, we need to analyze some of the key benefits of CMS (content management system). Lets take a look: 9 Benefits...
What is CMS Part 1: Keys to a Basic Understanding What is CMS? If you work in the IT industry, you undoubtedly have heard this acronym. However, before we go diving into the benefits of a CMS or the different types of CMS, I thought it was important to take step back...
For most of my professional life, I have kept a daily log of my activities. I use black and white marbled composition notebooks that you can buy at the office supply store for $2. They are nothing fancy, but they contain the record of problems I have solved, thoughts...
Triangles have been a staple of mathematics, architecture and engineering for centuries. They have also become important in software development by way of a project management concept. You may have heard of the "Fast/Good/Cheap" rule. This rule uses a triangle to...
Hey everybody, check out my latest blog post at www.ajmcclary.com. Here is a preview (and video below): Cognitive walkthrough’s are my favorite form of usability testing—and I do it so much, it’s almost exclusively the only type of usability testing that yields...
In a current eRoom to SharePoint migration project I wanted to preserve the "Date Created", "Date Modified", "Edited By", and "Created By" fields in the eRoom documents. To do this I created a custom content type (in SharePoint 2010) based on the standard "Document"...
A best practice in any application making data calls is to push processing to the server and limit the amount of data that has to come back to the application. I recently worked on a windows application that uses the Microsoft SharePoint Client Object Model to...
Last week, Armedia held a webinar demonstrating the key features of CONNtext, our solution which allows for Maximo integration with FileNet. The CONNtext solution enables real-time bi-directional synchronization between IBM's Maximo Asset Management suite and IBM ECM...
Throughout my many years of experience in the system and software development area, I have noticed one major thing that always seems to be at the top of requirements but becomes relegated to somewhere lower in priority as the project proceeds, only to come back to the...
It was in the fall of 2010 when I got a call that began my engagement on one of the most interesting projects that I have worked on in recent times. The situation, the project was with one of the leading product safety regulators in the world. The international arm...
Phillip Crosby, notable business man and management theory author, asserted, “If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.” When applied to managing a company’s enterprise asset base,...
Over the past 12 months (or maybe longer) I have been involved with 2 separate projects involved in Alfresco integration with Daeja ViewONE Pro. Daeja ViewONE Pro is a java applet designed to allow users to apply annotations to any* document within a document...
[turns up amplifier, cranks up volume to 11, puts Huey Lewis and the News vinyl on record player....] I start up Visual Studio 6.0 and settle down to some nostalgic programming with Visual Basic (VB) 6. Ah, college memories come flooding back and strangely not many...
The 2011 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors report was published by the SANS Institute and MITRE in June (cwe.mitre.org/top25). The report leveraged the SANS Institute's Tops 20 attack vectors (www.sans.org/top20) and MITRE's Common Weakness Enumeration...
This year for fun and education (although many of our friends know another way that we might refer to this...but this is a public blog...,*wink*) Chris and I took a road trip around 'Lesser Spotted America'. The trip took us through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska,...
I've been doing my SharePoint development and testing using a locally installed instance of SharePoint. I originally installed my development environment following the instructions found in the MSDN library: "Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010...
Hi, this is Scott Roth. I am new to Armedia and Armedia's blog. I have been watching the past few weeks as Dave, Tim and Judy have shared their cutting edge technology lessons learned with you. Personally, I have found these posts incredibly insightful and had to...
Sharepoint Designer 2010 provides a great quick way to add simple actions to your SharePoint application. I have a project that I wanted to add a couple buttons that would allow the user to navigate away from a "Drop-Off" library to the libraries where files are...
A few weeks back, I wrote about using HTML5 custom data attributes as an enabling mechanism for extracting JavaScript from HTML pages. Turns out that approach has one significant drawback: HTML attributes are not suitable for storing arbitrary data. Specifically, we...
“Go forth and use this new product!”. I feel as if this happens more often than not, an existing product is re-developed, with not much in mind to the user, who has to use this new product. I was on a project recently, where this did not happen, and I’d like to...
A while back I described the problems I had checking files out of SharePoint 2010 using CMIS REST bindings (more specifically, using the excellent Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS client API for CMIS). At the time, it seemed odd to me Microsoft would release a CMIS stack...
I was always one to go ahead and use <c:out> to display model data in my JSP pages. Never had a reason not to! Well, I recently had a reason… As I mentioned in my last post, I am working on a web application that uses several jQuery libraries – another...
My SharePoint development environment is my laptop. In this environment I have developed various kinds of web parts and have been deploying them to my local instance of SharePoint. So of course, the day came when I wanted to deploy my web part to an actual server....
When I wrote about separation of concerns in webapps, I said I would consider how to apply separation of concerns in my project. This post is a progress report! I have tried this pattern on several pages and so far, all is well. Step 1 is obvious: just extract all...
A while back I wrote about checking out a SharePoint 2010 file using CMIS. Getting checkout working excited me so much I forgot to try checking the file back in! Turns out there are a few tricks. We use Apache Chemistry as our CMIS client. Chemistry's checkin method...
In a previous blog I discussed "how to" enable the Content Management Interoperability Service (CMIS) in SharePoint 2010. In that blog I also reviewed the SharePoint built in Web Part for getting data from a CMIS enabled site using WSDL. In this blog I will show how...
My web application front-end code is built using HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery, using the Spring MVC 3.0 Framework to get back-end data back to the browser. We use the WizardPro jQuery library to aid the user in creating objects in the webapp (WizardPro is a great little...
My project uses a lot of HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript goodies. It works well and looks awesome... in Chrome 10 and Firefox 4. Our User Experience designer tells me it works well and looks awesome in Safari, too. Say, which browser is missing from the lists I just...
A: To uncover my hidden assumptions! Let me tell you a story about SharePoint, Alfresco, design choices, and downloading files. My Java-based application uses SharePoint 2010 to store files. CMIS is the obvious tool for my app to talk to SP 2010, and in fact, CMIS...
This is the second of two blogs where I demonstrate how to use the openCMIS library from a JAVA client to connect to a CMIS enabled SharePoint site through the REST Atom service of SharePoint. My previous blog “SharePoint 2010 – REST Atom Service.” provided...
This is the first of two blogs where I demonstrate how to use the openCMIS library from a JAVA client to connect to a CMIS enabled SharePoint site through the REST Atom service of SharePoint. The “lessons learned” and tips I include come from examining MSDN and...
I was tasked to create a SharePoint site and enable it for CMIS access from a java application we were developing. Since this was new to me, I wanted to establish a SharePoint to SharePoint connection using CMIS before trying to connect from our java...
SharePoint 2010 is the first SharePoint with a CMIS adapter. SharePoint 2010 offers a Web Part to request data from other CMIS servers (e.g. Alfresco and Documentum), and a CMIS producer to offer data to CMIS clients (e.g. Apache Chemistry). Theoretically this means...
Separation of concerns is a big deal in software engineering. Program structures should be nicely organized, such that distinct tasks are handled by distinct program elements. In other words: no business logic wrapped up in our SQL statements; no data access in our...
Two exciting announcements from Oracle the last few days: JCP.Next - Oracle Proposes Changes to JCP: Enforced transparency (open mailing lists, open issue trackers); and greater throughput (more frequent JSR updates, and deactivating JSRs when they stop making...
Input Management I shouldn't knock the term Input Management because it is fitting for what I've been involved with, but it is vague. This vagueness, allows competing companies to use any definition to best fit what they are trying to sell. (That is for another...
Just like thousands (millions?) of others, I spent the last 9 years writing services for Web applications. I always concentrated on the server side, and never took the browser seriously as a software development platform. I assume I'm not alone, given the prevalence...
Check out the latest video we've produced for the AIIM Info360 conference.
If you asked me three months ago if I enjoy developing to Alfresco’s repository and Share UI (specifically Enterprise 3.3.3), it would have been a frustrated “NO…” -- Not frustration about WANTING to learn a new product, since that is always exciting and challenging,...
I’m sure that some of you read the title of this blog and feared that someone missed spell check when titling it CONNtext; however the unusual spelling is quite intentional. CONNtext, a play on the words connector and context, is an Armedia developed solution that...
Welcome back to the second installment of the CMMI series. I’m going to flip the previous installment of the CMMI blog on its head and talk about the rigidness of CMMI and why that presented some challenges to our efforts of achieving a ML3 rating. One of the process...
Over the last 10 months, Armedia engaged in a committed effort to achieve a CMMI Maturity Level 3 rating. While it is unusual to go directly for a ML3 rating from scratch, it was an additional challenge for a small business to do the same. Luckily for us, Armedia...
How do we avoid what philosopher George Santayana warned of when he said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Today's platforms, frameworks and methodologies all help us learn from the past and can go a long way to help assure our optimum...
In my previous blog, Data, the Neglected Part of Content Management, I discussed the importance of structured data within a cms. Getting a good structured data design to compliment the design of the overall content management solution can be dirty work; not quite...
I call it "the question". You're in a crowded conference room and someone asks, (and it's usually with the senior manager present), "could you give me a definition of content management?" Everyone looks at you, the learned professional for some wise insightful...
In my years of working in the content management space I've experienced the challenges of switching horses, sorry I mean platform vendors more than once. Terminology aside, it's hard to quickly understand let alone master a new platform simply because how each...
I've been experimenting with a really clever usability testing technique that uses human intelligence to collect quantitative data about a user's experience. The way a development project traditionally gathers this data is through conducting a study—gathering...
RMA is typically slow and recently we were asked to make it faster and explaining the WDK stack is not why we were brought in. The application consisted of custom everything (menu items, functionality, workflows, lifecycles, alias sets, object types, complex security...
Now that we have covered the basics of "What is Case Management," and you have developed a pretty good sense of the various Benefits of Case Management, lets talk about a comparison of ArkCase and NIEM. Is there any doubt that ArkCase wins this battle? But how so?...
When you work for a while in the software you get numbed to “technologies have come and gone...” occasionally though some become commodities and others trend setters. We have seen that with many products like Apache, Tomcat, Lucene, Drupal …etc that have stabilized...
In the 90’s, when ECM solutions were rare, we could get away with designing solely toward requirements, but there is too much at stake nowadays. A recent study sampling various IT projects reported that: 62% percent of projects fail to meet their schedules 49% are...
It was year 2004, when I was first introduced to EMC Documentum. As I first fired up the DAB IDE, I felt man this IDE is Unintuitive, slow and cryptic. Apart from learning the DFC API’s in Documentum, getting accustomed to DAB itself was an excruciating experience....
Anything that defines the “future of productivity” deserves a welcoming befitting a king: “the lion roars back”! Luscious superlatives take a number... And now back to our regularly scheduled program… Yes, SharePoint 2010 has arrived (officially since mid-May). Yes,...
A simple goal – “export, transform, load” – the destination is a matter of choice. EMC eRoom is going away. It has been marked as End of Life (EOL) so what next? EMC Documentum have 2 options: EMC Documentum Collaboration Services; EMC Documentum Centerstage. ...
What happens when you combine Ligero and EMC Documentum when developers have a spare moment. You get: Rockumentum! The question was thrown out in casual conversation - "Hey, do you think we could turn Documentum into a Jukebox?". So what else would you do with your...
Too expensive. Too bulky. Too consumer oriented. Too many existing competitors. Too niche. Too proprietary. Too slow... Oh yeah, lots of negativity. Wise words? Truly wise...if your standards are at or below Peter Griffin's. Otherwise: NO, NOPE, COMPLETELY WRONG....
In the 1993 hit movie “Jurassic Park” the young heroine, Lex, is inside the park’s main control room. The computer console is in front of her. The resurrected Velociraptors are pressing hard on doors and windows trying to break through for a tasty human snack. The...
File this under: “what the …”, “huh?!”, “is this ECM related…”, or “let’s bear with it for a bit, it may go somewhere…”. So for those of you who may not have heard: The Andy Fastow Story is a far-fetched, weird and wonderful fantasy about a man who single-handedly...
“What is a record?” This is the fundamental question that must be answered before answering "What is records management". Without a clear answer to that question, one cannot determine record titles, develop and apply retention schedules, structure file plans or manage...
Impact of EMC’s partnership with Fatwire to provide Web Content Management offerings in place of its own existing WCM products
‘Tis the season for the big sales kickoffs, goal communication, quota setting and the inevitable fudding and jockeying that goes with that. We at Armedia are, of course, not much different and have been dutifully working our list for a while. All roads therefore lead...
For the last few blog posts, we have discussed answers to different aspects of the question "What is Case Management". With the several roles that are involved in controlling and managing components of a Case Management system. Lets discuss a few more: A couple more...
In my last post, I answered the question "What is Case Management." Now, lets look at another question: What are case managers? Who is it that does all this case management? The answer to the question "What are case managers?" has several components which make up the...
So many times, we hear the same response from clients "what is case management? I've heard of content mangement and records management, but what is CASE management?" Armedia writes about case management, and we help our customers implement case management solutions,...
OSGi is a dynamic module system for Java. An OSGi system is a network of components that communicate via defined interfaces. Each component is deployable, manageable, and updatable, with predictable effects on the other deployed components. Each component can be...
As it relates to Case Management, NIEM is very important. The need for sharing information is vital for the war on terrorism as well as combating domestic crimes (i.e. drugs, sexual perpetrators and etc.). Law Enforcement agencies have to be able to share case...
What is NIEM and how it relates to the world of Enterprise Content Management
Anyone who has ever attempted a data migration knows that there is no such thing as 'a smooth transfer of power', as it were. From learning both the legacy system and the new system, business processes, data clean-up, data mapping, deciding between existing tools and...
Cloud computing and its impact on ECM. Advances in Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.
HVS (Part 2) Data Partitioning Before we delve into Data Partitioning, here’s a review of some fundamental database concepts. In terms of this article the focus will be on Oracle as the database. Fundamental Database (ORACLE) concepts: A Table: (i) Stores structured...
Most of us in IT can think of many things we would rather do than upgrade systems and software; for example, maybe take a nice trip to the dentist, or perhaps volunteer as the test subject in an IRS agent, audit training class. If you finally have your Documentum 5.3...
After hearing so much about EMC Documentum HVS, we decided to look under the hood to understand what the hype was all about. What is HVS? Made broadly available in version 6.5 (you need to purchase the key) it is a generic term that refers to 3 broad areas of...
One of the often overlooked challenges of electronic records management is the control and maintenance of retention policies. This is particularly difficult if you are faced with a large number of members in your organization's different record series categories. ...
There are well over 35 proprietary document management systems, an astronomical number of homegrown document management systems, and billions of sources for information to come from. As technology changes, new and better features are added to current systems, new...
“I was making my plans when life happened.” (John Lennin) I should have Googled that quote. What just happened? I presented a “quote.” I discredited the quote and myself by admitting that I did not do even minimal research on a commonly used Web source. I misspelled...
The schedule is an ever present aspect of application development. Engineers must constantly balance producing quality work against given time constraints. This is why most engineers are constantly searching for tools and techniques that allow them to deliver more quality work in less time. Techniques, like software patterns, focus on the quality aspect of the software while many tools focus on productivity. When an engineer finds something that allows him/her to both increase productivity as well as improve the quality of work delivered, it deserves special attention.
I am headed to Rwanda on July 10th for a short-term missions trip. My church, Immanuel Bible Church https://www.immanuelbible.net, is partnering with African New Life Ministries, https://www.anlm.org. One of our projects is to build out a computer lab for the...
Good day, all. For all who are celebrating Memorial Day, we wish you the best & pass along our respects to our servicemen and women of past & present. Today's topic will cover some simple advice on how to extract more performance out of your Content Server by...
Last summer, my father-in-law purchased a really nice John Deere riding mower. The mower was amazing. It did everything a mower was supposed to do, and a lot of what a tractor could do, as John Deere designed it. But within days of getting it home, my father-in-law...
You may have heard of the Reveille Management Console for Documentum D5/D6 and Reveille for Captiva InputAccel – the only solutions that can proactively and automatically monitor, diagnose and repair your DCTM/Captiva installation, but what is Reveille RealTime (RRT),...
Have you ever wanted to impart information about a space, but without having to force the user to open a document, or perform a search? A custom view is a portal that can be attached visually to a space. It is a great way to convey information about a space and it's...
There have been a large number of articles published regarding electronic health records. I wanted to share my thoughts given that Health IT an area that I believe has a tremendous amount of potential. This topic is nothing new, it has been discussed, tried,...
So, the much anticipated announcement about iPhone 3.0 is out shortly--in about 1 hour to be precise. Lots of exciting new functionality rumored--cut & paste (finally!), MMS (why hasn't it been here already?), better bluetooth functionality, etc. What I'm most...