FileHold 8.5 Released

FileHold 8.5 was released yesterday afternoon. We are getting onto the upgrades and new installations.

You can take a look at the new features here:

Features include:

• MS SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0 Integration
• An optional feature that is very cool to use is FileHold Fast Find for 3rd party application integration with various Windows Desktop applications.
• Folder based "Auto Tagging"
• Document Control Numbering (DCN) that ensures unique DCN's are assigned to each document
  
• SQL 2005 Reporting Services Integration to allow customers to write their own reports against FileHold metadata, usage, and other system metrics
  

In addition to these new features FileHold 8.5 document management software also comes with a number of other improvements including:

• Improved performance in the FileHold web client to help VPN users and other users spread across large enterprise networks with performance
  
• Support for Microsoft Vista with full Vista installer support coming in early December 2008
  
• Integration support for the FileHold Desktop Client with Microsoft Office 2007
• Improved auto positioning by the Brava viewer to make metadata capture even easier
• Enhanced search capabilities with the ability to highlight the words being searched as they are found.
• New update to FileHold's integrated DTSearch full text search engine using Version 2.0
  
• Improved System Administration License Usage Reporting in Web Client > System Administration
  
• Improvements in the FileHold Desktop Application for Cabinet >Folder hierarchy display performance
• Implement Library Level Statistics reporting: Cabinets# -> Drawer# -> Folder# -> Document counts with totals per system, for both: Active and Archive Library.
• Implementation of repetitive markup burnings into CSF files.
• IT department friendly (silent) FDA install / uninstall support to help IT departments deploy the desktop client using Active Directory deployment scripts or system management software like Kaseya or Microsoft System Management Server (SMS). Please note that FileHold does not test these various systems directly but has customers who are running these systems that kindly provide us with real world feedback during our quality assurance process. If you are a FileHold customer interested in helping FileHold with our next release around this area, please contact me for further information.
  

An Open Letter to anonymous FileHold Blog reader "Digital Racer"

Blogger.com anonymous user "Digital Racer" had some feedback about this blog article - I am quoting 100% of the comment. I added the brackets to clarify the post it was referring to, and am also linking this post to the original article that prompted this feedback from Digital Racer.

Digital Racer said: "This (code snippet blog post) would be more useful if you had actual working code instead of a bunch of half a** comments"

Dear Digital Racer: Thank you for the comment! The short blog article with the code snippet was actually posted by request as it is a very popular topic with our customers. It was posted to help other FileHold customers who might have the same question when they first start using the FileHold product and has helped many developers.

It is just a code snippet, yes, that is certainly true. Code snippets are samples to get ideas flowing, but you would need to check the full API's to get the specifics and ask us questions to fill in the gaps of what you are trying to do. It would be nice to have a book about the API, but that will come too. We are a small, hardworking company that believes in honesty and enjoys helping customers solve complex document and record management problems.

I am not a developer anymore, but manage our support, engineering and implementation team(s) and when I see something useful exchanged between my engineers and our many customer's IT departments and developers then I try to post it here, although we are always so very busy helping customers around the world that I am reminded that I should post more on this blog. This is why I took your comment and made a blog post about it.

Our customers take a bit of time to look through our online documentation, the source code of our sample C# application and then asked us specific questions to get information on how to do things. This is a common process when new customers come on board. Every few days this happens.

Your comment lacks specifics about what might be "half-a**ed", and I am sorry you feel that way.

The FileHold.com web site is very large, and filled with a rich array of information about the FileHold Document Management product. Many software companies lack any specifics of any kind other than a way to contact their sales department and usually have a lot of links to various PDF articles. There are nearly 700 pages on the FileHold.com web site with our always improving online documentation. Right now we are in a big push to update the documentation for our new release, FileHold 8.5. By the end of the year we should have a lot more information on our already information rich site, as we strongly believe in being open about what FileHold can do for organizations and companies around the world.

Many customers comment on what a resource of information we provide and how easy we are to work with. Our feeling is that people should be free to learn as much as they can about the product before they contact our friendly and knowledgeable sales team for a demo, quotation or answers to implementation questions.

If you could take the time to actually say what you are trying to do with the FileHold API - I would be more than happy to post your questions and answer with specifics. That way we could help other people as well by helping you. I would truly appreciate that.

I should also mention that the FileHold API is what we use to build the FileHold document management product, it was not added to an afterthought. It comes free with every server product.

Here are some online resources to get you started:

There is the online help documentation:

A brief overview of the 5 web services that comprise the FileHold API.

An overview of the security model:

Then there is our sample C# application with source code.

An overview of FileHold auto-filing with sample code

Hopefully this will give you a bit more information and I will feedback to the team that you would like to see more details. Thanks again for taking the time to comment - it is appreciated.

Sincerely,

Cameron Siguenza
V.P Services, FileHold Systems
http://www.filehold.com

Microsoft SharePoint and Integration with ECM

Advanced ECM
Until now, Enterprise Content Management products, such as FileHold, have been deployed primarily as a point solution or as a component of a line-of-business application. The trend is that many organizations are seeing their environments evolve into shared services frameworks and the
centralization of content management is one of the driving factors. It is important to point out that Microsoft typically does not develop vertical or point solutions; they develop applications, platforms and tools.

At first glance, Microsoft SharePoint appears to have functionality of an advanced ECM system. In many cases there are redundant functions with Commercial off the Shelf Electronic Document Management Software. However, extensive work is typically required to create an ECM solution from scratch on top of the SharePoint platform to obtain the functionality of an "out of the box" ECM solution.

FileHold Adds Value to a Deployment of SharePoint
FileHold's deep integration into Microsoft architecture means you already know how to use it. FileHold uses the familiar Explorer view paradigm and mimics your current office filing structure of Cabinets, Folder Groups, Folders and Documents. FileHold's "ease of use" results in a broader base of users using advanced content management functions with greater control and management of content.

FileHold "OUT OF THE BOX" provides:
Image Capture and Indexing
Library Services
Document Workflow
Security and Compliance

Things to Consider
FileHold recognizes the power of SharePoint but also realizes that more robust record management requirements are likely going to require a more mature tool for the foreseeable future. It isn't likely that Microsoft will grow SharePoint into a true enterprise content management system. ECM vendors will continue to dominate in the areas that SharePoint is not prepared to address.