Continued from the March 2013 edition of our magazine 

Lesson learned

What is the difference between credit card statements, invoice and a receipt?

We first included these document types in one document category “Invoice”. However while identifying the metadata for each document type, it became clear that these document types look alike but they are

not. Credit card statements contain the list of transactions during a billing cycle and also contain the account balance to settle at the end of the billing cycle. Invoice is an itemized bill for goods sold or services provided, and includes the total charge. Receipt is an acknowledgement of a payment for any goods and / or service. 3 separate content types were created for these document types.

What is the difference between auto loan or home loan documents?

Both of them represent loan documents even though they represent different kind of loans. A content type of “Loan Documents” was created to cover these document types.

What is the difference between life, auto, home, medical insurance documents? In addition there are several document types under medical insurance documents a) Insurance Policy b) Policy Amendment c) Card d) Claim e) Claim Documentation f) Prescription g) Mail Order Pharmacy h) Flexible Health Account i) Healthcare Savings Account

All of these are insurance documents. A content type of insurance was created for all the document types above. However 2 site columns Insurance Type and Insurance Subtype were introduced to indicate the kind of insurance document.

Health folder contains health related documents like prescription, health articles, health insurance documents. How to categorize them?

The health insurance documents will go under the insurance content type. Health document content type was defined to cover the health articles and other health related documents.

Home Maintenance folder contains home maintenance documents including the invoices for the home projects as well as contracts and information documents. How to categorize them?

Home maintenance invoice should go the invoice content type as home maintenance invoices. A separate content type of home maintenance documents was created for all home maintenance contracts and other information documents.

Honda car monthly loan statement – Should it be saved as loan document or invoice?

This is a loan document. Invoice is actually the bill for the amount due to goods or services sold. This document contains the loan account statement and does not have any amount due for the loan.

While scanning and indexing the document, how do you determine the document type associated with the document? Sometime it is not very clear.

After a lot of scanning and indexing documents, the experience suggests that the document usually has some kind of indication built in to indicate what kind of document it is. For example, the work retirement on the financial statements indicate that it is a financial statement with the benefit type of retirement.

Create the SharePoint Solution

SharePoint requires specific artifacts to be created to create the site with underlying information architecture created earlier. SharePoint artifacts include a) Site Collection b) Site c) Site Columns d) Content Types e) Document Libraries. SharePoint requires Site Column to be defined for each document metadata defined in the information architecture. SharePoint requires Content Type to be defined for each document category with all the corresponding site columns associated with the Content Type. Finally SharePoint requires a Document Library for each content type as the container for the documents for that content type. This has been done using the SharePoint Developer Tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. SharePoint Developer Tools makes SharePoint development very intuitive and seamless with SharePoint deployment model. You can download this solution from the codeplex site for your reference. Please see below the reference section to get the website to download this SharePoint solution.

Future Opportunities

Opportunities and future enhancements with this solution are endless. Below are few samples.

1. 1)The BizDocs solution can include simple out-of-box workflows on certain document types within home. For example Invoice document can trigger a workflow which creates a task to pay the invoice to the service provider with a task due date same as the payment due date.
2. 2)The site http://work can be customized / branded to make the look and feel unique to the business and the employees.
3. 3)The BizDocs solution can contain a family calendar of all the events with automatic reminders for the employees.
4. 4)The BizDocs solution can be hosted in the cloud (Office 365) and the SharePoint server component can be completely eliminated.
5. 5)Capture Application has powerful features including OCR which can enable the automatic indexing of the many documents which have got the relevant metadata on the document itself at the specific locations.
6. 6)The BizDocs solution can be extended to save Emails as the content also with the relevant metadata. Emails can contain important content which needs to be referenced many times.

Conclusion

Companies spend a fortune in creating a Content Management System to manage their content, to make the content search easier and efficient for their employees, enabling their employees to be efficient in their daily job.  The BizDocs solution applies the same concepts to the small business content management system and makes a small business paperless with a very elegant computer solution. With a small investment, BizDocs enables every business with its own private site which contains all the documents electronically with the relevant metadata which makes the search very efficient and fast for any required document.

This document also articulates the process to create the BizDocs solution and the underlying information architecture. This process can be applied very successfully in any business with their business content.

For a minimal investment ranging from $6995 to $22995 this solution can be implemented.  These costs include the following:

• SharePoint Foundations (Free download with Windows)
• KnowledgeLake Capture ($995.00)
• Server ($1,000 - $2000) (includes the hardware and software costs)
• Professional Services ($5,000-$20,000) – Varies by scope of the solution

Reference

SharePoint solution Project and Documentation

http://bizdocs.codeplex.com

Copyright notices and disclaimers

KnowledgeLake Capture is a registered trademark of KnowledgeLake, Inc.

SharePoint is a registered trademark of Microsoft.

About Author

Arun Aggarwal is a solution architect for McGladrey with a focus on Microsoft technology stack. Arun has delivered very successful large scale implementations of SharePoint applications for different clients in various industries. Arun has a deep and wide experience in information architecture which is the foundation for any Portal site’s success. The solid information architecture makes the site navigation and search very effective and intuitive.

In order to demo his information architecture experience for small businesses, Arun has shared the information architecture of the Portal site http://home which he created for his own home. This solution can be used to setup a Portal site for your own business and also learn the principles of solid information architecture, experience and the lessons learnt in many years of his professional career delivering very effective information architecture designs to many clients.

Please contact Arun Aggarwal at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for any questions related to this solution or for any help related to the implementation of this solution at your small business.

About McGladrey
McGladrey LLP is the largest U.S. provider of assurance, tax and consulting services focused on the middle market, with more than 6,500 professionals and associates in 75 offices nationwide. McGladrey is a licensed CPA firm, and is a member of RSM International, the sixth largest global network of independent accounting, tax and consulting firms. For more information join our Facebook fan page at McGladrey News, follow us on Twitter @McGladrey, connect with us on LinkedIn, and/or on YouTube.

During the recent Google I/O 2012 conference I watched one of the keynote sessions from the comfort of my favorite web browser and was introduced to their BigQuery service, which is the public version of Google Dremel, their internal tool for analyzing large datasets.  I was intrigued by the demonstrations on a dataset of 137 million records with query response times in the 3-5 second range.  But was this like the tomato-slicing machines hawked on television that work great for their well-practiced spokesperson, but do a better job of making tomato juice in my kitchen?  But if this few order of magnitude difference in performance was real, it could be a great benefit, and since the cost to try it out amounted to pocket change, I decided to see for myself.

First a little background on the three key differences between using BigQuery and the familiar relational database technology.  BigQuery uses a table scan for everything.  No indexes or other mechanisms to write data to disk in a manner that may help later retrieval.  Its those key differences that make this happen with great speed.  

The first difference is using a column-oriented database approach, which simply is writing a table to disk column by column instead of row by row.  Row by row is great for finding one or a few rows, like is typically needed for executing transactions, but would require reading the entire table to read a single column.  By storing the data column by column, an analytic query can just read the columns requested, greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed.

The second difference is a high degree of compression.  Since the data in a column is the same type and frequently contains large amounts of duplicates, it’s much more likely to compress well, quite often in the 10-to-1 range.  So for example, say we have a 100GB table with 100 equally-sized columns and 10-to-1 compression and we run a query retrieving 5 columns.  Instead of reading 100GB we read just 500MB, a considerable improvement.

The third difference is the number of servers that participate in the query.  While Google doesn’t comment on how many servers a query will be spread across, and it likely will vary on the size of the table queried and other factors, they use enough that the resulting response time stays so fast that people are motivated to use it alot.  It’s a simple equation.  The more you use, the more money they make, and the faster it performs the more you’re likely to use.  

For my test case I had 87,232,116 records consisting of 139 columns, for a total of about 45GB of data.  I’m not saying this is “big data”, but it’s large enough to be interesting and this had never before been attempted before due to performance concerns.  I compressed the data into gzip (.gz) files no larger than 1GB each, uploaded them to Google Cloud Storage and imported them into BigQuery using their Python-based BQ command line tool.  There are a few other setup steps that preceded this and the data was already in a form, pipe-delimited, that was compatible.  Then using the BigQuery web browser interface (bigquery.cloud.google.com) I ran several dozen queries, none that took more than 5 seconds to complete.  I also downloaded their Excel add-in which allows queries to be executed from inside a spreadsheet, with equally impressive results.

The cost to use BigQuery is straightforward.  Twelve cents ($.12) per month per GB stored and three and a half ($0.035) per GB scanned.  The first 100GB scanned per month is free.  So my testing cost $5.40, all in storage costs.  No really a bank breaker.

In today's market the use of mobile devices is exploding because they lower costs and bring value to diverse organizations.  The SMS Group will present information on mobile applications in the workplace.  The presentation will include ITW Hobart Toolbox, an application for engineers, as well as discuss the benefits of fleet management.

Learn more at the Taste of IT.  Get your tickets today!

The best way to complete a business intelligence project is by using Agile methodology.  This responsive approach is the best way for IT to lead the business to "figure out what it wants", and understand what data it has and what needs to be captured.  We will walk you through a methodology that lets BI projects be successful by the most important criteria - it is exactly what the business needs.

Joshua Smith, Sogeti USA Business Information Management Practice Leader, will show you at the Taste of IT how he has helped clients transform massive amounts of data stored throughout their organizations into meaningful and trustworthy information allowing them to make insightful business decisions.

Get your tickets today!

Learn more about our process-oriented document/content management application that enables organizations to streamline their operations by dynamically controlling and organizing the creation, capture, management, access and distribution of documents within their business processes.  Our solutions provide perfect combinations of functionality, flexibility, security and scalability, while delivering a high cost-to-value ratio.  It can help organizations to achieve their organizational goals by optimizing the management of all information and data.  

Meet Leah Seymour, Document Solutions Senior Account Manager, to discuss this further at the Taste of IT.  Get your tickets today!

Microsoft's hypervisor: it's here and it's ready for primetime.  Learn about the new features built into Server 2012 as it pertains to HyperV 3 and why you need to consider utilizing it in your datacenter.  All this and more from Software Information Systems' (SIS) seasoned IT veteran, Tom Miller.

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How are companies accelerating innovation by leveraging the collective wisdom of their teams?

What is social intelligence and how do I manage and grow a collaborative workforce?

How do I set up a curation of content - how should"search" organize and display results?

Learn all this and more from Ascendum's Director, Enterprise Collaboration and Content Management Practice, Sundar Kadayam at Taste of IT.  Get your tickets today!

The Gartner Report suggests that 85% of today's business involves unstructured work.  Structured tools, such as structured workflow based solutions, emails and other ad hoc tasking unstructured tools fail to provide the best results.  This presentation will demonstrate an easy and comprehensive solution with flexibility via an ad hoc workflow to support your task, project and process needs in today's unstructured workspace.  This is also done without trapping customers into custom coded solutions.

Eric Van Hoose, owner and founder of Van Hoose Associates, will guide Taste of IT attendees through the productivity process.  His patented application helped deliver a 40% process improvement to the Air Force Enterprise for management of its weapon system depot source of repair process.

Get your tickets for Taste of IT today!

A couple months ago I bought a Mac Mini out of total frustration of the time it took to maintain, boot up, debug and protect my Windows machines. I thought it would be a steep learning curve and I could write a long blog on that frustrating process and some useful tips and tricks. Sadly, from the blog's perspective, and happily, from my personal perspective, that's simply not the case. 

The Mac Mini is a little box, about the size of fat, small, square frisbee, makes no noise, is cold to the touch, boots in about one minute and has a small selection of ports to attach devices. In my case I have an HDMI-attached monitor and the keyboard and mouse are bluetooth. The mouse is a Magic Mouse, and that alone is worth the price of admission. I spend most of my time in a web browser and the Magic Mouse makes scrolling, zoom and previous page navigation so much easier.

The defining change in going Mac is the lack of interaction that Windows constantly presents. Applications install with one drag. System updates take one click, and so far have not required a re-boot and do not interfere with normal operation. Installing the printer took zero of anything. It takes a little getting used to. Actually, very little, after I realized that Apple takes a minimalistic approach to asking for anything. Quite the refreshing change. 

I've loaded a few applications, my beloved Google Chrome browser, DVD converter and Skype being at the top of the list. Most everything else I use comes with it, such as iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie. Haven't felt the need for any anti-bad-guy stuff, although I'll be researching that in the coming months.

And perhaps best of all, no bloatware. No 30-day trials of anything. Annoying the customer doesn't appear to be in Apple's DNA. 

Thank you.

Tablets are all the rage these days.  Seems like a year ago (it was) that the pundits were predicting the market failure of the iPad.  It was just an oversized iPod Touch, wasn't anything more than an interesting toy, and certainly wasn't going to be of interest to corporate types.  How could they be so wrong?  Every other tablet introduced crashed and burned.  They missed the biggest selling feature this time, staring right at them, that wasn't there before.

It wasn't scary.

Take the average person and put them in front of a computer.  Most are scared to death and refuse to touch the keyboard in fear that they might break something.  Put an iPad in their hands and seconds later they're tapping and sliding and laughing.  Most will play for several minutes, ignoring guests and its rightful owner, as they discover this and that cool feature.  I've seen construction workers waiting to take their turn and grandma's sliding pictures with their pinkies.  And smiling all the while.

Why such a difference?  Computers and iPads both have processors, memory, an operating system and icons.  Under the covers, they are basically the same.  But we humans fear complex things and proceed with caution, using our basic survival skills that serve us well, day in and day out.

The typical computer is a big machine and goes through several minutes of whirling and clicking before it's ready to use.  It has a mouse that moves a pointer and two buttons that do different things in different situations.   It has a keyboard with somewhere around one hundred keys, many of which have multiple purposes elicited by holding shift, alt, ctrl, fn or a small four-part flag.  It most likely has a dozen or more lights and a dozen or so ports of different shapes and sizes.  You need to patch, you need A/V, you need anti-this and anti-that.  And most of all, you need to be frightened.

Contrast that with the iPad, which is just shy the size of a piece of 8.5 by 11 inch paper and weighs in at 1.5 pounds, turns on instantly, has four buttons each which you can figure out in less than a second each and the same connector you use on your iPhone and iPods.  You turn, it turns.  You touch, it reacts.  Can't open it up, don't need anti-anything and has a nice "upgrade all" feature.  You bring yours, I'll bring mine.  Let's do coffee and a game.  And not be scared.

That's my belief in what is driving consumers and business people to adopt tablets at a record pace.  You can't employ the typical fear, uncertainty and doubt to slow this down.

We're not scared anymore.