How many times have you heard about the next great collaboration technology? We have done it before in touting out MindPort collaboration application for documents. But wikis are getting hard to ignore since they make so much sense for business. Why? They overcome the “inbox” problem. E-mail communication is great, but having multiple copies distributed throughout a dozen people’s inboxes is inefficient to say the least when those e-mails need to be referenced at a later date. A wiki provides a single, highly accessible place to coordinate activities and share information.

For the uninitiated, the Common Craft blog has a great video (a bit “campy” though) that explains what a wiki is and how it works. Applications we are seeing clients (and ourselves) implement are knowledge bases, client information, operations manuals, and project planning. There are a number of legal specific wikis covering circuit courts, tax law, IP and more. And in case you haven’t already made the connection, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one big wiki.

There are some challenges, mostly changing the culture of writing on the wiki rather than an e-mail. Getting the right wiki software and ensuring that it is widely accessible but also secure requires some thought.

Adobe’s “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” blog announced that they will be conducting a webinar on May 24 on document security that may be worthwhile. They will cover discerning whether PDFs have been tampered with, revoking PDFs and other security features. Many of the basics like restricting printing and copying will be covered as well. Registration is through Adobe’s web site.

Sure, we like to think some relationships will last forever, but they are really the exception to the rule. People change. Companies change. Industries change. Things, umm, change. When SAGE got into the managed IT services arena with OnSight, we recognized change as a given. That is why we built in quarterly technology reviews, for instance, but we also made it easy for clients to quit if circumstances changed and the relationship no longer worked.

OnSight doesn’t lock in clients the way other managed IT services do. Clients own their own equipment and infrastructure, so if they decide to go in another direction they don’t face sticker shock of “rebuilding” the network from the E-mail server to the Citrix box. And while we work with lawyers, we didn’t get a team of our own to write draconian contracts that lock in clients for long periods of time. If OnSight isn’t providing the right service for a client, than a document should not be the only glue binding us together.

Just a quick note to save the evening of Wedneday, June 6, 2007 on your calendars for SAGE's Annual Client Appreciation Reception at the JW Marriott in downtown Washington, DC.  The venue offers spectacular views of the National Mall. Invitations are coming soon, so keep an eye on your e-mail inbox (or spam filter, as may be the case!).

One last note: although the reception is for SAGE clients, if you are not currently a SAGE client, there is still time before the reception!  Cheers!

Surprise, Microsoft if pushing integration among its products!  The latest kick is “business intelligence” the idea that databases serve data and content throughout an organization through Intranets, web sites, documents, and mobile devices. Microsoft’s take: publish everything through Excel spreadsheets, because the average Joe knows that if they don’t know SQL server. Otherwise, it is the common refrain from Microsoft that the combination of SQL Server, SharePoint 2007, and Office 2007 will send your users into blissful states of productivity and profits to stratospheric levels. But this time the dream includes a new application PerformancePoint Server 2007 that will provide dashboards, scorecarding, and other analytic tools.

Next SQL Server Goes Unstructured (sorta) . MS also announced the next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Katmai” will allow data integration with Office apps, allow unstructured data, and be released next year. (Bets are now being taken in Vegas whether it will be late). Unstructured data includes documents, XML, and geographic data.

Here's another helpful tip from the great folks at our OnSight Support Center. You need to search a bunch of documents a client sent you. You figure it will be a breeze because they are sending PDFs probably generated from the original electronic documents. When you open them, they are not text based PDFs at all but images! Now the unceremonious task of running OCR, spell check, and clean-up awaits you.

The new Standard and Pro versions of Acrobat 8 make that workflow a little less tedious. Acrobat has had the ability to OCR documents for some time, (once referred to as “Paper Capture” but now the more-straight-forward-if-less-elegant-sounding “OCR Text Recognition”), but it has boosted the exporting capability to Word, text, XML, HTML and image formats. Best yet, you can batch process selected files or a folder of documents using "Tools>Document Processing>Batch Processing." That just leaves the inevitable spell check and touch-up of the OCR results.

This provides a valuable stop gap when clients provide sets of PDFs that need to be full-text searchable, but are not so large as to warrant sending out to an EDD or similar vendor for processing.

This article on CIO Insight’s web site recounts how a small web hosting firm used virtualization technology to compete against its far larger rivals. How?

Flexibility. Virtualization allowed the company to dynamically allocating resources, devoting its (virtual) servers to H&R Block during tax season, then moving them to other clients when it was over. Virtualization also allowed them to offer utility computing solutions.

Reducing Power Consumption and Cooling Costs. The lesson everyone quickly learned as data was moved to the Cloud (a geeky way of hosting information on servers rather than desktops) was that electricity is expensive, for both the processors and the equipment to keep them cool. While chip manufacturers now see the light with lower consumption chips, there were still underutilized servers eating watts and requiring AC. Consolidating servers saved the company 50-70 percent in cooling and power costs.