Articles - Page 187

The Top 10 AI Tools for Small Business: From Automation to a Coordinated Team of AI Agents

matt-garrepy

The Danish social Intranet company Colibo Inc. has just raised its first major venture funding from a series of prominent investors alongside the Danish Growth Fund. Colibo is injected with an investment in the DKK double-digit million range – funds that are to be used for establishing the company in the US and UK and the further development of the company’s Social Intranet solution, Colibo. Colibo has been on an amazing growth path. The first Intranet solution was installed in 2014, and Colibo has gained significant market shares in Denmark in just a short period of time. Now, the Colibo-solution is to be released internationally, and the company is to be established in the US and UK.
+70,000 users in more than 14 countries
Colibo is a user-friendly and dynamic Intranet alternative for companies and organizations that otherwise would have used Microsoft Sharepoint as their digital workspace solution. The Colibo solution has more than 70,000 users across 14 countries, and customers include The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Central Denmark Region, Kosan Crisplant, Clipper Group and several Danish municipalities.
Social Intranet tools raise productivity with up to 25 %
According to McKinsey Global Institute analysis1, companies can raise productivity of their administrative staff with up to 25 % by using social Intranet tools, making the knowledge of the organization searchable and by basing the company on a communication platform that supports social workgroups.
Colibo is a spin-off of Mediaworkers – a digital agency, recently awarded the fast-growth company prize for the second consecutive year, and who has brought Colibo all the way to Series A venture through independent financing.
“We are very excited about raising capital as well as gathering a team of investors with solid international software experience. Likewise, we are now able to execute our product roadmap for Colibo, catapulting our software to rank among the very best in the world”, says Mogens Sejer Iversen, CEO and Founding Partner of Colibo.
Mogens Sejer Iversen is now handing over the CEO position in Mediaworkers to Henrik Sejer Gelineck Berg, currently the the company’s CFO. However, Mogens Sejer Iversen continues as head of Mediaworkers Group – the underlying holding company that (among others) is the sole owner of the successful games studio Funday Factory.
Prominent investors ensure the next growth phase Stig Hølledig who is known from the software unicorn Sitecore, is among the Colibo investors says about the potential with Colibo: “Globally, we are facing a growing number of companies who are going to replace their old Intranets with more dynamic digital workspaces over the next couple of years. We are closing this market demand perfectly with Colibo. At the same time, we – the investor – are very impressed with the significant value the solution provides including very satisfied customers representing some of the most demanding organizations in the country,” Stig Hølledig says.
To learn more, visit http://colibo.com/

Innovative Danish software-startup raises millions in venture funding

mike-johnston

It looks as though the popular project / task management software, Trello, has caught the interest of a buyer! Atlassian, makers of JIRA and Confluence (amongst other things), have announced their purchase of the popular service.
Trello is something I've personally used for quite some time on CMS Critic and I'm excited to see what improvements we can expect from this purchase. It's my hope that rather than absorb the service and discontinue it, that Atlassian expands on the great offering that's already there and builds it into something even more amazing.
According to a <a href="http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">recent blog post</a> from Trello CEO, Michael Pryor:
<blockquote>
“..you can expect Trello to become even more awesome and more fun than it is today. We’re as committed to our original vision and brand as we were on launch day but we now have more firepower to fulfill that mission. We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).”
</blockquote>
Thankfully, according to Atlassian Co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, it looks as though for now they do intend to maintain Trello as a stand alone service:
<blockquote>
If you currently use Trello as either a free or paid user, you can rest assured that we will continue to offer Trello as a standalone service. We’ll be working with their product team to help them accelerate development efforts. If you are an Atlassian user, I encourage you to set up an account on Trello and check out how it might work for your team.
</blockquote>
To learn more about the acquisition and both companies plans to proceed, read the following posts:
<a href="https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/ </a>
<a href="http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian</a>

Trello Is Being Acquired By Atlassian

This much-debated topic requires further clarity that will, in turn, benefit both the platform provider and the buyer. Let’s start with a definition of each and compare the core differences between them that set them apart.
A CMS, technically a WCMS for Web Content Management System, is used to build, launch, manage, and host websites. In the case of CMS, the user experience is singular, displaying the same content and messaging to every user.
A <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Web Experience Platform</a> is also used to build, launch, manage, and host websites. However, a Web Experience Platform delivers a different experience to every website visitor based on a plethora of data which is leveraged to personalize the user experience. With the ability to personalize content and deliver different user experiences to every customer persona, the opportunities are limitless.
Websites built on a CMS are focused on singular content and messaging while a Web Experience Platform can deliver unique web experiences with the content, medium, and messaging completely personalized to the user. Yes, content is still the operative term but it is no longer singular. In a Web Experience Platform, you have tons of content ready to serve up to a wide range of customer personas.
Currently, CMS companies are desperately scrambling to become Web Experience Platforms as they have noticed the tremendous benefit in doing so. Serving up personalized content tailored to the user, giving one user a different experience with your website than another, that is where the future of website management is headed.
As CMS companies scramble to pivot towards delivering tailored web experiences, existing Web Experience Platforms are far ahead of the game but not for long. It is likely that by the end of 2017 a majority of companies previously known as CMS providers will rebrand themselves as Web Experience Platforms. This will push the boundaries of programming languages, <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">web design</a>, and frameworks as well as the designers and engineers who use them, forcing them to adapt to the new standard in web development which will undoubtedly lead to new programming languages, frameworks, web design practices and much more.
Be wary of vendors that claim to be Web Experience Platforms. A lot of CMS companies are calling themselves Web Experience Platforms, even if they technically aren’t, and others are holding onto the CMS acronym while adding a Web Experience Platform, almost as an additive to the CMS. And everyone else is either a true Web Experience Platform or a CMS. You cannot be both at the same time, the entire purpose and vision of each product, despite being web oriented, is drastically different.
The Web Experience Platform, at times known as a Digital Experience Manager, will become the new standard as technology moves quickly and the entire CMS market migrates their focus to the digital experience. So if you’re looking for a website solution you now know the state of the union and can ask the right questions when looking for platforms to build and manage your website(s).
Begin with this question. Can you really deliver content tailored to the user? And I don’t mean an ad targeted at a certain user that takes them to a certain landing page. I mean someone visiting your website, and all of its pages, and seeing content specific to the customer persona they fall into.
For example, your company sells to marketers, developers, software executives, and agencies. So in the case of a Web Experience Platform, you create content for all of those customer personas and create a conditional structure to serve up the appropriate content based on the persona of the user which can come from several sources of data, namely behavior, cookies, browser history, viewing device, etc.
So reading this as a business executive you’re probably going to ask your IT or Engineering Lead tomorrow why you don’t have a Web Experience Platform. They probably won’t know what that is but tell them to step on it. Be there first, don’t join in at the last second because there isn’t a better time to switch as long as you find the proper vendor with a roadmap to increase the level of personalization the platform provides.
As an end user, a consumer on the web, guess what? Less closing out of windows, skipping through pages, and wasting time looking for the right content online— it’ll be tailor made and served to you. The effect of this shift will be felt across the digital world not just on websites but all digital devices as content becomes more personalized and the experience becomes the focus.
As a buyer, when debating whether or not to choose a CMS or a Web Experience Platform it's much like debating over whether to get a 2017 BMW 7 Series or a 1994 Honda Civic assuming they cost the same. Wouldn't you rather be driving the brand new BMW 7 series?
Web Experience Platforms are the next generation of Content Management Systems. Make sure your existing CMS has a product roadmap that leads to evolving into a Web Experience Platform and if not, find a Web Experience Platform that runs on all six cylinders.
<h3 style="user-select:auto">About the Author</h3>
Shawn Moore is the founder &amp; CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from inception to a successful company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.
Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

The Difference Between a CMS and a Web Experience Platform

Created by <a href="https://go.forrester.com/">Forrester</a>, an independent technology and market research company, the Forrester Wave on ECM, much like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, analyzes particular vendors’ offerings within the document management and content management space.
Forrester is transparent about their methodologies for their Wave on business content services, relaying in-depth information on the processes of their research to prospective buyers.
Additionally, Forrester’s research for its Waves is predicated upon holistic processes, utilizing analysts, research associates, vendor response teams, and customer references to arrive at their findings.
The Wave is parsed into seven milestones: Getting Started; Creating Evaluation Criteria; Selecting Vendors, Inclusion Criteria, and Kickoff; Gathering and Evaluating Data; Scoring; Fact Checking; and Publishing. 
Although document management and business content management services are slightly different facets of information management, they are highly interconnected, and one can be understood through an analysis of another.
<h3> Document Management Points from the Wave</h3>
Forrester focuses more intently on ECM features within vendor solutions than Gartner, noting that core ECM features such as file check-in/checkout, role-based user permissions, file cycle management, and search taxonomy will remain integral to business content and document management services.
In accounting for future ECM trends, the Wave also notes that integration will become increasingly two-sided, or “bidirectional,” meaning that software innovation for programs like Microsoft Office and Salesforce will be increasingly designed to integrate with ECM solutions, whereas prior to this phenomenon it was only document management vendors engineering their software to integrate with third-party software like Salesforce and Microsoft Office.
This will prove beneficial for prospective document management vendors reluctant to buy ECM that does not integrate with software on which the organization already depends.
Forrester aptly refers to this phenomenon as “bidirectional integration.” This bidirectional integration will be an important component of an even broader phenomenon as Forrester sees it: the software landscape adjusting to ECM as ECM has previously adjusted for it.
For organizations interested in using document management and content for sharing, collaboration, and usability, the Wave provides valuable insight on several ECM vendors excelling in these areas.
To solidify the importance of sharing, collaboration, and usability, Forrester notes that stake holders such as regulators and customers are stimulating demand for IT professionals to work on documents and projects outside the geographic location of the walls of the office, making high powered collaboration and file sharing features more essential than ever. 
Additionally, Forrester identifies cloud-based ECM solutions as game-changers for early adopters in many industries—noting that although many organizations start with On-Premise ECM solutions to <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/content-management-systems-vs-document-management-systems/">be familiar with ECM technology</a>, it will be useful for prospective buyers to only consider cloud solutions across all industries moving forward. Forrester asserts that the cloud will be increasingly vital with time, and is here to stay, in large part, because of transactional content management.
Forrester also notes that this transactional content phenomenon entails business processes originating outside the organization and are fueled by third parties and customers, while
<h3> Limitations of the Wave</h3>
The Wave weights certain categories based on the research firm’s understanding of prospective buyers’ needs—raising questions about whether research firms understand prospective ECM buyers’ needs well enough to assess them.
On the other hand, some may argue that since Forrester’s customer is, in essence, the person reading their reports, they will take this person’s interest in technologies seriously, striving to provide the most accurate information possible. Furthermore, one may wonder whether Forrester solicited consumer opinion to determine the true needs of prospective buyers.
These trends only further illustrate the trend toward the <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/the-consumerization-of-content-navigate-the-change-through-ecm/">consumerization of document management</a> and content management services.

Understanding Document Management in the Forrester Wave Context

<h3>Simplifying Existing DMS Market Research</h3>
As is the case with all research geared toward helping organizations make purchase decisions, the analyses in the Magic Quadrant and Wave will attempt to summarize market and vendor information quickly before summarizing it thoroughly and in its entirety.
Quick summaries are useful, but oftentimes not all-encompassing. It will be up to prospective DMS buyers to decide whether it is in their best interest to use what may be the easiest means of selecting the <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/">best document management system vendor</a> as opposed to relying on several diverse sources, including an internal analysis of their own organization’s needs.
However, both Forrester and Gartner offer more specific research insights for prospective technology buyers than the Wave or Magic Quadrant provide: The Gartner Interactive Magic Quadrant and the Forrester Wave tool each allow prospective document management system buyers to input information specific to their organization, providing more individual assistance in the technology selection than a single report can provide.
However, from this input, not all vendors will be available in the results, so prospective buyers should still explore other options as well.
<h3>Analyzing the Document Management System through Market Research</h3>
Commerce is now driven by content, and without the document management system technology and strategy to transform it into knowledge, information limits organizations. “The Information Age” does not just encompass the proliferation of data creation technologies—it also denotes organizations’ reliance on these technologies in lieu of their ability to derive knowledge from them.
Organizations with <a href="http://blogs.gartner.com/darin-stewart/2013/05/01/big-content-the-unstructured-side-of-big-data/">unstructured content</a> can lose access to this content’s information within a second; as this second transpires, it may become a mistake that takes hours, weeks, months, and perhaps even years to recover from—particularly if this information impacts customer experience or satisfaction. Additionally, losing access to information can also result in opportunity costs, legal costs, and an organizational image that subtracts from the bottom-line.
Document management system delivery models and technologies are changing drastically. Therefore, as DMS vendors spearhead innovation, their contribution to users’ understanding of their solutions is imperative.
Now, going paperless in and of itself is neither a sufficient information management policy nor a means of gaining a competitive advantage for mid- to large-sized organizations: 80% of any given organization’s content is digital—and without DMS’s strategy and technology to automate the structure of this content, your employees will continuously perform the duties of a librarian in one capacity or another—detracting from the revenues to be earned within the scope of their actual roles.
Often, DMS is viewed as an ineffective resolution to the ills of corporate disorganization—one that does not account for the subtleties and nuances of individual roles in the workspace, let alone each organization’s role in its respective industry.
However, no matter what organization you run, the majority of what you do is creating, managing, and processing information through human capital to make informed decisions, and given <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/filing-cabinet-software-deployment-mistakes/">proper training and implementation</a>, a document management system provides the features, benefits, and simplicity to expedite the attainment of these results.
Going paperless alone is not the singular value of DMS. Rather, this involves the management of paperless information, because although there may have been an organizational process and storage guidelines when paper was there, uploading and digitizing it without a storage infrastructure has created content chaos in mass—a phenomenon that impinges the productivity of knowledge workers and the economy as a whole alike.
A document management system offers executive leadership and administrators in the fields of education, business, and government the power to extract actionable insights from content.
DMS is designed to support content throughout all lifecycles in an organization at the levels of its <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/assimilate-a-dms-into-a-modern-it-model/">IT infrastructure and organizational strategy</a>.
Document management is an equalizing technology-leveling the playing field among small to mid-sized organizations striving to compete with larger, paper-dependent ones. In a business climate that is rife with competition and economic uncertainty, organizations must do everything in their power to reduce expenses without sacrificing output, and use of a document management system is one of the foremost ways to effectively achieve this goal.
To learn more about <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/what-is-a-document-management-system/">what a document management system is</a>, visit eFileCabinet’s website today.

Understanding the Document Management System through Market Research

Utilizing Third-party Software Integrations
Although it is also a key step in the paperless office software selection process, many third-party software integrations across the vendor pool go underutilized by their users.
Selecting and using software with third-party integration relevant to the organization’s industry is imperative.
For instance, accounting firms should seek solutions with ample <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/software-integrations/">Salesforce integration</a>. However, a solution’s integration with more deeply embedded software like Microsoft Office is essential regardless of the industry.
Redefining Organizational Workflow
In order to get the most out of a paperless office software’s workflow feature, testing various workflows that either build upon or challenge the workflow utilized prior to the purchasing of the solution is important in using the collaborative features of the tool.
If emulating a preexisting workflow that does not use the scope of the solution’s workflow in its entirety, it is worth creating a new workflow that does.
Erasing Organizational Knowledge Silos through the Solution
When used as the vendor specifies, an organization’s content will eliminate knowledge silos in both behavioral and technological form.
Behaviorally, many workers in paper-and shared drive-dependent organizations usually spend anywhere from 10% to 20% of their time searching for inaccessibly stored information, whether through filing cabinets or shared drives.
This presents enormous costs to output, even without accounting for the fact that many workers spend time remaking or re-creating documents that are already stored somewhere, but cannot be found. <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/office-automation-zonal-update/">This is why Zonal OCR technology</a> in paperless office software provides an immense benefit to knowledge workers struggling to keep their information retrievable.
Extracting Data Driven Insight through Paperless Office Software
Given the present rate of data and information accumulation in organizations, gaining insight about this data and information becomes nearly impossible without technological intervention, and paperless office software is one of the few enterprise technologies that can structure content in a way that imparts, not prevents, insight regarding valuable information.
This provides strategic advantages in relation to competitors, marketing, information governance efficiency, and external auditing.
Relevant Certifications for Paperless Office Software Usage
A Note on Certifications 
Although many content management and information governance authorities issue general certifications, product diversification, including the industry-specific specialization of these vendors, will create a paradigm shift among certifications—with vendors themselves developing certifications specific to their solutions. Until then, the following certifications may give credibility to professionals’ information management skillset across a variety of different paperless office software solutions.
ECM Practitioner, Specialist, and Master Certifications
These certifications, as issued by <a href="http://www.aiim.org/wpfd">AIIM</a>, can be divided into two camps: sales-based certifications and technology-based certifications, with the latter being most beneficial for ECM users and users of similar technologies.
However, both kinds of certifications overlap in developing content needs assessment skills for organizations, and the level of mastery over ECM is indicated by the three certification tiers: ECM Practitioner, ECM Specialist, and ECM Master Course completion.
COMPTIA Certified Document Imaging Architect (CDIA)
The <a href="https://certification.comptia.org/">CompTIA</a> Certified Document Imaging Architect certification provides IT personnel with the means to fully implement paperless office software into preexisting IT structures, including the knowledge to ensure full utilization of the system’s features.
This certification provides insight and training on the more complex facets of electronic information management, such as workflow and workflow assessment.
ARMA Information Governance Professional (IGP)
<a href="http://www.arma.org/">ARMA</a>, as an information governance entity, offers an excellent, general ECM certification that ensures those certified under this specification understand information governance at the intersection of business auditing, information privacy, information technology, records management, and compliance.

Key Elements of Paperless Office Software

Last week, the Solodev team attended Amazon Web Services re:Invent, where some 30,000 engineers, startups, executives, consultants, partners, and techies from around the world converged on the Las Vegas Strip to hear the latest and greatest innovations from the brilliant minds at <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Amazon Web Services</a>, the world’s #1 provider of cloud computing services.
Immediately after our arrival in Las Vegas we found ourselves at an airport covered in AWS Branding, the most notable of which was their new SaaS Subscriptions Program, which Solodev was selected to participate in among a select number of partners. After a five-hour flight across the country, we were greeted with the Solodev logo at every turn from the airport all the way to the conference. What an arrival.
Our direction was clear at re:Invent, show the power of Solodev, and how AWS strengthens that power, to the world. Being the 5th booth once entering the exhibition hall, it was difficult to avoid our booth and within seconds of the doors opening, our booth was packed. I observed how energetic and excited everyone was and most of all, curious about all of the AWS Partners and what they did that was so special. For Solodev, the answer to “What do you do?” was simple.
<blockquote>“We’re the only web development platform (CMS) fully optimized for the AWS Cloud and its entire product suite, giving you unparalleled levels of security, scalability, and redundancy while you build, launch, manage, and host amazing websites and mobile apps in the cloud with Solodev.”</blockquote>
AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced a series of new products and services to add to their already impressive product suite, the most game changing of which are the newly announced <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AWS CodeBuild</a>, a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy, and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/xray/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AWS X-Ray</a>, which makes it easy for developers to analyze the behavior of their production, distributed applications with end-to-end tracing capabilities. In addition, AWS made tremendous announcements in the Big Data, Serverless Computing, and Artificial Intelligence spaces with the product launches of AWS Glue, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Athena, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly.
On a less technical level, the focus of the conference was on how AWS Partners like Solodev can provide better products and services by leveraging the tremendous power of the AWS Cloud and its entire product suite and the implications this rapidly evolving infrastructure in the cloud can provide both existing, new, and emerging startups and organizations. Several AWS Partners spoke at the conference about how leveraging the AWS Cloud empowered their businesses to scale, streamline their cloud infrastructure, and provide better experiences to customers and expand their businesses faster with the power of Amazon Web Services.
The relationship between AWS and its partners isn’t a one-way street as Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, stressed the fact that all partner relationships with AWS are mutually beneficial and how important partner feedback is to continuous product innovation at Amazon. “The reality is, we are going to direct business to our partners who are committed and who really understand the platform because our customers want partners who understand the details of our platform.” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy.
With the leading minds of tech at a conference held by the leading provider of the most important piece of the engineering puzzle, cloud infrastructure, in the same place at the same time there was a sense of urgency that agility, artificial intelligence, big data, migration to the cloud, the importance of partnerships, and pushing the cloud to its limits through added layers in cloud infrastructure were at the forefront of the messaging coming from AWS speakers and executives.
Although attending re:Invent was extremely informative we were able to accomplish much more than learning about technology trends, new AWS products, and how our fellow AWS partners had leveraged Amazon’s infrastructure to scale and iterate. Being the only web experience platform for the enterprise built for the AWS Cloud makes us stand out and as a result, we were able to meet with Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, who kindly tweeted our Amazon Marketplace listings after finding out about Solodev from a co-worker.
AWS re:Invent also gave us a chance to expand existing partnerships (AWS, New Relic, Atlassian, Cloudability, DataDog, Zenefits) and explore new ones. An unexpected amount of web development shops were falling over each other to learn about how they could use Solodev to manage their clients hundreds and even thousands of websites while others were looking for new CMS platforms to migrate to. The end result, Solodev was named one of the most talked about products debuting at AWS re:Invent 2016 in <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/3144911/cloud-computing/cool-tech-at-aws-re-invent.html#slide47" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Cool tech at AWS re:Invent” by Network World</a> within 24 hours of landing.
The major takeaway from the event is that the world has embraced cloud computing and much like the space race of the 1960s, it seems like everyone in tech is competing to build the best cloud products and services available and leverage the power the cloud provides to build amazing products. So it can be broken down like this.
<ul>
<li>If you’re still on premises, you’re behind</li>
<li>If you’re considering the cloud, it’s time to pull the trigger</li>
<li>If you’re already in the cloud, make sure you’re in the best cloud environment</li>
<li>If you’ve mastered the cloud, leverage its power to build new amazing products and services on top of cloud infrastructure</li>
</ul>
Solodev is honored to have gained so much recognition in 2016 from winning a series of web design awards to clinching the <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">People’s Choice Award for Best Cloud CMS</a>. 2016 also saw Solodev named among America’s fastest growing private companies by the Inc. 5000 for the second year in a row as well as being among a select number of AWS partners to join their newly announced SaaS Subscriptions Program. Going into 2017, Solodev has 5 listings on the AWS Marketplace, including our latest build of Solodev for Windows on the AWS Marketplace.
About Solodev
<a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Solodev</a> is the world’s first on-demand web experience platform created by developers for developers. It allows organizations to create amazing websites with unparalleled levels of security, scalability and total design freedom.

AWS re:Cap: Solodev goes “all in” at AWS re:Invent  2016

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Learning about the origin of filing cabinet software can help us to understand it in its contemporary context. John Mancini, the president of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), is one of the world’s leading experts on information management: AIIM recently declared eFileCabinet user Chris Beebe as its paperless office hero for its <a href="http://www.aiim.org/wpfd">World Paper Free Day</a> event.
Mancini notes that the information landscape is comprised of five stages leading up to the development of Enterprise Content Management, document management software, and filing cabinet software as we know these information management mediums today:
1. The Paper-Based Information Era
Mancini maintains that this model was used before the 1950s and was, in large part, the method by which western civilization depicted and documented information in general for most its existence.
2. The Micrographics Era
Mancini asserts that micrographics emerged after the paper-based epoch—emphasizing the photography of paper documents, reducing them in form to microfilm or microfiche. This was arguably the first crucial step toward digitizing information in mass.
Documenting and recording emerged, but paper remained the primary intersection of “organizational processes, information, and people.”
3. The Electronic Records Production (ERP) Era
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the concept of automation was brought to light by leading tech pioneers and innovators. Despite this newfound innovation, paper still held supremacy over the business process. Mancini notes that these solutions, were discussed among and sold only to C-level executives, and were highly expensive and complex. Today, <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/paperless-office-infonomics/">filing cabinet software accomplishes a similar feat</a>, but is far more intuitive.
4. The Workflow Era
This is when documentation specialists emerged—and it forced people to look at information management not as something one merely does but as something one also understands–this is particularly true given the volume of information that proliferated during this time. Network area localization spawned this final section leading to our present era: the era where highly sophisticated information management methods were made available via filing cabinet software.
5. The Era of Information Management Sophistication
Mancini declares that beginning in the early 2000s, with the advent of the internet, filing cabinet software emerged to organizations’ benefit. However, it changed drastically throughout this era—beginning as a cluster of simple imaging technologies, with <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/the-differences-between-ecm-and-dms/">enterprise content management (ECM)</a> serving as an umbrella nomenclature for anything involving enterprise information management.
Within the past 5 years, however, ECM has become more so a verb (something you do) and less so a noun (something you buy), according to Mancini. As a similar technology, filing cabinet software beholds the same distinction.
For in its verb form, it is largely responsible for de-manual-laboring the organization. Despite blue collar environments being associated with manual labor and the many ills coming with it, relying on paper and disheveled, unstructured information imparts just as many if not more ills (including manual labor within the office) than typical manual labor environments.
With emphasis on visible processes and quantifiable bottom lines, many executives and administrators fail to identify the costliness of hidden processes within an organization—relying on shared drives and/or paper, which is a vessel for immensely multifaceted costs.
Document management technology, however, reduces the manual labor in the organizational process, putting traditionally manualized office processes into the automated, digital, and highly secure and compliance-adherent workflow, collaboration, and storage platforms inherent to the scope of filing cabinet software.
Most organizations relying on paper and traditional information storage processes never realize how inefficient these processes are until they purchase solutions to overthrow them. The time spent handling, sending, locating, and retrieving documents in physical form significantly detracts from the process and cost efficiency. Although this occurs independent of administrators’ consciousness, it is no less detrimental than organizational problems of which administrators are aware and determined to solve.
These demarcations throughout the historical development of enterprise technologies elucidates the difference between cloud storage and more sophisticated solutions: these two very different technologies that are oftentimes confused for the following reasons.
<ul>
<li>Unlike filing cabinet software, cloud storage does not offer workflow, collaboration, enterprise-grade storage capacity, automated deletion, indexing, multi-tiered security features to simplify compliance, all-encompassing role-based user permissions, content lifecycle management, and software integration capabilities</li>
<li>Additionally, the difference between these two technologies and cloud storage is the difference between a digital secretary and a digital filing cabinet—filing cabinet software being the secretary with the ability to handle, manipulate, and alter information on command.</li>
<li>As the enterprise tech era is brought to its fruition and peak growth, information technology will not reach consumerization. Once fully implemented into the <a href="http://giic.org/">organizational infrastructure</a> worldwide, it will no longer be common for consumers to have better technology in the home than they do in the office.</li>
<li>With wearables, mobile phone applications, and consumer-grade software at the helm of software innovation, organizations are asking how they can keep up with the rate of innovation consumers have access to outside of the office, and use of filing cabinet software is one of the many possible answers to this ever-important question.</li>
</ul>

Filing Cabinet Software: Its Role in Information Management's History

<a href="http://www.kentico.com/?utm_source=press_release&amp;utm_medium=link&amp;utm_campaign=pr_g2crowd_Q12016" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Kentico Software</a>, makers of an all-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform, today announced Kentico 10. The company’s flagship product features a long list of functional improvements all focused on getting digital marketing jobs done faster and more efficiently. It is by far the company’s most enterprise-ready solution to date.
<blockquote>“We see ourselves as being a very different kind of WCM vendor,” said Karol Jarkovsky, Kentico’s Director of Product. “Our view is that it’s not about how many features you can cram into a product, but rather understanding how digital marketers work and building a platform that’s easy for them to use and enables them to get jobs done faster.” He continues, “The last thing we want to do is bog marketers down with flashy but seldom used capabilities. We have, to the contrary, been removing lesser-used features and streamlining our software code for the past several years. The result is that Kentico 10 is a very clean, very elegant solution that’s ready for today’s business enterprise.”</blockquote>
KENTICO 10 FEATURES &amp; CAPABILITIES
Productivity
<ul>
<li>Kentico has spent months observing the way that digital marketers work and built much of what it has learned into Kentico 10. For example, more agile campaign management has been achieved by featuring a single unified control panel from which marketers can design, deploy, and evaluate digital marketing campaigns.</li>
<li>Responsive Images Management – In order to deliver a superior customer experience, personalized content must be delivered through multiple channels including phones, tablets, and a growing list of mobile devices. That means that images need to be resized and rendered in numerous resolutions, color profiles, layouts, and viewports. With Kentico 10, the company has introduced responsive image management. After some initial setup, that means you upload images just once and the system automatically adjusts them for various media.</li>
</ul>
Context
<ul>
<li>With Kentico 10, you can gain insights into activities of your customer base across multiple web properties, enabling cross-site lead scoring and contextual marketing projects. Complete view of visitor interactions across all brands is now supported.</li>
<li>With the Campaign Journey, we allow marketers to track interactions of visitors with the brand during the sequence of steps in the journey. Flexible campaigns allow marketers to change attributes of the running campaign without concluding the campaign or losing any of the data already collected.</li>
<li>The abundance of data makes it difficult for marketers to make sense of it all. During the development of Kentico 10, the company explored different ways to better glean and share insights to both Kentico and non-Kentico users. That’s important because often you are not the only one interested in the data. That’s why Kentico is leveraging its strategic relationship with Microsoft and offering advanced Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities through the Power BI Email Marketing dashboard. This ensures that everyone has access to the same channel intelligence.</li>
</ul>
Performance &amp; Scalability
<ul>
<li>Users will notice a dramatic 50% faster page load and response time of the Kentico environment. This means faster development of digital marketing campaigns and faster deployment of websites. This should be of particular appeal to digital marketing agencies, freeing them to take on more work within the same hours. The bottom line is that with Kentico 10, users will get more jobs done in less time.</li>
<li>Kentico 10 features a tenfold improvement in scalability, supporting over 100 million contacts and over 1 billion marketing activities. This new scale of work, in addition to built-in web farm support, makes Kentico enterprise-ready, and a much more viable option for Global Fortune 500 corporations.</li>
</ul>
Technology
<ul>
<li>Full Implementation of MVC – The <a href="http://asp.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ASP.NET</a> Model View Controller (MVC) is the fastest growing developer framework, helping companies to build better performing, more scalable websites. That’s why it was introduced in the last version of the product and is fully implemented in Kentico 10 in both the E-commerce and Online Marketing areas. That means total separation of concerns for all kinds of projects. By using the coupled REST API, Kentico 10 can be used in a variety of use cases as a content repository with the content consumed not only through traditional delivery channels, but also in native mobile apps, and by smart devices and machines to extend the pool of use cases.</li>
<li>Full Deployment of Continuous Integration – One of the challenges that digital agencies face is that every developer has their own instance of the development installation and their own instance of the development base – in effect, their own isolated environment. At the end of the day, they need to share that functionality with the rest of the team. Continuous Integration – the tool that makes this possible – is fully deployed and supports all object types in Kentico 10, enabling you to quickly and easily move objects between environments.</li>
</ul>
Ready for the Enterprise
<blockquote>“With the introduction of Kentico 10, the expansion of our service offerings, and our recent entry into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM, we expect that more Global Fortune 500 companies will take a serious look at Kentico,” commented Founder and CEO Petr Palas. “We have been anticipating that day, and have been working hard to make our products and our business enterprise ready.”</blockquote>
Learn more at <a href="http://www.kentico.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">http://www.kentico.com/</a>

Kentico 10 Features Dramatic Advances in Speed and Usability

Fugue, Inc., announced today the immediate availability of the free version of its flagship cloud orchestration product, Fugue. Fugue simplifies common challenges enterprises face when operating in the cloud and mitigates the need for deep domain expertise required to manage massive infrastructure complexity and ensure regulatory compliance. Unlike existing cloud management tools, Fugue provides DevOps engineers with the ability to program and orchestrate the full lifecycle of their entire Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure service stack across compute, network and storage in a systematic and scalable manner. To access the free version of Fugue, visit <a href="http://www.fugue.co/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.fugue.co</a>.
<blockquote>
“The free version of Fugue is a fast and frictionless entry point for developers and cloud engineers to begin to easily experience the true benefits of the cloud,” said Fugue Co-founder and CEO Josh Stella. “It is meant to add immediate value to individuals who provision, maintain, operate and terminate cloud environments on a routine basis.” 
</blockquote>
The free version of Fugue is ideal for development, testing, and staging environments, and for those just getting started with the cloud. A single user can provision and orchestrate multiple cloud environments in an AWS account and Fugue actively manages infrastructure state and corrects for configuration drift. Free Fugue comes with email support and online documentation. There is an option to increase the level of support at-cost.
“There is broad agreement that the future of IT is cloud computing—Fugue is right in the middle of that future,” said Peter Christy, Research Director with 451 Research. Fugue is currently working with Fortune 100 customers to bring advanced cloud operations capabilities in the areas of team collaboration and next-generation enforcement of regulatory compliance and custom policies to market in early 2017.
“The free version of Fugue provides an elegantly designed way to explore achieving what we all seek: a high-confidence, codified, and orchestrated infrastructure,” said Rob Daly, CEO of Stelligent, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “Fugue and Stelligent share the same aims for our customers: We want them to be able to increase the speed of innovation delivery, eliminate infrastructure maintenance burdens and ensure enterprise IT standards are continuously met.”
Fugue works with today’s workloads and DevOps toolchains and significantly simplifies a wide range of cloud-native use cases, including immutable infrastructure, container-based and serverless cloud services, microservices and blue/green deployments. 
Fugue consists of three primary components: The Fugue Conductor, a cloud-side system for provisioning and continuously enforcing cloud infrastructure; the Fugue CLI for sending commands to the Conductor; and Ludwig, a compiled, type-safe domain-specific language for composing and validating cloud infrastructure-as-code. Fugue ships with a standard library which includes simple abstractions for declaring a wide variety of cloud infrastructure service configurations. 
Fugue is a Silver Sponsor at the AWS re:Invent conference from November 28 to December 2, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. At the conference, the Fugue team will be demonstrating how Fugue can be used to solve today’s toughest operational challenges in the cloud. To learn more, visit Fugue at booth #918 on the expo floor, or visit<a href="http://www.fugue.co/reinvent-your-cloud" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.fugue.co/reinvent-your-cloud</a>.
About Fugue
Fugue is an innovative system for orchestrating and enforcing cloud infrastructure that radically simplifies cloud operations. Teams can use Fugue to declare the desired state of cloud infrastructure and policies in a collaborative, human-friendly programming language and to automate the provisioning, management and teardown of complex cloud environments and continuously enforce infrastructure state and policy compliance. Fugue has eight patents granted and sixteen pending. The company is privately held and headquartered in Maryland, with investments by New Enterprise Associates, Core Capital Partners and the Maryland Venture Fund. To learn more about the company, visit <a href="https://fugue.co/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://fugue.co/</a>.

Fugue Launches Free Product for Cloud Infrastructure Orchestration and Enforcement

Here at CMS Critic, we're always looking for ways to help our readers. Based on the number of emails we receive each month from people trying to setup new websites, online stores and blogs, we have decided to start offering some new services. 
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<ul>
<li>Web design and development</li>
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CMS Critic is now offering new services

Solodev, winners of our “Best Cloud CMS” award are pleased to announce that their platform has been completely re-architected for the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. As such, Solodev customers fully benefit from this incredibly secure, redundant, highly available environment. Customers now have immediate access to Solodev and can spin up new instances of the platform in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, deploying business critical websites in minutes rather than weeks.
When told of their recent win of <a href="/awards/">Best Cloud CMS</a>, Solodev Founder and CTO, Shawn Moore had this to say:
<blockquote>
“We’re honored to have won the people's choice award for Best Cloud CMS. We know there are a lot of strong competitors in our market and our team worked extremely hard to build our state of the art cloud offering.” 
</blockquote>
Solodev will be attending the popular <a href="https://reinvent.awsevents.com/">AWS re:Invent 2016</a> conference next week to showcase their newly optimized platform so be sure to swing by their booth and touch base to learn more about their excellent cloud based offering.
<blockquote>
“Solodev has made huge strides in their efforts to advance their cloud platform and for customers who are looking for a solid, stable and reliable cloud based CMS for their business, Solodev is an excellent option to consider.” said Mike Johnston, founder of CMS Critic.
</blockquote>
To learn more about Solodev, visit them on the web at <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.solodev.com/</a>

Solodev CMS, winners of the Best Cloud CMS award, Now Available in the AWS Cloud

A Document management system answers many questions: how do I reduce operating expenses? How do I save money in newfound places for my business? How do I scale back on paper use in my office?
However, the software itself also poses important questions to those who are considering using it. Here eFileCabinet answers many of the most FAQs received from prospective users and new customers alike.
A. Will Software and Strategy Support be an Ongoing, Indefinite Process?
Document management system support will not be an ongoing and indefinite process insomuch as the document management system vendor has a strong support team and product offering. However, irrespective of which document management system a prospective buyer selects, the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/document-management-system-strategy-and-execution/">strategy for the technology</a> will always be an ongoing process.
Although software and strategy are highly similar in the sense that a software’s features may provide strategic frameworks in and of themselves, from the organizational perspective, the strategy will always require legwork because the industry in which the organization resides will fluctuate, bringing new demands and challenges, and ultimately shaping the way organizations respond to these fluctuations with a document management system.
B. What Will Data and Content Migration Entail?
Most organizations’ qualitative data can be found in its content and vice versa. Thus, data and content may be treated as one and the same, or merely as “information.” DMS vendors will be able to assist buyers in <a href="http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/data-migration">data migration</a> whether it be to an online, cloud-based solution, a hybrid solution, or an on premise(s) solution.
However, some vendors will not sufficiently address post-installation considerations regarding information migration. Essentially, it is common that once a vendor completes the installation and makes the sale, further guidance is not provided to the <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/case-studies/">document management system user</a>.
For instance, a particularly common issue post installation is the vendor’s failure to warn organizations against using old storage and data methods (like the shared drive) that the DMS was purchased to supplant. Employees are creatures of habit just as they are outside the office, and will continue relying on overlearned storage tactics, procedures, and protocols unless leadership incentivizes buy-in to the new DMS by removing the technology it was designed to replace.
C. Why Would I choose an Electronic Document Management System over An Electronic Document Management Solution (EDMS)?
Several document management system vendors use the terms document management system and EDMS interchangeably, so confusion regarding the terms is understandable. However, there is a distinct difference between EDMS and a document management system, while still relevant in terminology, is not relevant in practice.
The term emerged to account for enterprise imaging innovations made over 15 years ago near the beginning of the millennium. Akin to DMS, the main purpose of EDM was enabling organizations to rely on less paper, store information digitally, and increase the security of their files (albeit the security enhancement of going paperless alone was marginal).
However, the document management system, as noted earlier, encompasses a greater suite of strategies and software bred to accommodate the needs of larger organizations with multiple branches and a greater volume of information, including more stringent compliance objectives and expectations.
D. Why Would I choose a Document Management System over Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)? 
ERP software is designed to help organizations become data driven, making strategic decisions based on surmised data. Perhaps more akin to DMS than any other technology mentioned in this guide, ERP is better suited for organizations looking to utilize different platforms of the same software in different departments of the organization.
However, a document management system deployment is most useful if deployed organization-wide across all departments—making it a better option for larger organizations wanting to keep all departments informed of each other’s processes and information structures.
Additionally, ERP is designed to account for predetermined information. DMS, however, is robust enough to account for both determined and undetermined information—the latter of these two information types being the most difficult to structuralize into internal processes. Finally, ERP emphasizes delivering solutions in real time: real time being the feature by which technology keeps pace with external processes as they unfold in the environment.
E. Why Would I Choose DMS over Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS)? 
Enterprise File Sync and Share <a href="https://www.sharefile.com/?aid=115878241100&amp;src=google&amp;kw=citrix%20sharefile&amp;gclid=CjwKEAiAr4vBBRCG36e415-_l1wSJAAatjJZZ7ehvPhPYsY9E4tkeRKPcE5ofIEZzdNaqY9_MaakrRoCH8Hw_wcB">(EFSS)</a> is the equivalent of what many call cloud storage today, making it a consumer grade technology unfit for use in an enterprise, no matter how small the enterprise may be.
Although many DMS vendors have all the features of a typical EFSS, the value inherent to a document management system does not reside in its EFSS features. Presently, over half of all organizations worldwide rely on EFSS.
F. Why Would I Choose a Document Management System over Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? 
DMS and ECM are two of the most commonly confused enterprise grade technology solutions. ECM mobilizes documents into self-contained content, reducing the time spent organizing materials and clutter—both of which are prevalent issues across industries.
Essentially, DMS facilitates documents’ capacity to self-manage so workers may tend to the more important aspects of organizational functions: decision making, analysis, and revenue-generating processes.
Although the following statistic varies from vendor to vendor and industry to industry, anywhere from one-fifth to one-fourth of a document management system is Enterprise Content Management in its entirety.
This is in large part because although ECM and DMS are distinctly different, they share a variety of technological features—whereas a DMS entails not just technology, but also the strategies by which organizations can effectively use and manipulate content for any given purpose.
For instance, Infosys, a business technology and consulting firm, notes that one-fifth of ECM is comprised of the following document management features: folder-ing, file visibility, file retrieval and search, workflow features, and automated document deletion and retention.
A document management system, however, primarily utilizes business process management, which is a strategy of melding preexisting IT structures and processes into organizations’ DMS usage.
Concomitantly, ECM involves records management (the legal component of enterprise technology and content), web page content management, and information exchange add-ons with more security features than email provides. However, both high-end ECM and a typical DMS can handle millions of documents.
To read more about <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/what-is-a-document-management-system/">what a document management system is</a>, visit eFileCabinet’s website.

Document Management FAQs: eFileCabinet Answers

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