Making the switch from navigating to searching with help from ICC and Regex.

Many companies are still making that transition from shared drives (who has never had a S:\ or H:\drive!?!?!?) to Document Management System (DMS) or full blown Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. There are many reasons for making the switch from overloaded hardware to new business demands but a key point in many of these systems is how the end user uses the system.

Lots of shared network drives are a prime example of content chaos with no naming or folder standardization and users left to create their own folders. However, some more well thought out network shares have a semi-structured foldering system with maybe  a base template of a folder structured which is copied and pasted for new projects, claims, matters or applications.

 

Whatever the structure or lack of it on a shared file system it is generally a case of users having to browse for the content they are after. What happens if you can’t find that vital document you worked on 3 months ago? You always have the option to search but then you are presented with the dozens if not hundreds of hits the full text search brings back. I think of this type of use case as discovery – users are having to discover what they are looking for rather than being able to pinpoint it straight away. More on this topic here at a previous post: Difference between search and discovery.

With this in mind it is important for our end users to realize that any migration to a new DMS or ECM system demands a different way of working – hopefully a smarter and more efficient way of working. Although, sometimes DMS or ECM system are implemented badly and mimic the folder browsing approach which seems crazy in today’s world with the content explosion. Saying that I am sure there are cases for the old style folder browsing such as case management solutions that have adhoc document collections.

We have established the source system disadvantages, the benefits are new target system will bring and determined that we have a semi-structured foldering system which could be used to place some categorization and property values to our content in the new system. Up steps IBM Content Collector (ICC)!

I am no expert with ICC but I love it’s module design and flexibility it provides for ingesting content from a variety of sources to a repository. You don’t need to be a programming genius to achieve some great results but how do we determine index information based on folder names in document file paths? In short we are looking for patterns in a string and what better way that using Regular Expressions….groan I hear you sigh! I was never a fan of Regular Expressions mainly because it looked like hieroglyphics however after spending sometime on a number of projects and getting into the weeds I have changed my mind and realize how powerful they can be. Saying that I will likely forget everything I have learnt in a couple of months.

Below is a screenshot of how to build Regular Expressions into your ICC Task Route. I haven’t detailed the Regular Expressions used as that is a topic all on its own but will post again on typical expressions and how they can be combined with ICC Lists to provide some powerful lookups.

Trouble finding those filed emails & staying on top of your inbox?

Great little tool that a colleague introduced to me back in Lotus Notes 6. I have just started to use it again to help me keep on top of my inbox and file things more effectively.

SwiftFile:

SwiftFile is an intelligent assistant for Lotus Notes that helps users organize their e-mail into folders. SwiftFile uses a text classifier to learn each user’s mail-filing habits. SwiftFile uses the model it learns to predict the three folders into which the user is most likely to place each incoming message. The predictions are presented to the user as three shortcut buttons that allow the user to quickly file each message into one of the predicted folders. When one of SwiftFile’s  predictions is correct, the effort required to file a message is reduced to a single button click. This file contains instructions for installing and using SwiftFile.

Such a simply little tool that may even help with your records management and email archiving strategy.

Get the latest version here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24019219

How to sell Social Software.

Social Software, Social Platforms, Social ECM, Social Connections ….call it what you will, it is certainly a growing market and many companies are ‘dipping their toe in the water’ to help enhance collaboration or simply introduce collaboration in their organization.

Why you need Social Software – the pain points:

There are various benefits to transitioning to a social platform other than just having the latest and greatest Web 2.0 software with all the bells and whistles.

1.  How do organisations attract the best young talent today?

Those upcoming stars that are fresh out of university want to work at organizations that are leading edge and tech savvy. Even today’s teens are more computer savvy than their previous generations. They are pushing collaboration to the next level – chatting with 3 or more friends at a time in real time on their instant messenger or multiple instant messengers. They are permanently connected with their smart phones to family, friends and colleagues. They blog, they updates wiki’s with ideas and coursework from their university tutors. Practically, all teens have facebook, twitter, pinineterest and foursquare accounts to post miniblogs, arrange events, share pictures, locations and much, much more.

So what happens when these tech savvy teens joining the leading Corporates of today and discover they go back a step in time with thick applications, out of date email systems, no instant messaging or not being able to find work colleagues or documents due to the silos of information.

2. Tacit Knowledge.

Those employees that have been the longest in the organization are also likely to have the most knowledge about your services, products, partners and the organization itself. All this tacit knowledge is in jeopardy of disappearing overnight as these long-term employees decide to retire or even worse move onto another organization.

3. Remote offices.

Organizations with multiple remote sites particularly large national or international organizations struggle with the connectivity of employees at these sites working in the same knowledge domains. Proposals, case studies, initiatives and projects are regularly duplicated across offices without any knowledge that the other remote offices or departments have the same goals or could learn from the other offices and employees experiences. Imagine the very person to help you design your Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system is sitting in an office on the other side of the world already prototyping a solution. The lack of insight and visibility into what is happening across the ENTIRE company and being able to tap in to those skills and expertise of others leads to duplication of effort hence wasting time and efforts.

4. Email as Document Management.

Email as your document management and daily collaboration tool causes a number of issues and this is not uncommon in many organizations. Overloaded inboxes, duplication of content, sharing, versioning and discovery issues. Email is definitely a key communication tool in organisations today but the ability to socialize a document or presentation with peers and identify key individuals to input effectively requires a different approach. Sharing your work, documents, findings to the wider organization allowing them to be discovered from keyword searching as well following up with key people who collaborated on the project just isn’t possible with an email culture.

The Leap:

So we know the pain and we can see we need a smarter way of working across the domain silos, remote offices, various age ranges of employees and to get away from emailing everything. The question is are organisations and its employees ready to change their day to day communication mind set and start to work differently. It isn’t just a matter of implementing the latest and greatest Web 2.0 technology; it is also about having the right mindset and commitment to use the new tools. Today you email people you know, tomorrow you create a new community to post your document and invite those who can help.

Sounds easy but it isn’t. The biggest challenge in implementing social software is getting users to change their mindset of collaboration.

Targeted Approaches:

Social software isn’t as much in need in small organizations or those organization that are hub-centric (ie: working out of one main office). However, large organizations especially multinationals that have many remote offices are sure to have a number of firm-wide initiatives, national projects, department or domain focused programs that require collaboration from employees across different sites. A key indicator are documents being heavily emailed around various offices due to no shared file locations across sites maybe due to network routing, security or connectivity limitations.

If you are able to identify three key initiatives that match the foregoing criteria then you have your pilot project. Notice I say pilot, as you are destined to fail if you build out a large scale deployment and expect the users to start using it overnight. Begin small, prove how socializing content works on these smaller firm-wide projects. Once you have a success story then you can begin to sell the benefits to other areas – pick your departments and users wisely to help grow your social platform into your organization. Also you need to start with a pilot not a Proof Of Concept, POC as your early adopters won’t want to upload content if it is going to wiped and rebuilt or replaced in the near future. A pilot will be extended into a full fledged system so no content is lost.

Another tip to ensure your identified social projects have a successful pilot is to include fresh, young users into the initiative. New employees that are young and internet savvy will find it easy to use the new platform and apart from being enthusiastic and willing they can also act as sponge to soak up that tacit knowledge from older employees that may not be so convinced about socializing content.

IoD2012: IBM ECM Product Strategy

All about the value of information.

2012 – 2013 roadmap:
Content navigator debuts
Datacap 8.1 UI update (August) – presents single, attractive panel for scan and verify. Smart fields, database lookups, match calculations
CMoD gains FT search
System monitor update
Navigator CMIS, office integration
IBM FIleNet content manager update
Navigator Connections integration updates (6 – 9 month updates)
Cm8 update – event and time based retention policy
Datacap update
New ICC interface for Datacap

IBM Content Navigator 2:
Enhanced document management
CMIS support (productionized)
MS Office Integration (FileNet CM & CM8*)
Mobile enhancements
Drag and drop – no plugins. HTML 5 based.
Production Imaging view – edit directly ‘After Save then Get Next’
Declare plug
IBM Collaboration Services worked with it Content Navigator team and can now edit docs directly in ICN utilizing IBM docs from ICS – ship next year. Powerful extension framework
Favorites and capture introduced this quarter with mobile ICN.
Offline mode available.
Check In and Out fro iphone
Datcap integration – upload to index

Case manager deliverables in 2013:
More flexible task model. Differentiating factor in CM

IBM Content Analytics:
Integrates enterprise search.
Merge of search and analytics
Big data analytics
Contextual view

Analytics: Main priorities:
convergence of enterprise search and content analytics
Smarter Cities (i2, Curam)
Smarter Commerce (Tealeaf)
Classification enhancements
Industry solutions

Govern: Main priorities
Expand archive support for social content, SAP, collaboration
Policy syndication or Optim, Sharepoint
Enterprise records and global policy integration
Holistic eDiscovery solutions
Defensible disposal enterprise deployments
Value Based retention and disposal enhancements
‘Holistic approach for defensible disposal’

Cloud
Smart cloud enterprise now available
IBM Case Manager – Developer use only license
Bring Your Own license
Video demo of setting up a new instance of IBM Case Manager on IBM Smart Cloud

IBM Content Navigator…first impressions

It was called the Nexus project/initiative but now IBM Content Navigator 2 has gone GA as of last week or so. I completed my first IBM Content Navigator install today and it went pretty smooth for my first one if I don’t say so myself 😉

Some things I liked about the install:

> All the CE / PE / API client requirements are installed for P8

> I liked the configuration and deployment manager – all in one interface similar to P8 CE deployment manager

> Wizard driven steps in the config and deployment manager.

 

Some things to note:

> ICN requires a config database – no support for oracle at present

> Can talk to non-IBM repositories such as Alfresco via CMIS

> Utilizes PE workflow or backend system’s workflow – it does not have it’s own

> Security is taken from same AD as CE and hence inherits it’s AD settings from CE

> Don’t change the name of the JNDI connection created by install

 

Below is screen shot to show the nice, clean & crisp interface ICN provides. I like the tabs for the different screens to allow you to click back and forth. More info to follow as my rollout and exploration continues 🙂

 

 

IBM DB2 database restore in non GMT time zones

One to watch out for when restore your IBM DB2 databases in non GMT time zones as you don’t want to restore your database to what you believe is a local time but is actually a GMT time.

rollforward db user using to using local time and complete

This is probably pretty standard for any one living outside the UK are more than familiar with the “USE LOCAL TIME” option.

 

IBM BPM..choices, choices, choices…

IBM WebSphere Lombardi – IBM’s BPM offering or one of the many 😉 One to watch out for?

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/lombardi-edition/

So my very high understanding of the various IBM BPM solutions is:

• FileNet: Documentcentric
• WebSphere Process Server: Systemcentric
• Lombardi: Peoplecentric

Saying that it is my belief that there is a certain overlap between the various software and each can be implemented with different approaches to met the clients requirements.

At the end of the day I believe that often too much focus is put on the software/technology. True BPM should be about the customer needs/requirements – what is the goal?

Data gathering, customer requirements & business evaluations are regularly underestimated when understanding the final achievements.

Maybe we should have a new BPM product called “BPM II” which is customercentric 😉 Food for thought.

Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool!

I remember sitting in many a lotusphere session learning how to search for, troubleshoot, cross reference and understand what the causes of crashes were from NSD logs. Search for “FATAL”, cross reference the TID with the PID, link this to the following section…etc… It was tricky stuff and I remember being inspired by Ian Jordan taking me through some pretty complicated examples.

Anyway, good to see there is now a tool for all this. Havent used it yet but will definitely update you when I do or even let me know here by reply. You can check it out here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Using_the_LND_tool_to_analyze_IBM_Lotus_Notes_and_Domino_hangs_and_crashes

Changing an applications port on WAS 7

To configure the WebSphere application server to use a non-default port:

4 steps to reconfiguring a port for our FileNet Application to run on

Eg, Default port is 9080 but we want to use 9081

Following taken from different sources on the web and experience.

Step 1: Update the Port the server runs on:

1. If not already on the WebSphere administrative console, in a Web browser, type the URL, for example: https://<appserverhost>:9043/ibm/console
2. Select Servers, WebSphere Application Servers, server1, Ports, WC_defaulthost
3. Update the port in this screen to 9081
4. Save

Step 2: Update the Virtual Host:

1. Still within the WAS Admin console
2. Select Environment, Virtual Host, default_host, Host Aliases and then click New.
3. In the Host Name field, type *.
4. In the Port field, enter the HTTP port number of the non-admin server on which Oracle Role Manager is going to be deployed, for example 9081.
5. Click OK.

Step 3: Update the global Web Server plug-in:

This step is required for the application to pick up the changes.

1. Environment, Global Web Server Plug-in Configuration
2. Click ‘OK’

Step 4: Start & Stop WAS Servers

1. Stop and start the AE server
2. Stop and Start the CE server

I believe this is all done in the serversindex.xml in most case in prior versions. More details here:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.express.doc/info/exp/ae/txml_portnumber.html

WAS & disabling LTPA tokens

Problem:

WAS LTPA tokens keep expiring and manual process needs performed to get things working again.

Solution:

The following steps are not recommended as certain environments demand that LTPA tokens be enabled but in some case the resynching of them can be a pain. So if this is for you then the steps are:

1. Log on to the WebSphere Application Server administrative console.

2. Navigate to Security > Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure.

3. Click Authentication mechanisms and expiration.

4. Click Key generation – Key set groups.

5. Click NodeLTPAKeySetGroup.

6. Disable the Key generation – Automatically generate keys checkbox.

7. Click OK.

8. Click Save to save the changes to the master configuration.