Momentum is a great thing, especially in the software world.  We’ve been having a great year at KnowledgeLake and we just got some more good news as Microsoft announced the awards for the Worldwide Partner Conference.  KnowledgeLake won awards in two categories this year, both which hopefully sum up the hard work everyone here has done the last 12 months.

ISV/Software Solutions Partner of the Year
http://www.digitalwpc.com/Awards#ISV-Software-Solutions-Partner-of-the-Year

Information Worker Solutions, Enterprise Content Management and Forms Development Partner of the Year
http://www.digitalwpc.com/Awards#Information-Worker-Solutions-Enterprise-Content-Management-and-Forms-Development-Partner-of-the-Year

See you in New Orleans,

Chris

Just wanted to get this out to reach as many people as possible.  Several of my teams at KnowledgeLake are in need of individuals to fill positions to keep up with the growth we have been experiencing, yes even this the so called horrible economy.  We are in the process of selecting members to fill a few new teams we are building and want as many quality applicants as possible.

We are in need to C# and/or SharePoint developers, people with good customer services skill to work in support as well as quality support specialists.

If you want to a work for a company that employs people that actually enjoy their job and work hard at the same time please reply to this post or contact us at careers@knowledgelake.com.  Couch potatoes need not apply.

Recruiters, please do not contact me.

-Chris

We took another major step this week to building the ultimate Capture application for SharePoint.  We now have the ability to create searchable PDF documents directly from the client application without the need to send documents to a server side process first.  There is of course a lag when doing the OCR, so for high volume applications I still suggest using our Capture Server product.  What is nice however is that the OCR process runs in a separate thread along with saving to SharePoint so after you scan, you can send the PDF documents and immediately start scanning again.  This should make KnowledgeLake Capture significantly more usable than non threaded applications.... yes competition, you know who you are.

The new PDF support comes right after the support for ISIS we had just announced in February.  Some of the other features of our capture software include:

• Use of barcodes and patch codes to separate documents
• Ability to automatically index from bar codes
• Ability to automatically classify documents into Content Types in SharePoint
• Ability to clean up scanned documents, removing noise and automatically deskewing
• Automatic removal of blank pages
• Zonal OCR capabilities
• Forms Recognition
• much, much more....

For a complete list of features and trail software, check out our web site at http://www.knowledgelake.com.

-Chris

Actually we've been doing conversions for years here at KnowledgeLake.  The first one I was involved with was at AG Edwards back in the late 90's when I wrote some applications to move content from FileNet Image Services to Documentum 4i.  After that we continued doing these one off migrations.  I did a FileNet to Viewstar and others at KnowledgeLake worked on Application Extender, SharePoint, several others ECM systems and even some home grown document management systems.

After almost 10 years of doing this we started developing some really good methodologies for doing these migrations and over the last two years we have really started ramping up the amount of FileNet to SharePoint migrations.  Realizing we had stumbled into a legitimate marketplace and with last years release of SharePoint 2007, we decided to build a system around these applications and methodologies and have now released the Content Migration Suite for IBM FileNet.  You can read more about this at http://www.knowledgelake.com/news.asp#migration.

I know there will be a lot of people read this and brush it off because they think there's no way we could possible migrate large FileNet systems to SharePoint, however you shouldn't close your mind so fast until you really understand how SharePoint works.  We have successfully converted systems with over 10 million content items and have done this with just one site and in some cases one Document Library.  Yes, there are some tricks, which is what our system is all about, understanding SharePoint and knowing how to successfully store millions of records.

So give me some numbers you say?  If you read the press release, it states we can move content at a rate of 2.5 million documents per eight hour day per SharePoint Front End Web Server.  We've also added more servers and got close to 10 million per day.

What I can also say is "Don't Try This at Home".  There are some things to know, but I'm not allowed to share them right now... I'd then have to kill you of course.  Cramming millions of content items into any ECM platform without a plan is a dangerous thing to do.  This is the reason we decided to build the product and start helping others with it.

-Chris

Phew!  Another major project behind us.  Amid the ice and snow storm here in St. Louis, our teams released KnowledgeLake Capture 2008 (4.3).  I've been working on a feature by feature comparison between this product and our competition and I can honestly say, on the client side, this is the best document scanning application produced.  Yeah, I know that sounds biased, but I've used the latest version of our competition and I really believe we have them beat (for now).

Some of the new features include:

• ISIS support
• 2D Barcode support
• 32-bit & 64-bit Windows Vista support
• Ability to index and release to using any character set

We added these to the pre-existing (major) feature set:

• Twain support
• Barcode/Patchcode Separation
• Barcode Indexing
• Automatic index configuration from SharePoint
• Automatic classification into SharePoint Content Types
• Zonal OCR
• Image Cleanup (Deskew, Black Border, etc)

We'll also be adding a full blown PDF plug-in module in March that allows import, exporting and viewing of Searchable or Image only PDF documents.

You can download a trial version of this software at http://www.knowledgelake.com.

- Chris

We just got news today that KnowledgeLake won the People's Choice award in the Ingenuity Point Contest during January.  Microsoft’s Ingenuity Point Contest is a worldwide competition open to independent software vendors (ISVs) that build solutions on Microsoft technology with the potential to address some of the world’s biggest challenges in the areas of education, healthcare and environmental sustainability.  The year-long competition showcases examples of how technology can drive positive change and provides ISVs with a unique opportunity to give their groundbreaking ideas international exposure.

Starting with version 2.3 of the KnowledgeLake Imaging Viewer, PDF support is out of the box.  I'm very excited about this addition, especially as we are providing it with the base product for no additional cost.  When users upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 (available early December), the support will happen automatically.

For those of you reading that don't use our Imaging product, the Image Viewer is a zero footprint web application that integrates with SharePoint and allows viewing of TIFF and now PDF documents online.  There a several advantages to using our viewer over, say Adobe Reader.  The first obvious reason is that there is no foot print on client machines.  Everything it does in inside the browser and requires no ActiveX, Java, Flash or any other technology.  The second advantage is that users don't have to wait for for the document to download before viewing it.  Let's say you want to see page 99 out of several hundred pages.  You'd simply load the document and then select page 99 have the page you want.  All the work happens on the server, only rendering what is required to the client.

The third big advantage is that you can view and modify the documents SharePoint properties at the same time you are viewing the pages.

If you'd like more information on KnowledgeLake Imaging feel free to contact me or you can check out our web site at http://www.knowledgelake.com.

Have a good weekend,

Chris

Last week at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver we were doing demos of KnowledgeLake Connect working with Office Live.  If you are familiar with KnoweldgeLake Connect you know it adds SharePoint integration to any desktop application.  For example, let's say that you authored a PDF file from the Adobe Print Driver, Fujitsu ScanSnap or another application and you wanted to get that file into SharePoint.  With Connect (after initial configuration) you'd simply save the file to the "My Documents\My Connect Cache" folder and Connect will launch asking you to pick a site and library from the tree view.  The Office Live support will work the same way as can be seen below:

Users will simply pick the Office Live site and document library and they will be presented with the Meta (column) data that goes along with the library.  Hit Accept and your document is now in Office Live.

Okay I also mentioned desktop integration, so you need to do more than just add documents to Office Live.  With KnowledgeLake Connect you can go to to Office Live and open files such as PDFs and edit them.  When you are finished editing you simply press the save button and Connect knows the document came from Office Live and it will send the edited version back, overwriting the previous document.

Combining the functionality of a Microsoft Office Live and Connect seems to us like the perfect document mangement system for the small office or business that does not want to worry about their ECM infrastructure but simply use the technology.  The Office Live capable version of Connect should be available in September of 2007, but you can download, try and buy the SharePoint only version of Connect today at http://www.knowledgelake.com.  You can also give Office Live a test drive at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office_live/FX101754491033.aspx?pid=CL101750181033.

If you give the software a try, let me know what you think.

Chris

Not blogging much lately... however I did attend one day at the WPC last week.  It was my first time to the show, so I really have nothing to compare it with, but it was really cool to see our company with such a big presence.  We had a really nice booth this year...

... and also had a kiosk at the Fujitsu booth and our software was being used to scan business cards and save them to Office Live at the Office Live kiosks.

No time to really write much, but I can make a few announcements about some upcoming products:

1) x64 Imaging Server will be available on July 31st.

2) Office Live Support for KnowledgeLake Connect will be availalbe around September.

3) Native Image+Text PDF support is coming for both Capture and Capture Server.

Have a good weekend,

Chris

Everyone now and then something happens that really makes you look back and realize you've accomlplished something that will bring pleasure for years.  Last week at Tech Ed, KnowledgeLake Capture won the Best of Tech Ed in the Office System category.  Rather than rattle on what this award is, here's an except from the Windows IT Pro site:

"Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine and MSD2D (and soon to be Office & SharePoint Pro.com) announce the call for entries for the Best of Tech•Ed 2007 Awards. The awards recognize companies who offer innovative products that involve the following categories (Architecture Business Applications, Business Intelligence, Connected Systems, Database Development and Administration, Management and Operations, Windows Server Infrastructure, Developer Tools and Technologies, Web Development and Infrastructure, Mobility, Office System, Security, Unified Communications and Windows Clients). Products and services will be evaluated on the basis of: strategic importance to the market, competitive advantages and value to customer."

There are not enough thanks to go around to everyone who helped us win this award, but I hope all the people on the Capture team read this and understand the joy it brought to me last Thursday.  I was walking around with this big grin on my face and the only thing I was bummed out about was that all the KnowledgeLake employees weren't there to enjoy it with me.  I did hear mention of a fun party at our normal happy hour establishment, Growler's, which I missed because I was too busy wondering around Olando on cloud nine.

You can read more about my previous posts on this product at http://chrislcap.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dKnowledgeLake.

The "official" web site for KnowledgeLake Capture is here.  You can register for a free 30 day trial from this location also.

Have a great week,

Chris

In mid May my Imaging Server team will release an update to the KnowledgeLake Imaging Server 2007. This release will include something not in the original version, which is the ability to scan directly from and into a SharePoint Document Library. For current users of KnowledgeLake Imaging, those with maintenance contracts actually, will have access to this new version that includes the scanning functionality. KnowledgeLake Scan will also be available as a standalone product for SharePoint servers sometime this summer.

Those of you familiar with KnowledgeLake's capture products know that we have always focused more on the production side of document capture, rather than the desktop capture user. With this in mind, it might a good time to flashback to where KnowledgeLake Capture evolved from. Unlike almost all of our other products, capture was not originally built for SharePoint. Back in 1998, I was working on a FileNet implementation at a large brokerage firm and FileNet was just releasing their new 32-bit (yep 32 whole bits) scanning application called Panagon Capture. To keep this short, let's just say that the release was an absolute disaster and the customer was not happy. In my complete arrogance, Ron Cameron suggested I use the Kofax Toolkit to write an application to scan and save to FileNet. I'm still not sure if he was serious or not, but I thought for sure that if I had a decent toolkit this couldn't possibly be that hard. After hiding in locked room for 30 days I emerged with an application that was simple, but did the job. The customer accepted it and we slid my application in instead of Panagon Capture.

Three years later, KnowledgeLake was born and we decided to start things off by building and selling something called "Tablerock", named after a lake here in Missouri. Taking what I learned from my first dive into the Kofax Toolkit, I improved on some things and we launched our first product back in 2001. We sold the application as a framework rather than as a package so our services organization could modify it accordingly for each implementation. This was especially important for indexing as it seemed every customer needed its own modifications. The product really came to life in 2004 when we starting building software for SharePoint. Changing the saving mechanism to allow for release to SharePoint, we launched the first production capture software for SharePoint. We also built some tweaks into SharePoint to allow document libraries to scale. The product was renamed KnowledgeLake Capture and we dropped the lake names from all of our products at that time.

Right before the SharePoint products were born we also built KnowledgeLake Desktop Capture (actually "Clearwater" at the time), as our sales team was finding more and more needs for desktop scanning software. I didn't get it at the time, mainly because of the FileNet focus, but this started to make a lot more sense as we moved into the world of SharePoint. For 2007 we actually merged the Capture and Desktop Capture products together, which was made possible by rewriting the application from the ground up and no longer around the Kofax Toolkit. Although we do offer compatibility to Kofax drivers via a specific adapter the application was no longer dependant on it. This allowed to also build Twain and WIA scanning adapters to meet the needs of both Desktop and Production scanning in one platform.

Seeing other companies take the approach of scanning directly from a web application, and determined to stay in the lead on ramping content to SharePoint, we knew we had to at minimum add the same abilities. A prototype was built months ago, but we just didn't have the time and resources to get it incorporated into a real product as our teams were very focused on releasing our products for the new SharePoint versions. This changed after February however and we used the knowledge from our 2007 capture product and took the time to build Scan directly into SharePoint. KnowledgeLake Scan (as it's known right now) is our first web based scanning application and I can say without doubt I think we provide a better interface than any other web based capture application. We minimized the button clicks it takes to scan a document and make it easy to index and save the images as PDF, XPS of TIFF files. We plan on taking this interface a lot further in the future adding web based scanning into our KnowledgeLake Capture Server product, and with that we will introduce some abilities that I believe will separate us from any competition.

I do have to give some major kudos to my teams on this as the Imaging and Capture teams combined efforts on this to build it together, making the core components usable to each team in the future. So guys if you are reading this, let me say thank you!

Mixing it up,

Chris

Something I've been meaning to talk about for quite some time and something that I have always has a personal interest is supporting XPS (XML Paper Specification) in the KnowledgeLake products. I have been interested in XPS since its early beginning as code name Metro, which I discovered when I was looking for a replacement for both TIFF and PDF a couple years ago. I made a push last year to get as much XPS support as possible into our 2007 products and stopped short of making it our standard image format only because of the lack of a standard for markup inside XPS documents. </P

I've blogged previously about XPS at my old site:

http://support.knowledgelake.com/CS/blogs/cappys_blog/search.aspx?q=xps&p=1

Back to the point of this entry and that's to talk about the support for XPS that we have included in our 2007 products. Since we combined the feature of Desktop Capture and Capture into one single capture product for 2007, we still have the Email document available. Instead, however, of being able to just Email in the native format as well as TIFF or PDF, we can now also Email captured images as XPS files as well.

Also within KnowledgeLake Capture 2007 we added the ability to set the output format to an XPS file. Capturing documents works the same regardless of the output format, but when saving to the hard drive, SharePoint or Capture Server the format can be XPS, as well as TIFF, PDF or the native format supported by your scanner.

KnowledgeLake Capture Server also delivers XPS support, but in the form of a plug-in that converts documents to XPS as well as PDF within the capture path. Plug-ins work with files destined for specific Content Type, Document Libraries and Site in SharePoint, so you could configure Capture Server to convert all Invoices to XPS and convert all Purchase Orders to PDF. Capture, though customer plug-ins, can also release documents to virtually any storage mechanism, allowing us to create XPS documents from images for almost any system in the world.

The final product in which we added XPS support to was KnowledgeLake Print. As I talked about last week, Print gives users the ability to print documents directly from SharePoint Search results without needing to open the document. XPS is a supported format for Print, and in fact uses the entire XPS Print Ticket when a user asks to print an XPS document.

For more information about XPS, you can check out the following sites:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Paper_Specification

http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds/

Regards,

Chris

Release Candidate 1 for most of our 2007 product will be released over the next couple days and one of the major products that will be up is the new KnowledgeLake Imaging Server 2007. If you were familiar at all with our 2003 based products you probably know that KnowledgeLake specialized in turning SharePoint into a true imaging system, and if you enjoyed what was available before you're going to love what's in store for this version. In addition to all the great new ECM features of SharePoint (that could be worth a couple posts at least) we have completely redesigned our new Imaging Server.

Search

Our team probably spent more time working on Search than any other single thing we built. For the most part we only used the previous version as a minimum requirement, but didn't reuse any of the code or even stick with the same architecture. For starters we decided we needed to take better advantage of the SharePoint Search engines so we built a provider model that allows us to use MOSS Search, WSS Search or for that matter any third party engine if found one we like better. Since we are based on the new SharePoint Search engines, we can do cross site queries and scale along with SharePoint instead of being reliant on CAML exclusively.

The user interface uses two web parts, one for building queries and the other for executing the queries against providers and to return results. Queries can be built and saved to be used anywhere in SharePoint. Web part pages can be built to specifically execute a saved query or allow parameters to be entered to allow custom searching on pre defined columns.

The builder web part can exist in two different modes as shown by the screen shots, one for building queries and one for simply executing saved queries.

Viewer

Much like the viewer that was released last year, the new viewer actually has a new architecture that will allows us to sell an SDK in the future to allow the thin viewing and annotation capabilities to be sold by themselves. The KnowledgeLake Image Viewer was the first of its kind providing a true thin, zero footprint viewer that does not require Java, ActiveX or Flash. Besides the standard viewing and annotating, the new viewer allows SharePoint columns to be edited, bookmarks to be added to pages on large documents for easy searching. These bookmarks can also be saved as hyperlinks to allows specific pages to be Emailed to others for easy access to document information.

Integration work has also been done into SharePoint and Office Workflow allowing workflows to be worked or started directly from the viewer interface. The idea was to make working with images inside workflows as easy as the Office client applications.

Finally, we added integration into our new networking printing to allow images to be easily printed without having to deal with the limitations of printing from a browser.

Index

Probably the feature that is the most useful, yet hardest to explain is KnowledgeLake Index. The concept is two-fold, first users on ramping documents into SharePoint needed a quick way to add documents without having to think about Sites, Libraries and now Content Types. KnowledgeLake Index simplifies this into one item called a Document Class, so far example when you want to scan an invoice you simply select the Invoice class and the applications know exactly where to put the captured image as well as what index values to ask the user for.

The second purpose was to allow more detailed column definitions within SharePoint. Using Document Classes, columns can have Input Masks, lookup values, validation to external tables and even the ability to auto populate based on information and lookups from other columns.

Print

Also known as network printing, this is a common feature of most legacy imaging systems. It allows printing to be off loaded onto servers (basically spooling) so machines don't have to wait for print jobs to finish. With modern equipment this need dwindled, but with the introduction of the browser as the Image Viewer, printing once again became a burden as browsers aren't very good tools for printing. Print resolves this problem by having a server to the work of retrieving the original image and printing it as it was meant to be.

KnowledgeLake Print also has the ability to print most Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), both the new formats as well as the old. TIFF, XPS and PDF files are also handled in addition to other image formats like JPG and PNG. These file can simply be printed from search results without ever opening a viewing application.

That's probably enough for now. I'll write more about each feature in addition to Export, Import and some upcoming features such as Scan in the near future.

Chris

The product wheel keeps turning here at KnowledgeLake and Monday our new KnowledgeLake Capture Server Beta 1 was released. There are many new features and improvements in this version compared to the previous. Probably the biggest change is this version has been the addition of Web Based Indexing and Batch Import. I'll spend some time in this post to quickly go over some of the major changes, but first a quick overview.

KnowledgeLake Capture Server 2007 is due to be released on February 19^th, two weeks after our other 2007 products. This product started out about three years ago as a simple way to spool released to SharePoint from our Capture product. The need for a more robust application quickly arose and we released the first version of Capture Server last January, which is still the basis of the current platform. The idea of the platform is that batches can enter from almost any point, and then a series of steps can be applied to them according to the Document Class each document in the batch belongs to. The out of the box steps included multipage/single page TIFF conversion, Adobe Capture integration to convert images to full text Image+Text PDF documents, release to SharePoint and some other miscellaneous steps.

Web Indexing

Web Indexing is a new feature for our 2007 product that allows documents to be indexed using a web browser rather than requiring our workstation product, KnowledgeLake Capture. Users get permissions to specific caches from an administrators using Active Directory security and then the user selects the Document Classes from those Caches to index. Web Indexing uses the same platform as our Image Viewer, which will even allow annotations to be placed on images before they are saved to SharePoint.

Administrators have a lot of control over the indexing itself, with the ability to completely modify Document Classes including external database lookups and validations for any field. Developers can create custom indexing Web Controls if more specific customization is required however.

In order to place batches into Web Indexing, manual steps are now allowed in Capture Server. This allows a step to be created and put into the flow of any document classes, which will require manual intervention for it to move on. Just like automated steps, there is a complete API for developing custom manual steps.

Batch Import

Another new feature of KnowledgeLake Capture Server 2007 is the ability to create import jobs. There are two out of the box import plug ins available, one for comma delimited files, and the other for watching network directories. Custom plug-ins can also be written using the extensive API. Using the out of the box plug-ins allows Capture Server to create batches from Fax Server, Multi Function Devices and just about any other interface possible.

The concept behind batch import is to create batches that will be worked by Capture Server. Each job has the ability to associate batches with particular document classes so they will move along the correct capture paths.

Branch Capture Server

Branch Capture Server isn't really part of the KnowledgeLake Capture Server 2007, but a separate product. It's worth mentioning though because it extends Capture Server into branch/remote offices anywhere in the world, without requiring a full license of Capture Server at those sites. Branch Capture Servers job is to simply release batches captured at remote offices to a Capture Server in a timely, friendly basis. It can be configured to only use a specified amount of bandwidth and to only release batches at specific times, which works perfectly for offices on slower connections to the home office.

Capture Server Monitor

The last feature I'm going to talk about is the new Capture Server Monitor. This is an application that allows complete control (not including configuration) over Capture Server via the browser. One of our primary focuses for the 2007 product line was to improve usability and moving the monitor from a desktop to a web application is a major improvement. Included in the new monitor is the ability resubmit and delete batches, execute import jobs, view events logged in the Application Log and monitor Branch Capture Servers. Not available during Beta 1 are also a set of reports that allow managers to see exactly what is going in during the capture process as the Audit Trail also monitors scanning stations.

That's probably enough to talk about for one day. I'll be posting information about all of our 2007 products in the next week or so.

Chris

I got to take a giant breath last night and started thinking about the 60 days ahead. We released our 2007 product line to public beta last night, and I can tell you I am proud and lucky to have the team I do. It's one of the most determined groups of individuals I've ever worked with. If you are a current KnowledgeLake customer with a maintenance contract you should be able to download our two desktop products early next week. Many customers signed up to test the entire line of Beta products and I look forward to seeing them all on Monday for the Beta training.

Our 2007 product line is the biggest single development project KnowledgeLake has ever taken on, as well as myself. I've always known that adding bodies to help code isn't always the answer, but I have to say that the support group around those developers cannot be big enough. I have a few key individuals (MM BP and JD) that really stepped up in non-development roles to help kick this Beta into high gear.

Let me just mention quickly about the products that are part of the Beta Program.

KnowledgeLake Enterprise Imaging Server 2007

We were hoping to invent the longest product name ever, but we just couldn't quite beat Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007, however we got close. The good thing like VSTO, we just call ours EIS for short. Anyway, this is our product that really turns either MOSS or WSS into a true Document Imaging system. It allows user to Scan, Index, Search, View, Print, Export and Import documents into SharePoint Document Libraries, directly from the SharePoint web application. The new features that have been added since our 2003 products are Scan, Index, Print and Export. I'll be blogging more about these individual features in the near future, but my feeling is these additions are going to completely separate us from other ECM vendors.

KnowledgeLake Product/Desktop Capture 2007

We have two versions of our 2007 Capture product. Unlike before where the production and desktop version were based on completely different platforms the 2007 products share a majority of their code. The big difference between the two products is the drivers it supports. Desktop Capture only works with Twain and WIA devices, although either product can be extended to use any scanner driver if you have a way to code against it in .NET. Production Capture also includes a license that connects it to our upcoming Enterprise Capture Services, due to be in Beta in a couple weeks.

KnowledgeLake Connect 2007

A complete overhaul of our original Connect product, the new Connect, while not necessarily loaded with new features, sets us up with a much better platform to grow this product. The single biggest thing we did was share the Indexing code between all products including Connect. This allows administrators to setup validations and lookups on the server side and then just consume them on all of our clients. Other cool new features include the ability to add folders to document libraries directly from the tree view, ability to upload a batch of files, prompts to overwrite files and the ability to release to Enterprise Capture Services.

If you are interested in any of these products, just hit our web site http://www.knowledgelake.com for more information on contacting us, or just keep checking my space and I'll talk about each product in detail over the coming weeks.

Have a great weekend,

Chris