Hi there, Tim the sales guy here again. We’re making it so easy for organizations to capture and store documents that frankly, you’d have to be crazy to keep dealing with paper. It’s so yesterday.

What’s happening today is that we’ve been working with CAPSYS® on an integration that lets an organization capture documents in one place and automatically send them for indexing and storage in another place without any additional infrastructure, programming or scripting. And guess where these documents go? Yep, right into KnowledgeTree.

CAPSYS CAPTURE™ is a web-based, SaaS application with just a thin client that is easy to install.

So, say I’m in a remote office, just me, my scanner and a million receipts because I’m always procrastinating on my expense reports. The old way, I’d scan pages and pages of receipts and then have to upload each file from my PC into KnowledgeTree. I could probably use Hot Folders or Bulk Upload, but I’m not real clever that way, so it is a manual process for me.

Now, instead of integrating with my desktop scanning software, my scanner integrates with the CAPSYS CAPTURE client on my desktop. When I scan all that stuff in, it’s going up into the cloud into the CAPSYS CAPTURE Server for processing. And because CAPSYS CAPTURE has an easy graphical process flow feature, I was able to tell it to send my documents into KnowledgeTree without needing to know how to write a program or script.

And this is just a fraction of what CAPSYS CAPTURE can do. It also does all sorts of processing for bar codes, OCR and handwriting recognition. It will also capture faxes and emails for input right into KnowledgeTree.

So, if you’re like me and want a fast and easy way to get documents into KnowledgeTree, then you need to look into CAPSYS. Have a look here for more information. http://j.mp/kt-capsys

It's always great to see new and exciting projects being actively developed by the KnowledgeTree community. This month, we'll be featuring the KTGPLClient by Jeremy Smith.

Briefly, could you describe this project and what it entails?
The KTGNUClient project is a desktop scanning tool for Windows that is designed to allow scanning of multi-page documents, which can be used to upload documents to KnowledgeTree from within a single application.

What inspired you to create this project?
I found that using the built in Microsoft "Scanner and Camera Wizard" tool for multi-page documents was tedious and painful.

What business problems were you looking at solving specifically with this project?
I was hoping to solve critical business issues of saving valuable time and maintaining consistent document formats in the repository.

What other KnowledgeTree projects have you been involved with?
None, this is the first project that I have developed for KnowledgeTree.

What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement with KnowledgeTree?
KnowledgeTree has help me to increase our data access, data organization and enhance my activity communications.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?
If any community edition users have a need, there's a very good chance that other community members do too! Everyone should try and solve their business problems and share these solutions with others. Whether its sharing tips/hints/guides, participating on the forums or developing tools/plugins.

With KnowledgeTree 4.0 on the road-map, which KnowledgeTree feature would you most like to see included in the next major release?   [Read more]

Hi there, Tim the sales guy here again. This week, my marketing people want me to talk about the new integration between SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree that was developed by our French partner, iNet Process. It’s called iNetDocs, and it’s very cool.

As a sales guy, this is pretty exciting stuff for me! Basically, it means that a sales person — or account manager, or anyone who depends on a CRM for most of their daily work — can access all the documents they need without ever leaving the CRM work space.

So, say I’m a sales guy (did I mention I’m in sales?). I get a lead assigned to me in SugarCRM and want to send out a data sheet. In the old days, before iNetDocs, I would have to go searching on my hard drive, or a shared network drive for a data sheet that I hope would be the latest version to send to my lead. I’d spend 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure out whether I had the right document.

With iNetDocs, I simply switch to the tab within SugarCRM that acts as a window into the KnowledgeTree repository. I navigate to the marketing folder and find the data sheet I need. I know it’s the latest version, because we keep all our current collateral in the DMS. Then, I attach the document from KnowledgeTree directly to the email that I’m sending to my prospect from within SugarCRM. The whole operation takes less than 2 minutes and I move on to the next activity that will boost my commission.

This is a great opportunity for everyone involved:
• I get to sell KnowledgeTree to SugarCRM users who want this functionality.
• SugarCRM gets to sell their application to KnowledgeTree users who need a CRM.
• And iNet Process gets to sell the integration and support.
• Finally, anyone who’s currently using SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree gets an affordable way to make them work seamlessly together.   [Read more]

When we sat down to architect our next generation KnowledgeTree Explorer, we agreed on several design and business principles that we regarded as must-have, fundamental cornerstones of our new product: cross-platform availability, component re-use, maintainability, Rich Internet Application (RIA), thin client architecture.

A sneak preview of our new KnowledgeTree Explorer (running on a Mac no less):

Platform independency
We realized very early that “desktop” is no longer synonymous with “Windows”, and saw from our diverse customer base that users require client (desktop) applications that run on Linux and Mac as well as on Windows. The most obvious choice of technology to deliver a truly cross-(OS) platform desktop application was Adobe AIR (http://www.adobe.com/products/air) since AIR applications run on any platform and operating system that support the AIR runtime (which includes Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows).

AIR implements WebKit (http://webkit.org), an open source web browser engine, which allows desktop applications to run in a scaled-down browser on the desktop. And since this browser is platform-independent, KnowledgeTree Explorer can run on any OS that supports the browser.

Rich Internet Application (RIA)   [Read more]

We're proud to announce the availability of commercial editions of KnowledgeTree 3.7. This release comes jam packed with new features, enhancements and support for new operating systems:

• Deployment on Zend Server
• Thumbnail and Instant View Functionality
• Cross Platform Repository Explorer
• Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, IIS 6 and 7 Support
• Native RPM and DEB packages
• New web-based Setup Wizard
• New Date, Large Text and Multi-select field types
• CMIS 0.61 Interface
• OpenSearch Interface
• Indexing of Microsoft Outlook Emails

Visit the KnowledgeTree What's New page for details.

If you're interested in trying out KnowledgeTree 3.7, download an evaluation of the software or sign up for an online demo.

KnowledgeTree Community Edition 3.7 is now also available for download.

Follow me on twitter: @danielchalef

Do you have a large number of files or folders stored in a single KnowledgeTree folder? If you want to quickly browse through these folders or files without paging through all of them, download a Firefox plugin called FastestFox. The plugin enables you to browse documents and folders even faster by stitching all the pages together to create a single web page. See below for a screenshot of the plugin.

It always feels good to pass a test – even one that you don’t know you’re taking. I don’t ever recall thanking someone for giving me a test, but I will thank Matt Aslett at the 451 Group for giving KnowledgeTree passing marks on his Open Core Transparency Test.

Since we agree with Matt (and others) that transparency is a vital component of the open core model, it’s important to us that we’re viewed as upholding that standard. We appreciate being recognized for our efforts! Thanks, Matt.

KnowledgeTree is pleased to announce the release of KnowledgeTree 3.7 Community Edition (Release Candidate).

New features and enhancements in the Community Edition include:

• Deployment on Zend Server for enhanced performance
• Document thumbnail preview functionality
• Support for Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, along with IIS 6 and 7
• RPM and DEB packages for Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux
• Additions to the types of document properties provided out of the box
• Support for open standards, including CMIS and OpenSearch
• Setup Wizards that assist you during all phases of installing, configuring and upgrading KnowledgeTree
• Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese translations

For more information on the release, please view the release notes.

Download KnowledgeTree version 3.7 Community Edition now!

Kudos go to our friends at Zoho for standing up to Microsoft with style, humor and chutzpah! Responding to a comment from Microsoft that Zoho and other cloud-based office productivity applications offered “fake Office capabilities,” Zoho seized the gorilla by the…um…horns, and quickly launched www.fakeoffice.org.

This decisive marketing coup was accompanied by a well-produced video and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the additional mileage that Zoho gets from Microsoft’s latest gaff.

It’s also amusing to think about Microsoft’s own “fake” efforts. How about the fake iPod (Zune) and the fake PlayStation (Xbox)? Now, of course, there is the fake search engine. One could also argue that Excel was the fake Lotus 123 in it’s day, and Word was the fake Wordperfect. And dare we say that Internet Explorer was also the fake Netscape? We could play this game for a long time given that the basic premise for office productivity tools has been around for a long time and there have been generations of them by now (anyone remember Harvard Graphics?!)

I hope that some similarly creative folks out there will make the most of this opportunity. Although Microsoft is incredibly easy to ridicule, it’s certainly more fun when they set themselves up for it so adroitly. Do let me know if you’ve managed to join in the fun!

P.S. KnowledgeTree's Software as a Service offering, KnowledgeTreeLive, integrates very nicely with Zoho Office, providing customers with web-based editing of documents in the KnowledgeTree repository.

Follow me on twitter: @danielchalef

The recent and highly publicized failure of T-Mobile’s Sidekick (hosted in the Microsoft/Danger cloud) has again called into question the safety, security and reliability of cloud computing.

According to Jon Stokes on ars Technica, “This outage and subsequent data loss is just the latest, and probably the most dramatic, black eye yet for "cloud computing," since users falsely assumed that if data was "in the cloud" then it was stored with enough redundancy and fault tolerance to render such a massive data loss impossible.”

Look closely at that statement – “users falsely assumed” that their data was safe in the cloud – and evidently, Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger did as well. I would argue that this is not as much a black eye for cloud computing as it is for those companies that take cloud-based storage for granted without additional backup and disaster recovery plans.

No backup system is 100% reliable; that’s why IT departments often implement multiple strategies, such as magnetic tape, redundant servers, etc.

We rightfully get asked by customers all the time about the safety and security of their data in KnowledgeTreeLive, our cloud-based (Amazon EC2) document management system.

Well, not only do we rely on the massive redundancy of the Amazon cloud, but we also have gone to great lengths to ensure that documents and data stored in the cloud can be recovered in the event of a system failure. For KnowledgeTreeLive customers, we take daily snapshots of working data and keep a rolling 7 days worth of these snapshots. We also keep a rolling weekly snapshot for a minimum of 4 weeks. This ensures customers have a 4-week history of backups.   [Read more]