Demos!

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Will Davis

Demos!

It seems like forever since I made the original blog post about doing up some demos for our website and it almost has been.  Finally though, they are up and I’m reasonably happy with them… not ecstatic, just reasonably happy.

So what took so long? I have no idea! It was all fun and games in the beginning, making poses for the camera

obligatory captain morgan pose

Obligatory Captain Morgan pose

 

Of course, not to be outdone, the videographer had to get in on it too (notice the snow in the background?  That’s how long ago it was!).

Videographer doing the Captain Morgan pose

Videographer doing the Captain Morgan pose

 

Then there is the make-up… The hours upon hours it takes to put that on really added to the overall time frame.

 

 

makeup application

Make-up application

 

But these are all really just excuses, really it went down like this:

  • 1 day for the filming
  • 1 day for voice work
  • Months upon months of putting it all together.

We didn’t intend for it to take so long but days turned into weeks which turned into months and well, here we are… finished product.

You can view all the demos here but to go directly to them, the first demo is here without having to sign any forms and the other two here and here which require personal information such as your name, company, social security number, etc…  In a couple months when we release the next set, these will be released without requiring collecting your information or as is my understanding.

Want to see more of Xenos? What would you like to see? We already have the first demos created but more will be created in the future or you can shoot me an email and we can set up a more personalized demo.

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Xenos on LinkedIn

Posted on May 3, 2012 by blogadmin

Our Linked In Group for ECM and Information Management Professionals is growing; albeit slowly! We started this group to reach out to those interested in discussing current ideas in the ECM space and those who have questions, concerns and opinions.

To date, we’ve had some great stuff on hot topics like Hadoop, Big Data and Big Content, ECM Migrations, enterprise architecture and lots more.  Our members are a bit shy thus far but we’re hoping they open up and let their opinions flow…..we know they have huge brainpower and lots to say!

Don’t hesitate to join in and get some conversation flowing….we all might learn something and make some good connections.

Join ECM and Information Management Professionals now!

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Training webinar – File Bursting and Process Flow Design

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Will Davis

If you missed our second training session, no fret, it is now available online for downloading and it is worth a look.  In this training session we took the original AFP to PDF project created in the first session and:

  • Pulled out the account number, name and table data
  • Burst the document based on the account number changing
  • Named the resulting documents based on the information pulled
  • Modified the process flow to loop through the documents and write them to their destination

This is all great and really shows the power of Xenos’ Developer Studio but in the real world, these files aren’t just going to reside on disk, they are going to be loaded into an ECM system.  In the next training session, we will be loading these documents into IBM® FileNet™ P8 using the Xenos ES FileNet™ P8 Loader and also sending a notification email on success.  You can register for the event here.

If you have missed the previous training session on transforming AFP to PDF and want to catch up, it can be downloaded here.

Do you like where these webinars are going, have questions, ideas for future training sessions or just want to contact me for the fun of it? Feel free to email me.

Posted in Demos, EOM, Output Management, training, Uncategorized, What we do | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Importance of Planning

Posted on April 13, 2012 by kgray

 

In the past, Xenos Group’s main focus was enterprise print stream transformation. In fact, Xenos was the original creator of print stream transformation technology, true innovators in every sense of the word. Today we continue to offer the most easily configurable, highest performing, most reliable enterprise-class transformation tool in the world.

Nobody explains the process of transforming a printstream to PDF better than our own Linda McDaniel, EDP.  Linda breaks down the 3 main steps involved:

1.    Determining What You Have

  • The format of the print file will vary depending on the composition system you are using and the brand and model of printer the file was designed for.
  •  There are also levels or variations within the major print formats
  •  To determine what you have, first check the output options settings in your composition system.

2.   Managing the Resources

  •  Print resources are all the other files or objects used by the printer to resolve the document, such as fonts, images, electronic forms or formatting files.
  • Transforms need to have access to these resources to get the best results.
  • AFP resources are normally stored in mainframe resource libraries, and sent to the printer with the print file.

3.   Adding Value to the Output

  • When converting a print file to PDF we can add things such as bookmarks, URL links, coloured fonts etc., that were not in the printed document, to make the document more useful and appealing to the end user.
  • We might also add or delete text from the PDF for legal reasons.
  • If the documents are going to be loaded into an archive or ECM system, we can break the print file into separate print or PDF files

Consider all your options when planning a print file transformation. The more you know about your input data, and the resources it uses, the better off you will be. When configuring the transformation, using a set of sample data that accurately represents all the variations in your input data will help prevent issues from arising when you move to production. Think about what how the final PDF files will be used, and what might need to be added or deleted to make the PDF appropriate and valuable for the user. Just because the print file is black-and-white doesn’t mean the PDF has to be.

Read more about Planning a Printstream Transformation

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EOM for the more technically inclined – part 1

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Will Davis

Enterprise Output Management, whether you call EOM or Customer Communications Management (CCM) or Document Process Management… It all means more or less the same thing.  The problem with having so many acronyms and having so many different people talking about it is that the waters get a little muddied and there is confusion around what all it entails.  I hope with this series of blog posts, I can strike up a dialogue to discuss what is really meant by EOM (or CCM or DCM or lalalala) so we all have a better understanding of what we are doing.

For a really, really high level overview of EOM, check out my previous blog post but to dig a little deeper let’s talk about ingestion of documents or files.

The entire ingestion process can be broken down into three main areas:

  • Capture
  • Staging
  • Release

 

Capture

Capture refers to the overall process of creating the electronic files which eventually get stored or immediately printed for distribution.  These files come from a number of sources including your backend systems or even your customers and clients.

The files which are created from your backend processes are usually created using a process referred to as document composition and can result in files in a number of formats such as AFP, PostScript, Metacode, PDF, Line data, etc…

The files you receive from your customers can come in the form of email, printed media or just files uploaded via a method such as ftp.  These formats can come in a much larger array of formats such as images, office documents and of course the original files already mentioned with document composition.

Once these files are created or received, a process needs to occur to set them up for storage or distribution.

 

Staging

In the industry, I have seen this called transformation, I’ve seen it called homogenization but I usually like to refer to it as staging.  Staging refers to the processing which needs to occur in order for these files to be stored.  This is typically broken down into three main categories:

  • Validation – validating the files received to ensure they are in the format as expected and the data is as it should be.
  • Transformation – transformation of the files to a common format for storage and indexing or pulling the metadata for usage further down the line.
  • Packaging – Breaking down the file, merging multiple files but essentially ensuring the files are in the format to which they are going to be stored.

Once these categories are complete, the files received should be ready for releasing to the final process within ingestion.

 

Release

Flying airplanesOnce the files are received and processing has occurred on them, you will want them to be stored or distributed.  The most common things that happen at this stage are:

  • Sending to a workflow system such as IBM’s FileNet P8 for further approvals and storage
  • Sending to an ECM system such as IBM OnDemand, Oracle UCM or Documentum
  • Distributing to your customers or clients by sending the files off to a printer, FTPing them somewhere, Email, etc…

 

 

 

 

And that’s it! Well, from a high-level on the ingestion anyways.  In my next blog post within the series, I will give a high-level overview of what happens after these files are stored and future blog posts will go further into the details of what each of these steps entail.

I may have missed something or you may be interested in how Xenos helps with EOM.  Let us know in the comments below or feel free to send me an email so we can discuss further.

Cheers,
Will

Posted in ADF, Customer Communications Management, ECM, EOM, Output Management | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

AFP to PDF Training Webinar

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Will Davis

A couple weeks ago, we kicked off Technical Thursdays where, on the first Thursday of the month, we give a quick 45-minute training session on different areas of Xenos Enterprise Server.   The first webinar was more of a get to know Developer Studio (the design environment for Enterprise Server) and we also covered a simple transformation from AFP to PDF while automating the transformation in a process flow.  If you missed it, you can view the webinar here.

In the last training session, the AFP we were working with actually contained multiple statements within the one input file. In the next webinar we will be taking the project from the first training session, pulling some information from it and breaking it up into logical documents based on that information.  We will then modify the process flow so those individual documents are handled appropriately.

Sound like the most awesome thing you will see on the first Thursday of April?  Register here!

Do you like where these webinars are going, have questions, ideas for future training sessions or just want to contact me for the fun of it? Feel free to email me.

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Evolution of EOM Webinar – Social Media in EOM

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Will Davis

A couple weeks ago we started posting some questions from the Evolution of EOM Webinarwith Jeff Williams.  To continue this, here are some questions and answers with regards to social media in EOM.

Q – Social media is like a fountain of opinions and remarks.  How can you distill this automatically to be included on the statements you mentioned?

Jeff Williams – That is a very good question and a very difficult one to answer. Now we’re more getting into the BI space.  So, there are offerings on the market.  I know I talked a lot about reducing the vendors, reducing the vendors – there are vendors out there to pull in content from social media outlets and analyze it. Find out what is relevant, what isn’t relevant, what is statistically relevant for a particular person who you are trying to create a statement for.  I think that is an area that is going to grow.  I don’t think we have that in place in the market today so keep an eye out for it, I see it being valuable.  But you are right, it is like a sea of different opinions, different pieces of information and you need a very big net and a very fine filter to be able to actually pull out the pieces that will be relevant to your end consumer.

Q – Social media follow up – isn’t this a separate external PR activity/group that should make reports?

Jeff Williams – I could see that definitely being a case.  If you do have a separate group within the organization that is using software to, for example, filter what type of information is being disseminated on Twitter about your company and then reporting on that.  The addition though is once that is being pulled in you have a process and you have control over that information  that’s been reported on and you can use that as approved information within the output management space and within the presentment of relevant information to end consumers across the various channels. So I could definitely see that being a valuable addition to output management and having that be sort of on the side as a separate feed of information to the output management process.

 

Did you watch the webinar and have additional questions?  Did you not watch the webinar and have questions anyways? Let us know in the comments or via email.

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Evolution of EOM Webinar – Re-Engineering Within Transformation

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Will Davis

A couple weeks ago we started posting some questions from the Evolution of EOM Webinar with Jeff Williams.  To continue this, here is another great question which was brought up.

Q – Can you expand on what re-engineering within transformation is all about?

A – Re-engineering of a document can take on various flavours. In some of our examples in the automated document factory case, taking insurance documents from underwriters that are in their own formats, getting those documents to the parent company, and having the parent company take that document apart, move the address blocks so they will show up in the little clear cellophane window,  changing the logo, changing some of the text so that they represent the actual insurance company, organizing the print streams in a way that they can be output to printers in a postal optimized way to reduce costs.  That is one example of re-engineering.

Another example of re-engineering is taking an existing statement, looking for the white space real estate, and what I mean by that is the parts of the statement that don’t have any content on them and making decisions about what kind of offers to put there to best suit the customers.

That is really what the re-engineering portion was.  There are other examples, really the sky’s the limit. And on the re-purposing side, just extracting and mining all the content from within a statement because a lot of work went into creating that statement, a lot of calculations were done and a lot of the data on a statement does not reside anywhere else in any other system so leveraging that for additional downstream applications.

 

Did you watch the webinar and have additional questions?  Did you not watch the webinar and have questions anyways? Let us know in the comments or via email.

Posted in ADF, ECM, EOM, Output Management, Uncategorized, What we do | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tech Thursdays

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Will Davis

If you are a member of our mailing list or follow us on Twitter, you may have heard that we are starting a monthly training session hosted by yours truly called “Tech Thursdays”.  Since marketing believes that inundating you with emails and twitter messages isn’t enough, I have been asked to advertise this session on the blog as well.

During these “Tech Thursdays” we will be taking small use cases and showing how they can be solved using Xenos Enterprise Server.   The first training session will show you how you can automate a simple AFP to PDF transformation.  This training will include:

  • Setting up an AFP to PDF transformation project
  • Creating a process flow
  • Calling the transformation from the process flow
  • Writing out the results of the transformation to disk
  • Automating this process flow so it gets kicked off when a file is received on the file system

This training webinar, while basic, will provide a baseline for future training webinars and will take approximately 30 minutes plus any questions.  If you attend this super-awesome webinar, strangers will raise you to their shoulders and the heavens will shower you with riches beyond your wildest dreams, or in the worst case, you will learn a little more about what we do and the technology we do it with.

So… if you haven’t already registered, please do so here.

See you there!

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Evolution of EOM Webinar – What distinguishes EOM from reporting activities or systems?

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Will Davis

 

A while ago, our director of product management, Jeff Williams, did a webinar on the Evolution of Enterprise Output Management.  It’s a fairly long one and quite a few great questions came out of it from the audience at the end.  Since I always find it difficult to sit through long webinars and I’m sure a lot of you do too, I will share a couple of the questions that came up with you over a few posts.

Q –According to your experience, what distinguishes EOM from reporting activities or systems?

Jeff Williams – EOM, in my experience, encompasses the end to end process so if you are talking about reporting systems, that is on the front end either creating content from data sources or data warehouses and presenting that in a way either as a PDF or on a website.  Those can be expanded to perform other activities however, when I look at EOM I see it being the end to end – everything to do with the life cycle of the outputted content. So, from the creation including all of the rules that go into document composition, the auditing process of that to that being passed on to a workflow or process flow so that it can be audited throughout the entire lifecycle.  It includes, in our definition, the retention of that statement or content that was created, being able to audit how many times it was accessed and by whom.  I see reporting being a portion of EOM but I see it being encompassed within it.

Q – So Controlled and Repeatable Processes is the conclusion?

Jeff Williams – To get to the very bottom of it – yes – it’s all about managing the process from creation to presentment and ultimately to destruction.  You want to make sure you have a vendor or a system in place that is going to ensure that document is where it’s meant to be, when it’s meant to be, that you are able to apply eDiscovery, you are able to audit and say that, yes, my process is flawless and all the content is where it needs to be.

 

Did you watch the webinar and have additional questions?  Did you not watch the webinar and have questions anyways? Let us know in the comments or via email.

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