Digital Landfill

We were experimenting with a new tool to actually improve the email distribution of Digital Landfill, and alas, no good deed goes unpunished.  Our apologies for the confusion. We will revert to the old Feedburner distribution until the hiccups can be sorted through. 

Again, my apologies - and thanks for being a Digital Landfill reader.

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Ever read any of our 8 things e-books? They're free.

Excerpt from AIIM's new Capture Software Product Study on Standard Output Image Formats...

As bandwidths were limited when the imaging and document management industry began, the industry adopted 200 dots-per-inch TIFF Group 4 compressed black and white images as their standard (which created a roughly 75K KB image for a standard page of text). A secondary advantage to the TIFF group 4 format was that it is a loss-less compression standard—i.e., no image data is removed during the compression. Each vendor then added some specific headers which made their formats unique. Third-party capture vendors therefore had to create “formatters” or “release scripts” in order to create an image that would seamlessly import into the document management systems.

In the photographic and consumer world, a lossy standard named JPEG became ubiquitous and is used exclusively in mobile phone captured images. The accuracy of OCR and other recognition technologies from a JPEG compressed format depends not only on resolution but also on the amount of loss that was taken when the image was compressed. Usually compression can be as much as 80% without much loss, but this very much dependent on the complexity (busyness) of the images since JPEG encodes areas of similarity in a picture (e.g., the sky).

JPEG2000 seemed to be interesting as it has the ability to be loss-less, but has never become popular. We believe this is partly because the compression time required has often been too great to support high volume imaging.

Since the origins of the industry and adoption of TIFF, PDF has also become a standard. The advantage of PDF is that it contains a standardized header that can allow the image to be decompressed and displayed or managed using standard PDF viewing software which Adobe and others have made available freely.

Underneath the PDF header, many different formats can be carried. These include TIFF Group 4, JPEG,and numbers of other formats including the TIFF Group 3 format used in faxes. It can also contain ASCII text complete with font format information or a mixture of images and text. But all this is transparent to the user. The user just sees the image.

PDF/A is used as an output from batch imaging capture software where conversions to archives are being performed. It is a version of PDF that is used for protecting documents for archiving. It is increasingly important for capture solutions to support it and a requirement in many European countries.

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While I'm on the topic of capture, did you know AIIM has a new Capture Certificate Training program? Now available.

1. Capture technology components and functionality
2. Business benefits of capture solutions
3. Scanner options and configuration
4. Building a business case
5. Indexing strategies and role of database
6. Diagramming business processes

With a multi-thread of conversations and comments, whose task is it to file the official record? It is interesting to see that 12% of our respondents are automatically capturing important emails to a dedicated email management system, and a further 6% are capturing to a document management or ECM system. It goes without saying that the 39% who file important emails in personal Outlook folders are failing to share important knowledge, hampering e-discovery processes, and putting the corporate record at risk.

We also asked how long emails are retained. 27% have no policy, including 25% of the largest organizations. Where a policy does exist, 23% delete after a given number of months, 26% keep indefinitely, and for 51%, it depends on the content of the email.

For a full copy of the AIIM State of the ECM Industry Report, go to http://www.aiim.org/research.

Have you seen ?

Quite simply, THE most comprehensive overview of capture software.  Anywhere. Written by industry pundit and guru Harvey Spencer.

And while I'm on the topic of capture, did you know AIIM has a new Capture Certificate Training program? Now available.

• Capture technology components and functionality
• Business benefits of capture solutions
• Scanner options and configuration
• Building a business case
• Indexing strategies and role of database
• Diagramming business processes

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In an ideal world, managing content in a single ECM system would be the simplest way to provide employees with a single point of access. However, even those organizations committed to the Big ECM concept may well have content repositories in ERP, CRM and HR systems, as well as specific line-of-business applications. Although content can be migrated from these systems to a secure repository, or in some cases can be managed-in-place as records, the first step is to provide visibility to this information from a common information access portal – particularly for those who do not have a client license to access the application.

For a full copy of the AIIM State of the ECM Industry Report, go to http://www.aiim.org/research.

I'm looking for someone who wants to be a marketing rock star...

Background:

AIIM (http://www.aiim.org) is the leading non-profit organization in the content and document management space. AIIM has 40 employees and revenues of $7 million per year.

Last year, we completed a project with Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm) focused on defining the impact of social technologies on the content space and our role in the evolution of social business technologies (see http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory for details). We have launched a second major project in the social content space, headed by Professor Andrew McAfee.

AIIM’s revenue model is currently constructed around the following products: 1) market education (including research); 2) training; 3) membership and networking.

We are in the process of identifying a new senior executive to head up our marketing activities. This person would likely be responsible for a 3-4 person staff. The preference would be to have this person based in the Washington DC area, but it would be possible to have this person located elsewhere with a commitment to spend one week per month in the Silver Spring office (at least initially).

The ideal candidate will have 7-10 years of progressively expanding marketing experience, a rich knowledge of and personal participation in social technologies, and experience in automating and standardizing core marketing and lead generation processes.

Please contact me via email at johnmanciniaiim.org or direct tweet at if interested.

No phone calls, please. Contact with potential candidates will begin in late May.

Strategic Objectives:

Lead efforts to:

1. Standardize and then automate AIIM’s marketing and e-mail marketing processes, from its front-end social presence to its website to its back-end database and lead generation.
2. Establish awareness of AIIM as the premier source to find, control and optimize records, transactional content, and social business systems.
3. Create a corporate marketing function:

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  • Marketing and e-mail marketing automation
  • Social and web strategy
  • Organization positioning, PR, partnerships (event and content)
  • Communities and chapters
  • Prospect and lead generation
  • Member communications