5 Reasons to Outsource Document Capture

I found interesting article of Priscilla Emery, "Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture" in documents for day 4 of our course. These points include:

1. Focus on your organization’s core business
   processes.
2. Improve customer service and reduce transition costs
3. Faster and more secure implementation of compliance and discovery initiatives
4. Providing near-term cost savings while avoiding technological obsolescence
   
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery

Because managing documents is a huge effort, it reduces effectiveness and takes lot of precious time from employees. It is recommended to outsource document capture to company who uses proper technology not only to store documents, but also to capture information stored on them and use it to improve business transaction processes.
Storing documents in electronic form improves also security and compliance. Record managers not only want documents to be stored on paper, or on microfilm tapes, but also in electronic form to be accessible online. This should go also with proper backup solution to improve security.
Outsourcing document storage helps in reducing costs also. IT departments usually require high costs. Outsourcing document storage reduces costs of maintaining hardware and software maintenance, while providing near-term return of investment.
It is also helpful when company faces natural disaster. Documents accessible online and having paper-based documents stored on removable media moved to another secure location may bring company back to it's operative state within couple of days.

Open Source in the Application Server Market

Use of open source in the application server market is strong and users can consider the best of the open source application servers as viable alternatives to the leading closed-source offerings for most mainstream projects. Users are often compelled to acquire AS technology that significantly exceeds their functional requirements just because the leading vendors only offer "fully loaded" product options. Users are also pressured to pay more as their applications increase in transaction volume and require additional CPU licenses. The open-source alternative can address both of these challenges:
• Most open-source AS products use a micro-kernel-style internal architecture (also known as "SOA inside"), enabling users to deploy only the required subset of the AS product.
• The costs of an open-source offerings are structured as a support subscription and typically are not linearly dependent on the number of CPUs used.

Most users deploy their open-source AS along with the already established closed-source alternatives, taking advantage of the standards-based compatibility and allowing incremental savings and a gradual transition to open source. Application ISVs are frequent users of the opensource AS as the default foundation for their applications: it reduces their costs and the costs for their customers, while delivering required qualities of service to most packaged application scenarios. Users that never considered an open-source AS may still be using it just because it came inside of a purchased application. Significantly today, and even more in the future, most business software users are and will be affected by the changes in open-source AS technologies and business practices.

Enterprise Networking Infrastructure

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=682607&ref=g_sitelink

Networking application software are being integrated with hardware and new services are being delivered "out of the box." Understanding the expected transitions can help companies prepare for the future. Enterprise networking infrastructure forms the "nervous system" of enterprise IT by providing the basic transport on which enterprises deploy IT and business applications. newer applications and devices connected on the network demand an upgrade of the established networking infrastructure. It is important to choose a right balance between technically superior products and integrating related technologies. Enterprises must understand their current technological environment and decide whether these products and technologies will meet their future needs. Understanding how various networking components can be interdependent is an essential prerequisite to performing this analysis.

Key Issues for Linux Servers

According to the author of the article next steps in the maturation process for Linux servers will focus on virtualization, interoperability, vendor support and competitive responses from Unix vendors such as Sun Microsystems. Although the Linux operating system (OS) kernel has stabilized, many questions and concerns still must be resolved. Here are Key Issues and topical areas that Gartner plans to address in 2008 and discusses all of them:
How will virtualization affect the Linux market?
How will the OS market and the distribution business evolve? What market disruptions and risks will users face?
What are the hidden costs of deployment?
How will Linux impact Microsoft and Unix vendors?
How will Linux evolve as a role in the data center?

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=645217&ref=g_sitelink

Best Practices for Understanding and Negotiating Outsourcing Contract Risks

This article discusses best practices for handing elements of risk in outsourcing contracts.

Outsourcing contracts have six major risk areas that come out as financial aspects of the deal that must be negotiated and appropriately documented in the contract: termination and disentanglement; benchmarking; performance-based metrics; penalties and incentives; allocation of resources; and innovation. There are some recommendations what to do before negotiations:

* Build a strategy for each risk element
* Know what you truly need and what you are willing to negotiate;
* Understand the risks that both sides face in the deal.
* Insist on specifics in the outsourcing contract;
* Don’t forget about technology .Gartner has found that once the negotiators get to the bargaining table, they usually spend about 75% of their time negotiating risk elements of the deal, not the technical details, and they often are unprepared.


The article also gives six “best practices” - describes them and gives “tips for success” in that area.


http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=672211&ref=g_sitelink

Some blog comments

I think I read all the blog comments, it took awhile. Some of you are very funny. I can get Polish translated. :^)

A couple comments...

1) I understand your comments about not getting access to resources such as Books 24x7 until it was late in your program. That is unfortunate. But, I can put it in perspective a bit.

First, I probably showed you the best of the best, in terms of Gartner and Books 24x7. The other resources are not as rich, and probably harder to find. All the resources for computer science students are listed on the DePaul library page we visited (where the links to Gartner and Books 24x7 are on top). I think there is a link to some IEEE papers there that may be of interest to some of you.

You probably will want to check the other subject areas on the left menu, and also other Subject Guides, such as Business. See http://www.lib.depaul.edu/eresource/subject_search.asp . The databases ABI/Informs and Business Source Elite are pretty good.

Second, you have access until shortly after you graduate, so for some of you this will be quite awhile. I have found there are too many resources, to a point where it becomes overwhelming. You end up spending more time searching than learning.

Depending on what you want, I think the vendor white paper approach is your best bet. Download the magic quadrant (there's usually a pdf), you get the industry competitors. Then, search their site for more information.

2) You probably know by now, blogging is as much an art as a science. You have to practice to get good at it. Some blog entries can be long, nothing wrong with that, if you are being comprehensive. But, sometimes it's easier to just be descriptive and point to a resource. For example, the Krugle comment about searching code worked pretty well. (You can search for it at the top of the page.)

A blog for 29 students is probably too big in scope. It is probably easier to narrow the focus to a few people with similar interests, that way you know what you are getting. Again, you need to practice.

Trust me, the payoff is worth it over time. It's too hard to find good resources, and you'll forget what you have within a month or so. If you make a blog record of worthwhile resources, you always know they are there. Over time, it saves a lot of time wasted searching.

3) I was able to crunch the numbers and record total number of posts for each of you. Your grade will be based on that, to a degree, but especially the quality of your posts. Some of you wrote very nice answers to the CMS questions, for example, so that counts substantially.

I will eventually post a final letter grade for you to COLWeb, with comments as necessary. It should take another few days.

ASUS DRW-20B1L/B1LT internal DVD rewriter with LightScribe direct disc labeling technology.

The ASUS DRW-20B1L/B1LT comes equipped with the Optimal Tuning Strategy (OTS) for improved disc burning and better overall write quality. With OTS, the drive will perform a test burning before actually burning the disc - intelligently calculating the best burning strategy based on operating temperatures and media and drive variations. This provides the users with optimal write speeds for the new disc. After the disc is burnt, OTS memorizes the particular type of disc, and utilizes the same burning strategy when the same type of disc is used. This not only reduces the possibility to burn unplayable discs, it also provides high quality backups and improves compatibility so that the disc can more easily be read by other drives; as well as extending the lifetime of the drive.

Another innovation of the DRW-20B1L/B1LT is the E-Green Engine technology. This feature provides an E-Green Mode which activates when the drives are idle for 2.5 minutes. Once activated, drive applications are closed when not in use to help conserve energy. According to Asus' calculations: on average, the PATA and SATA versions of the drive will provide 75% and 27% power savings respectively over competing solutions.

Besides boasting fast speeds, the LightScribe technology is also able to provide users with customized disc labeling.