IE9 RC

Microsoft has just released IE9 Release Candidate.  There is a lot of things I like about this version, but most of all I like how simple the new UI is.  Thanks to Chrome for starting this trench.

Here’s ILINX Content Store running inside IE9 with all default settings

And here is ILINX Capture

As for browsing and internal web apps, everything appears to be working and working fast.

ILINX Capture 4 Web Client Enhancements

Welcome to 2010!  Hope you all had a great holiday

Below are two of my most favorite features in ILINX Capture 4 web client.

Detachable Viewer

ILINX Capture 4 now supports detachable viewer – enabling the indexing panel to be on one screen and the image on another screen.

Personalization

ILINX Capture 4 enables more configuration settings on the web client.  Both scanning options and confirmation prompts are now configurable

There also a tons of other improvements under the cover both on the client and server, but I find myself using these two features above the most.

Hope this helps.

  

Browser Size

When developing a new web page or web-based application, one of the very first things you need to do is to figure out who your audience is. Are the people who will be looking at this web page super-advanced users with the latest plug-ins installed on their machines, or will they be people with older software.
This is obvious when using technology like .NET — what version will be installed in their system (2.0? 3.5?), or JavaScript (will they have JavaScript enabled in their browser?)
These questions become second nature to you.
However, other questions are not so obvious at first. Like, screen size. Do you remember when 640×480 was the gold standard in screen resolution? Then came 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, etc.
According to Google Labs, 40% of users would not be able to see all of your web page if you create it at 800×600. This is because people seldom have their browser windows maximized to take up the whole screen.
It turns out that among the many things which Google tracks is the amount of screen real estate available when people hit their search engine site. They’ve applied this data to a simple overlay which can show you how much of your web page or site is visible to which percentage of web users.
One observation is that the universe of Google users may be different from the universe of users for your software, but at least it’s a start.
The thing which was news to me (but obvious once I thought about it) was that users will have the browser much wider than tall.
The page itself presents an interesting challenge in web design. It appears to put a semi-opaque image over the specified web page. It leaves a small square around the cursor to allow you to click on the page underneath the overlay. JavaScript updates to the page cause the image to flash as it reloads. And, if your design layout is centered (as many are), you will get misleading info.
After checking out our ILINX Capture site, I was pleased to see that 99% of users could see the main marketing points:

• ILINX Capture Logo
• ILINX Capture Tag Line (Capture Information. Any Place, Any Time)
• Main Links (Home, Product Overview, Demo)

without having to scroll.

Try it out yourself.

  

ECM Best Practices: Unit Testing and NUnit

Everyone agrees that testing is a good thing. Not everyone agrees on how much testing is cost-effective and what exactly the kind of testing is right for a specific piece of software or product. But automated unit tests cam help you ensure your software is healthy.

Unit tests operate on the smallest possible section of code, on logical modules. In software design, a program of any decent size will be broken down into modules. These modules have inputs, outputs and behaviors. These inputs and outputs and behaviors are used by other parts of the program to perform work and can be monitored or tested by the test software.

Often, a software module is deeply bound up inside the containing framework and it is not obvious how to test a subset of the code in isolation. (Testing multiple modules together is referred to as “integration testing” and will be discussed in a later post). Fortunately, there are software constructs available to mimic or “mock up” objects which the module under test needs.

A case in point is a product we are revising called ILINX Release Script 9.0. The ILINX Release Script is a module which is run mainly inside the process space of Kofax’s Ascent Capture product. There are a number of complex environmental elements which supply runtime context for the various ILINX components.

Because we are developing in C#, and are using the NUnit testing tool, we are able to make use of the NUnit’s Mock objects to help in mocking up objects to test against.

By stubbing out the functionality of the execution context, we are able to exercise specific portions (or units) of code with very specific and controlled data and confirm the software’s behavior and output. If you are using .NET, I encourage you to look into NUnit (http://www.nunit.org/index.php) it’s ability to generate Mock objects.

  

ECM Best Practices: Document Capture & Metadata

Document Capture is the on-ramp to ECM.  Without documents and the ability to import them into a system, ECM is meaningless.   Document Capture can be done in a variety of ways; scanning, faxing, emailing, API integration, etc.  However you stuff your documents into your ECM system, their is one major obstacle to making those documents useful, metadata.  All ECM system’s use metadata, even file systems .  A good metadata model is perhaps the most important component to ensure the success of an ECM implementation.

Some metadata is obvious, like author/creator, date created, and the primary identifier (think primary key for those of you RDBMS folks).  All of the systems that I have worked with have these metadata fields, whether they expose them to the user or not.  This leaves the ECM architect to determine what other metadata fields to associate with the documents the ECM system manages.  I have come up with four guidelines, when it comes to creating metadata fields.

1. What fields would be useful to help users find content.  This guideline seems obvious.  But how you go about answering this question may not be.  The first place to start, is your end users.  Ask them how they currently find documents.  When they look at documents, what information in the document is most important to them.  It is also helpful to look at the documents themselves to find helpful metadata fields.  If you have an AP document, chances are it has a date specifying when a bill was paid.  This may also be good candidate for a metadata field.
2. What information needs to be stored with the document, but is not a part of the document itself.   Often times a user may want to make a comment about a document.  Or a document has a revision number that needs to be captured.  This information is important, but will most likely not be in the document itself.
3. What are your metadata dependencies. While you are architecting your metadata model, look for metadata dependencies.  For instance, say you have the metadata fields Business Unit and Document Type.  The Accounting Business Unit will have documents of Document Type Invoice.  You don’t want users in the Business Unit Professional Services having access to search Invoices.  If your ECM system supports this functionality, you will want to group specific Documents Types with Business Units.
4. Keep the number of required, user entered metadata fields to 5 or less.  If your users are required to enter values for more than 5 metadata fields, you run the risk of data corruption.  Entring metadata into a checkin form is not fun, and users can get bored of it fast.   Use automated methods to catch as many fields as you can.

If you are considering creating a metadata schema for an ECM system, this list should give you a good head-start.  You should also consider how the particular ECM system you are using handles metadata.

If you are intered in learning more about Document Capture best practices, I suggest you check out ImageSource’s upcoming Nexus Conference.

Tyson Magney
Senior Developer
ImageSource, Inc.