KnowledgeLake Capture - Best of Tech Ed

Everyone now and then something happens that really makes you look back and realize you've accomlplished something that will bring pleasure for years.  Last week at Tech Ed, KnowledgeLake Capture won the Best of Tech Ed in the Office System category.  Rather than rattle on what this award is, here's an except from the Windows IT Pro site:

"Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine and MSD2D (and soon to be Office & SharePoint Pro.com) announce the call for entries for the Best of Tech•Ed 2007 Awards. The awards recognize companies who offer innovative products that involve the following categories (Architecture Business Applications, Business Intelligence, Connected Systems, Database Development and Administration, Management and Operations, Windows Server Infrastructure, Developer Tools and Technologies, Web Development and Infrastructure, Mobility, Office System, Security, Unified Communications and Windows Clients). Products and services will be evaluated on the basis of: strategic importance to the market, competitive advantages and value to customer."

There are not enough thanks to go around to everyone who helped us win this award, but I hope all the people on the Capture team read this and understand the joy it brought to me last Thursday.  I was walking around with this big grin on my face and the only thing I was bummed out about was that all the KnowledgeLake employees weren't there to enjoy it with me.  I did hear mention of a fun party at our normal happy hour establishment, Growler's, which I missed because I was too busy wondering around Olando on cloud nine.

You can read more about my previous posts on this product at http://chrislcap.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dKnowledgeLake.

The "official" web site for KnowledgeLake Capture is here.  You can register for a free 30 day trial from this location also.

Have a great week,

Chris

Before I talk about Tuesday, I should finish up Monday since I blogged before the Mashup Event.  I blogged early as I figured I'd stick it out until 2am, but being on Central Time, that's 4am, and I just couldn't make it, especially considering the mix of Corona and sugar was putting me in a coma.  Anyway it was very cool as they had some comedians there making light of everyone's ideas.  The idea behind the night was to come up with mashups and build a quick solution, and the winner got an XBox.

So on to Tuesday, I made it up bright and early for the 8:30 session (10:30 my time <smile/>) on a session on Silverlight and .NET.  The first 15 minutes was good as they dug into the technical information, but after that it was pure coding and I can't really sit through sessions like that, so I bolted and headed to the Sandbox for yet another copy of Vista Ultimate and Expression (cool).  The couple neat thing I learned about the .NET install for Silverlight is that it's only 4MB, the apps still run in the sandbox with no way out, and you don't get any annyoing elevation prompts.  By the way you can start playing with this today, and if you do you should downolad:

• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha
• Visual Studio "Oraca" Beta 1
• Silverlight Tools Alpha for "Orcas" Beta 1
• Expression Blend 2 May Preview
• ASP.NET Futures (don't know exactly what they meant by this)

Afterwards I headed to a session on the future of design to mix (funny eh) things up a little.  Never quite understanding how designer think, I learned some really cool things about user experience in this session, but in the end it's simple.  Hit the value proposition, save the user clicks, save the user time, but ignore all of these if it takes something else to create a positive emotional experience.

Next thing on my plate was the Office Live session.  I had seen the demos before, but went mainly to get a chance to talk to the presenters, as we are actively doing some R&D work around Office Live.  If you don't know anything about Office Live, be sure and go sign up for a free account at http://officelive.microsoft.com and start playing.  In a nutshell it is subscription based access to SharePoint, Email, Calendar and anything else collaborative.  There is a complete API that allows you to build your own applications on top of it, plus the ability to use most of the normal SharePoint APIs.

Last session for the day was another Keynote, which frankly bored me.  I didn't really have a rhythm to it and there was very little new information to be gained.  I left early, nothing else to say.  Of course after that was the party, that no Microsoft event should be without.  We got to hang out at Pure in Caesars Palace for several hours and drink on the stock holders.  Pussycat Dolls perform every night, but that room was way to crowded with testosterone, so I spent my time on rooftop patio, which is what I'd recommend if you even get a chance to check this place out.  It's probably one of the coolest bars I've ever been in.  And with that note I'll end with a couple bad pictures from the evening.

MIX on Monday

I can say that when I decided to go to Mix this year, my main goal was to meet some of the folks involved with WPF and to learn more about what was called WPF/E. I suspected something was up however when Microsoft announced Silverlight a few weeks ago, knowing they were planning something much larger. So in the keynote they dropped the bomb that Silverlight will include the entire .NET runtime. It was actually ironic because I was talking to someone from Adobe (formally with Macromedia) before the keynote and I asked him what he thought about Silverlight as it related to Flash and he just commented that it didn't include any type of engine. I bet he as well as the rest of Adobe dropped their own bomb when they heard that news.

So what are the advantages of .NET in the browser? Listening to the keynote, the big things I can see are faster execution, better controls, better DOM and the fact that they are including LINQ! Yes, LINQ in the browser. Scott Guthrie even did a quick demo on a chess game he wrote that pits the .NET engine against the Javascript engine in Silverlight. It showed how many nodes per second were processed by each and it became obvious how much faster .NET will be that JS. Hey Brett, just think, drawing the freehand paths may actually be acceptable now!!!

Another cool announcement was the Silverlight Streaming Alpha, which is a web site you can upload videos to (up to 4GB total) and get a direct URL back for viewing on any web site, which can be easily used in Silverlight applications. Sounds like Microsoft's YouTube to me, but either way combining this with the great media abilities of Silverlight, web sites should be better than ever. Check out http://silverlight.live.com.

With keynotes taking up most of the morning, the afternoon was left to breakout sessions. The first one I attended was Silverlight and Javascript, but it was way too crowded and I got to sit between two guys bigger than myself. The three of us started producing way too much heat so I decided to call it early. I did get to see the presenter use the Javascript object model to access to access WPF entities built with Blend.

The next session I attended was something called Accessing Data Services in the Cloud. I didn't really understand what I was walking into but it was recommended to me. Ended up being a really cool breakout, as Microsoft announced something called "Astoria". I will not do any justice to this technology, so I'll just keep it brief Astoria exposes data as a service, allowing access via HTTP as the exchange. The coolest thing I saw it used for was with JSON, which allows the data to simply be exposed as objects inside of Javascript. There's also an online service available, but keep in mind "Astoria" is a new technology in just preview form. I have no idea of what type of product it will end up as. You can check out more information at http://astoria.mslivelabs.com.

I tried to go to more sessions, but both of the ones I went to were cramped and hot, and I just didn't feel like sitting through another 1 ½ of it. I'm heading to the Mashup tonight though, so the evening is still to come.

Chris

KnowledgeLake to Offer Scanning From SharePoint

In mid May my Imaging Server team will release an update to the KnowledgeLake Imaging Server 2007. This release will include something not in the original version, which is the ability to scan directly from and into a SharePoint Document Library. For current users of KnowledgeLake Imaging, those with maintenance contracts actually, will have access to this new version that includes the scanning functionality. KnowledgeLake Scan will also be available as a standalone product for SharePoint servers sometime this summer.

Those of you familiar with KnowledgeLake's capture products know that we have always focused more on the production side of document capture, rather than the desktop capture user. With this in mind, it might a good time to flashback to where KnowledgeLake Capture evolved from. Unlike almost all of our other products, capture was not originally built for SharePoint. Back in 1998, I was working on a FileNet implementation at a large brokerage firm and FileNet was just releasing their new 32-bit (yep 32 whole bits) scanning application called Panagon Capture. To keep this short, let's just say that the release was an absolute disaster and the customer was not happy. In my complete arrogance, Ron Cameron suggested I use the Kofax Toolkit to write an application to scan and save to FileNet. I'm still not sure if he was serious or not, but I thought for sure that if I had a decent toolkit this couldn't possibly be that hard. After hiding in locked room for 30 days I emerged with an application that was simple, but did the job. The customer accepted it and we slid my application in instead of Panagon Capture.

Three years later, KnowledgeLake was born and we decided to start things off by building and selling something called "Tablerock", named after a lake here in Missouri. Taking what I learned from my first dive into the Kofax Toolkit, I improved on some things and we launched our first product back in 2001. We sold the application as a framework rather than as a package so our services organization could modify it accordingly for each implementation. This was especially important for indexing as it seemed every customer needed its own modifications. The product really came to life in 2004 when we starting building software for SharePoint. Changing the saving mechanism to allow for release to SharePoint, we launched the first production capture software for SharePoint. We also built some tweaks into SharePoint to allow document libraries to scale. The product was renamed KnowledgeLake Capture and we dropped the lake names from all of our products at that time.

Right before the SharePoint products were born we also built KnowledgeLake Desktop Capture (actually "Clearwater" at the time), as our sales team was finding more and more needs for desktop scanning software. I didn't get it at the time, mainly because of the FileNet focus, but this started to make a lot more sense as we moved into the world of SharePoint. For 2007 we actually merged the Capture and Desktop Capture products together, which was made possible by rewriting the application from the ground up and no longer around the Kofax Toolkit. Although we do offer compatibility to Kofax drivers via a specific adapter the application was no longer dependant on it. This allowed to also build Twain and WIA scanning adapters to meet the needs of both Desktop and Production scanning in one platform.

Seeing other companies take the approach of scanning directly from a web application, and determined to stay in the lead on ramping content to SharePoint, we knew we had to at minimum add the same abilities. A prototype was built months ago, but we just didn't have the time and resources to get it incorporated into a real product as our teams were very focused on releasing our products for the new SharePoint versions. This changed after February however and we used the knowledge from our 2007 capture product and took the time to build Scan directly into SharePoint. KnowledgeLake Scan (as it's known right now) is our first web based scanning application and I can say without doubt I think we provide a better interface than any other web based capture application. We minimized the button clicks it takes to scan a document and make it easy to index and save the images as PDF, XPS of TIFF files. We plan on taking this interface a lot further in the future adding web based scanning into our KnowledgeLake Capture Server product, and with that we will introduce some abilities that I believe will separate us from any competition.

I do have to give some major kudos to my teams on this as the Imaging and Capture teams combined efforts on this to build it together, making the core components usable to each team in the future. So guys if you are reading this, let me say thank you!

Mixing it up,

Chris

Daylight Savings Time Worse Than Y2K?

A couple weeks back, Ron Cameron was telling me that he really believed that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) issue would end up being worse than the year 2000 (Y2K) problem. He told me the thought it would be at its worse when the time used to change (first of April), rather than in early March, when a lot of folks simply just changed times manually. I smiled and went along as it seemed like a reasonable prediction, but from what I've seen, I think he may have been spot on. I really hope he's wrong because so far it has been a real pain in the rear and if it gets worse, there's going to be some serious productivity loss and IT downtime getting it all sorted out.

I'm just going to spend a couple minutes talking about the things I've been exposed to so far. First, it was the Microsoft patch that was supposed to fix the problem on Windows 2003 Servers. Because we had to update servers around here, we figured it was a great time to go ahead catch up on hot fixes for the last couple months. So on we went running Windows Update, and WHAM things started breaking and the worst part was we didn't know exactly what was breaking things because we had applied multiple patches.

The first thing we had happened was on our software activation server, where a security patch decided to disable Basic Authentication and enable Windows Authentication without asking, of course this caused a stoppage to the nice people trying to activate our software. Upon some research Microsoft claimed they did it because Basic Authentication should only be used over SSL, but guess what, that sever is using SSL. Like we'd really pass our keys around without encryption. It was hard to find the problem, but at least it was an easy fix.

Second, was one of our development domains. For some crazy reason the DST patch broke one of the COM+ services on the domain controller, causing the server to quit functioning properly and putting a halt to some stress testing we had been performing. I don't know the details here, as I wasn't hands on, but the only resolution we found was to rebuild the machine. What a pain!

Next thing was all my appointments getting messed up on my Windows Mobile device. The device changed its time correctly on the new DST, so you would have figured things would have worked. But some type of confusion between this and the patch to fix Exchange had confused everything. Not a big deal, as I realized quickly (along with everyone else) what had happened and our administrator had already sent a patch over so it wasn't too bad at all, except showing up and hour late to my first couple meetings.

Finally, Darrin Bishop started telling me about a completely bizarre SharePoint 2007 issue he'd run across. Check out it out on Darrin's Workbench.

I really do enjoy the extra daylight, but I'm really starting to dread the first weekend in April.

Chris

 

I guess one advantage to being the leading SharePoint Capture software company is that you get to test lots of great devices. When I find one I like, I like love to talk about it. Also I don't like to bash bad products, so I'll usually only talk about the good stuff. My latest love is the Kodak Scan Station 100, which Kodak was nice enough to lend us for a while. I was skeptical as I had never really used a pure network scanner before, and therefore didn't have much to compare it against,

So, let's get on with what this thing does. It's basically a scanner with a built in computer that runs some version of Windows XP. I only know its XP because you can see the start screen when you turn it on. Being XP it takes a bit for it to boot up, but that's okay because you'll probably never turn it off, we don't anyway. The first thing you must do is only one of the two complaints I had and that was you have to install software on another machine to build (and later edit) the configuration. This could be a problem if you are constantly adding new users or locations, but from what I've seen it's typical of any device in this class, wait I've never really seen another device in this class. I setup about 10 email addresses for all the folks that sat close enough to the device for it to be handy and then I setup a couple UNC paths to simulate scanning to a couple different types of documents (more on this later). The configuration program also allows you to setup default for just about anything else you want such as document format (PDF, TIFF, JPG), simplex/duplex, OCR and a host of other settings.

Once you have the configuration complete you simply save it onto a USB drive, bring the USB drive to the Scan Station and as soon as you plug it in, you are asked to overwrite the existing configuration. The only two things I could think to improve on here would be to plug a keyboard into the USB port and let you configure directly on the Scan Station or have the ability to save the configuration across the network since its obviously network aware.

Okay the hard parts done, time to sit back and have fun. Once setup I just simply dropped paper into the ADF, selected my location(s), which were Emails are UNC paths and press the green button. Here is my second and last gripe, and it's because the lamps take about X second to warm up, and I want to scan now. Really not a big issue and I'm simply pointing it out. Once warmed up scanning is relatively fast at 28 pages per minute bitonal, but slows down dramatically when doing Image+Text PDF (because of the OCR). The files were either emailed or placed on the network immediately. Heading to my Inbox I checked out the files and I was blown away. Kodak Perfect Page works and works well… I guess I didn't mention that handy feature earlier. Perfect Page is a technology that cleans up your document automatically without the user having to press buttons and think about things. It performed deskew, black border removal, auto page size detection and some thresholding on every image I scanned, which gave me very good results. Good enough were OCR and barcode detection (via KnowledgeLake Capture Server) worked consistently. The only other image cleanup thing I would have like to have seen was blank page detection, but luckily combined with our software this is taken care of.

So why would someone want to buy this device? I would say the perfect scenario is for small departments that don't either want to spend the money on a quality scanner for each desktop or just plain don't have the room. If these departments have an imaging repository capable of inputting from network locations or simply want images sent to their Inbox, this device will meet their needs and unlike some other review of this scanner, I think the price is great at $2599.

How did I test this device? I connected it via Ethernet to a 100 Mbps switch on our company network. I scanned to both Email addresses and network locations. I used KnowledgeLake Capture Server to pick up the images sent to network locations, and sent them through our image processing modules to split into multiple documents when a barcode was detected. Next Capture Server placed them in a web indexing queue where they were manually indexed and then sent to SharePoint. I tested both multi and single page TIFF files as well as Image+Text PDF files.

My final thoughts on this product are simple; I recommend it for the scenario mentioned above. This device will also soon be certified for use KnowledgeLake Capture Server.

Enjoy, Chris

Why use (local) or “.” as a SQL Server Name

You learn something new every day I suppose and I was taught something today that was complete news to me. Keep in mind I'm not exactly a database expert, so for those DBAs out there you can go ahead a stop reading now. I've used (local) or a period as the server name in connection strings and thought it was just a simple way of forcing usage of the local machine name. I guess that's true in part, but there's more. Using either of these tells SQL to use Shared Memory and does not require that either Named Pipes or TCP/IP protocols to be enabled. It's probably not much use in a production environment, but great for developing on local SQL instances.

Let me know if you find this useful, as I'd like to know if I'm the only SQL dummy out there.

Chris

2007 Product Launch

We finally did it, by that I mean launched our 2007 product line. At least from a technical perspective anyway. We now have to refocus a lot of efforts on the marketing side of everything as it's, as we aren't fortunate enough to have a marketing engine as big as Microsoft's. We started the process of building our 2007 products way back in August of 2005 when Microsoft invited us to participate in the Office "12" Technology Adoption Program. Since that time we've built several prototypes two alphas, two betas and a couple release candidates on our way to finishing on February 5^th. This has been by far the biggest software project I've ever been involved with and by far the most satisfying. We finished the final project plan back in early August, set for a release date of February 5^th in which we actually hit. There were a lot of long days and nights, and I can tell you I must be the most blessed man alive to have the privilege of getting to lead the team I have. These folks worked day and night many times especially the last 30 days or so, as they were as determined as I was to hit our date.

So what does a company like ours do when they finish a product this big? Well of course the first thing we do is throw a party, actually two parties. The night of release there was four of us left at the office finishing the final details and we actually were complete at 9pm, which is much better than the midnight I was figuring it would be. Three of the four of us went for a frosty beverage and dinner, while Darrin had to make his way back to Springfield, IL that night so he passed.

On Thursday we had a big happy hour party at Growler's Pub, the official KnowledgeLake bar and grill. Most of the team made it plus pretty much the rest of this organization. Friday night I threw a party (or should I say my wife threw a party) at my house for the development team, which basically meant an excuse for a bunch of nerds to play pool, throw darts, sing karaoke and play guitar hero. Of course we ate too much and polished off a bunch of the finest St. Louis brew (Schlafly's).

So what happens now? The first order of business for our team is to finish Capture Server, which we had scheduled to be two weeks behind the rest of the products. We are pushing it three weeks as we pretty much drained that team dry to have them help us finish Imaging, Capture and Connect. So if you are waiting for this, it will RTM on the 26^th and be ready for download on March 5^th. The other big thing we have to get done is our new Web Site, which should be launching about the same time as Capture Server. This will really mark the beginning of our marketing campaign as we don't want to pump up things too much until we have a nice sleek place for everyone to see demos and download the literature. After that you'll be able to find us at most major shows this year, so if you plan on going to events such as AIIM, Tech Ed, WPC or SharePoint Connections be sure to stop by and say hello.

Regards,

Chris