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
1 comment:
At Dark Blue Duck we came to the "Scan direct to SharePoint" opportunity from another direction.
As Microsoft Employees we had been advocating SharePoint to corporate customers for some time when it hit us that SharePoint needed to support paper.
Our realization was that if we added desktop scanning support to SharePoint it would be a product we would use ourselves. Especially if the scanned in documents where .pdf formatted files and where searchable.
Our first commercial product was the Recycle Bin Enabler for Windows SharePoint Server 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. When Microsoft made it known that it would provide a Recycle Bin as part of SharePoint 2007 our market practically disappeared and we knew that we would need to work hard to get our Scanning Enabler product to market as early as we could. We know now that we need to continue to innovate.
From the start we knew that our integration with SharePoint would need to be seamless. The Dark Blue Duck Scanning Enabler is a successful product. We have a lot of respect for what the Knowledge Lake people have achieved and wish you well.
As Jim McCarthy explained in his book “Dynamics of Software Development” back in 1995 “If a market is healthy, it attracts competition. Competitors usually help build up a category by marketing with you the functionality that is common to both your applications. Competitors validate you and your customers. They create a market with you.”
Regards
Dark Blue Duck
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