PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint

Transcription

1 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint Product Overview

2 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Copyright Copyright Crawford Technologies 2013, All Rights Reserved Crawford Technologies, CrawfordTech and the Crawford Logo are the property of Crawford Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. No warranties expressed or implied. History 1.0 Initial version, author Tim Nelms 1.1 author Tim Nelms 1.2 author Tim Nelms 2

3 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Tables and References Tables and References Contents Copyright... 2 History... 2 Tables and References... 3 Introduction... 5 Background... 5 Universal Print Stream Archiving... 6 Industry Solutions... 6 Enterprise Applications... 6 Print Stream Formats... 6 Document Types... 6 Archive Decommissioning... 6 Print Stream Transformation and Indexing... 7 Transformation... 7 Indexing... 7 Bursting... 7 Enhancement... 7 PDF and PDF/A... 7 Native Print Stream Archiving... 7 PRO Archiver High Volume Processing Server... 8 Batch Workflow... 8 High Volume Processing Server... 8 Scheduler... 8 Job Configuration... 9 Job Manager... 9 Archive Integration with SharePoint Store in Microsoft SharePoint Content Storage with Remote Blob Storage Workflow and Lifecycles Security Retention Policies and Records Management Information Access with Mircosoft SharePoint Search Browsing Viewing Development and Administration Tools Projects Task Configuration

4 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Tables and References Transformation and Extraction Configuration Debugging and Testing Tools Operational Console Production Database Consulting, Training and Support QuickStart Services Consulting Services Training Services Support Services Conclusion About Us

5 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Introduction Essentials Each day enterprises generate millions of customer communications; over 50 billion alone in the in the US each year In many cases these documents need to be retained for legal and compliance reasons as well as for reference and customer service Most enterprises fail to take advantage of digital delivery to reduce postage costs and improve customer service Costly mainframe archives are still widely used for storing customer communications when there are opportunities to lower costs and improve customer service CrawfordTech has been working for over fifteen years to solve the complex problems associated with customer communications Now, CrawfordTech has integrated their market leading PRO Archiver product with Microsoft SharePoint to provide a next generation solution to the problem of archiving customer communications Introduction Background Each day enterprises generate millions of customer communications - it is estimated that 50 billion documents are delivered each year in the US. These documents include statements, invoices, policy documents, letters and many more document types that are essential to maintaining relationships with customers. And these documents are sophisticated, intelligent even they will be personalised, they need to comply with relevant laws, they must be optimised for printing, they might be pre-sorted for delivery the list goes on. Traditionally the market for high volume customer communications has been dominated by specialist print vendors like IBM/Ricoh, Canon/Oce and Xerox and over time these vendors have evolved standards for printed output designed to drive their devices. Many enterprise applications are designed to generate print output specifically for these targets and the workflow of these print production processes can be complex. The challenge is that consumers and businesses are increasingly moving away from paper to digital communications. Whether this is PDF, web sites and other digital delivery methods like SMS text there is clearly a need to manage customer communications differently. Of course many enterprises have been digitising and archiving documents for years and archives of this type are to be found in most large corporations. There have been several generations of these archives including COLD and mainframe systems - the challenge is that these archives are costly to buy, expensive to maintain, integrate poorly with enterprise applications & workflow and are inaccessible to consumers. What is needed is a new generation of archive that leverages open standards, is integrated with packaged content management systems and can support delivery through web channels (in addition to paper). The benefits of a modern Enterprise Archive include a reduction in print & postal costs, improvements in customer satisfaction with self-service portals and improvements in enterprise business processes. Crawford Technologies has been working since 1995 to solve complex customer communications problems. Now CrawfordTech has integrated their marketing leading PRO Archiver product with marketing leading archiving and ECM systems to provide a next generation solution to the problems of archiving customer communications. Crawford Technologies has been working for over fifteen years to solve complex customer communications problems. Now, in partnership with Microsoft, CrawfordTech has integrated their marketing leading PRO Archiver product with the Microsoft SharePoint platform to provide a next generation solution to the problems of archiving customer communications. 5

6 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Universal Print Stream Archiving At a Glance Specific knowledge and support for your industry Support for package and custom applications Any print stream Any document type Migration and unification Universal Print Stream Archiving PRO Archiver offers universal print stream archiving across industry, business applications, print formats and document types. It can be used to archive almost any kind of business document including statements, policy documents, trade confirmations, patient records and reports, whether these documents come from packaged applications or custom business systems. CrawfordTech supports the widest range of source document formats including AFP, Metacode and PostScript and can archive in the native formats or as industry standard PDF/A. And if you are currently using archives like IBM CMOD, Control-D or Mobius we can help you migrate these archives to more modern and cost effective platforms. Industry Solutions PRO Archiver can be used to archive almost any kind of business document including statements, policy documents, trade confirmations, patient records and reports. PRO Archiver has specific industry editions for banking, insurance, utilities and healthcare that offer out of the box templates and best practices for these industries and reduce the expense and risk of deploying a new archiving solution. Enterprise Applications PRO Archiver supports a wide range of packaged applications including SAP, Oracle and JDE Edwards as well as custom business systems. The chances are that we have already implemented an archiving solution for your business application and can leverage our experience and skills to make your implementation successful. Print Stream Formats CrawfordTech supports the widest range of source document formats including AFP, Metacode and PostScript and can archive in the native formats or as industry standard PDF/A. CrawfordTech is an acknowledged global leader in print stream transformation and we have some of the most respected industry experts in the field. It is good to know that our experienced consulting and support are hand to support you at every stage of your project. Document Types Printed documents come in many shapes and sizes from multi page policies to single page letters and everything in between. Whichever documents you have PRO Archiver can intelligently distinguish between them and apply archiving policies relevant to your business and compliance needs. Archive Decommissioning If you are currently using archives like Control-D or Mobius CrawfordTech can migrate these archives to modern and cost effective platforms. Our services teams can extract print stream content from your source system and load it into your target repository. CrawfordTech can reduce the costs of maintaining multiple legacy archives by decommissioning. 6

7 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Print Stream Transformation and Indexing At a Glance Trusted technology Comprehensive indexing Optimised retrieval Add barcodes and colour Optimize storage for PDF and PDF/A documents Store native print streams in your ECM and archive system Print Stream Transformation and Indexing CrawfordTech is a widely acknowledged global leader in print stream transformation and as you would expect this technology is tightly integrated with PRO Archiver. Print streams contain valuable data like customer numbers, policy number and accounts numbers that are useful when searching & retrieving documents. CrawfordTech uses a range of techniques to ensure that index metadata is captured accurately and employs bursting strategies that help segment documents into digestible chunks for archiving. PDF has become a universal standard for digital documents and PRO Archiver supports ISO standard PDF/A as well native formats for archiving whichever the choice PRO Archiver ensures that documents can be stored optimal but retrieved with the full fidelity of the original. Transformation CrawfordTech is a widely acknowledged global leader in print stream transformation with support for PDF, PDF/A, AFP, Metacode, PostScript, TIFF and line data. CrawfordTech s print stream transformations guarantee full fidelity documents optimised for space and speed and which are fully integrated with PRO Archiver workflows. Indexing Print streams contain valuable data like customer numbers, policy number and accounts numbers that are useful when searching & retrieving documents. CrawfordTech uses a range of techniques including using AFP TLEs, barcodes and zonal capture to ensure that index metadata is captured accurately. Bursting Print streams can often contain thousands of documents and bursting strategies help segment documents into digestible chunks for archiving. Bursting ultimately helps ensure that retrieval of documents from the archive is quick and that storage requirements are kept to a minimum for common resources. Enhancement PRO Archiver document enhancement allows IT departments to add information such as barcodes, insertion codes and promotional information to documents for either printing or archival purposes. Applying these techniques means that source applications do not need changing in order to benefit enhancements that tune documents to either print or archiving business needs. PDF and PDF/A PDF has been become a universal standard for storing documents digitally. Now PDF can be reliably used for long term preservation using the international recognised ISO PDF/A standard. PRO Archiver produces PDF/A documents which are small, quick to access and retain the full fidelity of the original making them ideal for digital archiving. Native Print Stream Archiving In addition to PDF/A archiving CrawfordTech also supports native format archiving using PRO Dynamic Document Archiver. PRO DDA efficiently manages all the print resources necessary to reproduce a printed document with full fidelity. Native print stream documents can either be viewed through CrawfordTech s PRO Viewer tools or transformed at the point of need into PDF or other formats. 7

8 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - PRO Archiver High Volume Processing Server At a Glance Supports any number of batch types and configurations Scalable for peaks and troughs of demand Automate file processing Improve developer productivity for archiving configuration Easily track and query jobs PRO Archiver High Volume Processing Server The PRO Archiver processing server orchestrates the step by step process to capture, transform, index, and load content into your archive or ECM system. PRO Archiver s distributed architecture allows workloads to be spread across multiple processing nodes which provides a scalable and flexible processing environment to handle large volumes. The PRO Archiver scheduler reduces administration and allows the optimal use of resources by scheduling archiving jobs overnight. Finally PRO Archiver s configuration tools help you increase the speed at which you can design, test and deploy archiving processes using an intuitive graphical development environment. Batch Workflow The PRO Archiver processing server can be configured to support hundreds of different source applications and print streams. Each workflow can be uniquely configured to support the archiving behaviour needed for a particular type of document or job. PRO Archiver s workflow takes the pain out of manually building batch processes and custom scripts and ensures that these benefits are passed on to the administrator. High Volume Processing Server PRO Archiver s distributed architecture allows workloads to be spread across multiple processing nodes which provides a scalable and flexible processing environment to handle large volumes. Where processing volumes are very large, batch windows are short or there are simply peaks of activity, PRO Archiver can be scaled appropriately to suit your services levels and batch windows. Scheduler The PRO Archiver scheduler executes the capture and processing of print streams according to well defined policies. It allows PRO Archiver to be implemented with reduced administration in a lights out high volume production environment and allows the optimal use of resources by scheduling archiving jobs overnight. 8

9 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - PRO Archiver High Volume Processing Server Job Configuration It is not uncommon for large enterprises to have hundreds and even thousands of print streams and archiving these can be a complex and time consuming task. PRO Archiver s configuration tools help you increase the speed at which you can design, test and deploy archiving processes using an intuitive graphical development environment. In addition PRO Designer tools allow developers to view in real time changes to transformations considerably speeding up a highly complex area of configuration. Job Manager The job database keeps track of all batches and documents that are being transformed, indexed and loaded into the repository. It records the result of each process to make sure it completes successfully and will notify the appropriate administrator if an error occurs. (Maybe move to operational section). 9

10 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Archive Integration with SharePoint At a Glance Fully integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Full support for Microsoft SharePoint libraries Compatible with Remote Blob Storage Leverage one of the world s most popular ECM platforms Archive Integration with SharePoint PRO Archiver is closely integrated with Microsoft SharePoint and supports many of its advanced features such as Libraries and Remote Blob Services, all of which ensure that archived print streams can be leveraged like any other content in the repository. PRO Archiver helps ensure that print streams are stored efficiently using a storage model that also allows individual documents to be retrieved quickly. PRO Archiver is the only print stream archiving solution that is closely integrated with Microsoft SharePoint. Store in Microsoft SharePoint The PRO Archiver storage plugins for Microsoft SharePoint are designed to store high volumes of documents while applying efficient storage models to reduce storage footprint. PRO Archiver currently uses a full burst model where each document in a print stream is stored as a separate document in the future we will support other bursting models. The Store in SharePoint feature can be configured to use different libraries, which helps print stream documents integrate fully with other document types held in SharePoint. Content Storage with Remote Blob Storage PRO Archiver for SharePoint is compatible with different back-end data stores for content based on Remote Blob Storage. PRO Archiver for SharePoint will in the future be able to support no-burst storage models, which will benefit from Remote Blob Storage. Workflow and Lifecycles Very often printed content may require specific processing or activity depending on its meta-data. For example applications or renewal documents may need to be queued into validation workflows depending on their value or risk. PRO Archiver is compatible with third party tools and extensions to SharePoint which support workflows and drive either human or system processes as a result. Security Print streams often contain confidential information that needs to be protected and secured according to business rules and regulatory requirements. PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint is compatible with security policies configured in Microsoft SharePoint for a chosen library, so that only authorised users can search for and view them. Retention Policies and Records Management As data ages so its usefulness to a business decreases and the statutory periods for retention expire. PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint is designed to be compatible with third party records management and retention tools. This ensures that archived print streams will comply with industry regulations whilst ensuring aging information is not kept beyond its useful purpose. 10

11 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Information Access with Mircosoft SharePoint At a Glance Simple and complex queries Graze content using libraries Use a variety of viewing tools Information Access with Mircosoft SharePoint Microsoft SharePoint is a leading global Enterprise Content Management system and is used by thousands of knowledge workers in their daily tasks. PRO Archiver takes full advantage of SharePoint s knowledge worker features for search, browsing and viewing and applies this to print stream archives. It provides all the granularity of document level access whilst optimising SharePoint s performance for the higher volumes found in print streams. Ultimately Microsoft SharePoint and PRO Archiver can be used to support portals designed to service end-user requests. Search Microsoft SharePoint has a range of sophisticated search tools that allow both keyword and meta-data queries. Archiving applications are typically well suited to the latter and PRO Archiver populates Microsoft SharePoint objects with user document specific metadata that makes it easy to find. For example a search on customer number could return all the statements sent to that customer over a defined time period. Effective search reduces the time knowledge workers spend gathering information to support their business process. Browsing Microsoft SharePoint supports Libraries as means of classifying documents and these are fully supported by PRO Archiver. For example documents can be stored in a Library which allows knowledge workers to browse to a location and view all the documents in context. Viewing Microsoft SharePoint integrates with a wide variety viewing technologies and tools including applications like Adobe Acrobat. Documents stored by PRO Archiver are delivered as individual documents. Only the requested document and its resources are retrieved, reducing network bandwidth, reducing the need web servers and improving overall performance for end-users. 11

12 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Development and Administration Tools At a Glance Organize projects by business applications Common task types can be used across many projects Visually work with print streams Real-time debug and pre-flight testing Monitor production status and troubleshoot problems Integrate with enterprise systems management Development and Administration Tools As the numbers of print streams that need to be archived grow, so the complexity of managing the projects that archive these resources increase. PRO Archiver Studio is an integrated environment for developing testing and debugging your archiving processes and includes concepts like projects and tasks that make archiving easy to understand. The concepts are extended into operations where administrators can monitor job executions in the different projects (or queues) and check for completeness (the tasks). PRO Archiver Studio also includes CrawfordTech s market leading transformation design and test tools, which take the pain out of developing complex transformation and indexing processes. In any batch processing environment operators will need to monitor jobs and batches and intervene when failures occur. PRO Archiver Console provides an easy way to monitor processing including the ability to restart and rollback jobs. PRO Archiver s open standard production database schema allows any application to access real-time information about production jobs. Projects As the numbers of print streams that need to be archived grow, so the complexity of managing the projects that archive these resources increase. PRO Archiver Developer Studio helps organize archive projects to align with business needs. Projects can be managed and versioned separately and assigned to appropriate development resources for maintenance. Ultimately projects become the units by which the application is administered which makes for better communication between development and operations teams. Task Configuration Tasks represent the lowest level unit of work that is accomplished in PRO Archiver and the 15 standard tasks include transformation, indexing and storage tasks. Tasks are chained together to make a project which operates an end-to-end process. PRO Archiver Developer Studion is an intuitive graphical environment for configuring projects and tasks without needing to resort to coding. This makes PRO Archiver configuration easy to learn and helps developers leverage their knowledge across other projects. 12

13 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Development and Administration Tools Transformation and Extraction Configuration One of the most complex areas of configuration for print stream archiving is transformation and indexing. Print streams are optimised for printers and the way in which they manage common resources such as fonts, character sets and overlays make them challenging to interpret. PRO Designer makes sense of print streams by working with them visually. You don t need to be a printstream expert to configure print stream transformations and index extraction rules for archive applications. Debugging and Testing Tools Configuring an end-to-end archiving process is like any other development task - it requires iterative testing, debugging and configuration. PRO Archiver includes all the tools you need to check your work and make changes on the fly as you develop and test applications from your desktop development environment. PRO Archiver Studio makes it easy to test and validate the transform, index, and load steps for each archive application to prevent bugs from moving into QA and Production environments. 13

14 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Development and Administration Tools Operational Console In any batch processing environment operators will need to monitor jobs and batches and intervene when failures occur. PRO Archiver Console provides an easy way to monitor processing including the ability to restart and rollback jobs. Instead of checking logs to see if a job has completed successfully you can visually check job status through the PRO Archiver Console. PRO Archiver Console also provides access to detailed logs for jobs, an invaluable tool in troubleshooting. Production Database Archiving systems must operate with an overall IT infrastructure and be able to integrate with enterprise systems management tools like HP OpenView and BMC Control-M. PRO Archiver s open standard production database schema allows any application to access realtime information about production jobs. This significantly reduces the integration effort needed to feed production information into an existing enterprise management system. 14

15 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Consulting, Training and Support Consulting, Training and Support It takes more than technology to create innovative business solutions. It takes people with the experience to truly understand the scope and definition of your project, realworld expertise to make it happen, and a bar-setting standard of excellence and results. CrawfordTech is recognized for their in-depth industry knowledge and unequalled expertise in electronic document processing systems and applications. We provide a unique combination of knowledgeable IT professionals, industry-leading technology and proven processes. We know what it takes to develop document archival systems for optimal performance. QuickStart Services These standard packages of consulting and training to help assess and implement high volume print and archiving solutions with well-defined scope and budgets. They include project templates which reduce risk and speed up projects. Assessment QuickStart Services provide both strategic and business consulting services that evaluate business needs, assess and survey current archiving infrastructure and profile costs. From this the Assessment QuickStart Service helps size and define a solution to print and archiving that meets current and future business requirements Implementation QuickStart Services are designed to deliver business value by implementing systems and solutions. These services are based on years of successful projects and include integration with leading ECM and archiving platforms. The fixed price packaged service means that you have full control over your costs Migration QuickStart services help take information from legacy archives and migrate them to new platforms, whilst ensuring that costs do not spiral out of control. Our experience of migrating from legacy mainframe archives is extensive Consulting Services Designed to help develop successful strategies and leverage industry leading solutions CrawfordTech s consulting services offer everything necessary to develop strategies, assess business processes, implement and operate world-class print stream archiving solutions. Developed over years of public and private sector projects CrawfordTech reduces the risk of delivering print and archiving solutions. Strategic consulting evaluates our customer s print stream archiving landscape, helps define future requirements, and produces roadmaps that point the way to new business solutions Business consulting helps customers develop their print stream archiving strategies in support of specific business processes and recommends solutions based on well quantified business benefits Technology and implementation consulting helps customers develop and deploy products and solutions with reduced risk, using standard project templates Operational consulting services help run and operate products and solutions in production Training Services CrawfordTech s training courses help transfer the skills you need to implement and support CrawfordTech's archiving solutions. 15

16 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Consulting, Training and Support PRO Archiver fundamentals covers basic archiving functionality including indexing and content store in an ECM or archiving system (3 days) PRO Archiver advanced covers customised processes, native print stream encapsulation and advanced administration topics (2 days) Print Fundamentals familiarizes users with print stream transformations for a choice of print streams including AFP, Metacode, PCL and PostScript. The second day teaches users how to index print streams for example using AFP TLE or NOP records or PDF Bookmarks (2 days) Print Advanced provides a choice of topics including native print stream encapsulation and retrieval and document enhancement (1 day) Support Services CrawfordTech's support services for high volume print and archiving solutions are widely recognised as some of the most comprehensive in the industry. 16

17 PRO Archiver for Microsoft SharePoint - Conclusion Conclusion Crawford Technologies has a fifteen year track record of customer communications solutions. We have the products and expertise that is used by hundreds of customers around the world to optimise print operations and archiving. Enterprises are seeking fundamentally new ways of addressing the challenges of print stream archiving. Now in partnership with Microsoft, Crawford Technologies offer market leading print stream archiving technology integrated with the Microsoft s ECM solutions. PRO Archiver is a tried and tested print stream archiving solution and over 90 customers can testify to the benefits of putting customer communications in an enterprise archive using this technology. 17

18 About Us Since 1995, Crawford Technologies award-winning solutions have helped over 700 companies around the world reduce costs associated with mission-critical transactional customer communications. Our products, solutions, services and expertise help our clients deliver key documents to their customers in the format they need, when they need it. Our range of unique software solutions and products and expert services simplify, automate and extend the value of document delivery cost-effectively. Our innovative and flexible solutions enable meaningful process improvements irrespective of our clients' current, legacy or future standards in infrastructure or document output. Companies look to Crawford Technologies for our platform-independent approach, leading system performance and superior output fidelity. CrawfordTech s quality software, proven support and extensive document industry knowledge help our clients meet operational goals, support compliance and bolster the effectiveness of their document processing infrastructures. Our platform and vendor independent architecture insures our products and solutions seamlessly interface with existing in-house, legacy and third party applications and workflows. CrawfordTech Solutions Print Solutions AFP, Metacode/DJDE, ASCII/EBCIDIC/Line Data, PCL, PostScript, PDF, PDF/A, Image, Text, HTML, XML Prints stream transformation Print stream data extraction Print stream concatenation Print stream enhancement Standard barcodes, QR Codes, mail barcodes Workflow solutions Solutions for print service providers Print stream automation Automated document factory Archive Solutions Industry solutions for banking, insurance, telco, media, utilities, print service providers and healthcare Archiving solutions for EMC and Microsoft TORONTO 45 St Clair Ave West, Suite 102 Toronto, ON M4V 1K9 Tel: sales@crawfordtech.com NEW YORK 22 Depot Street, P.O. Box 5198 Potsdam, NY Tel: sales@crawfordtech.com LONDON 5 Wormwood Street London, England EC2M 1RQ Tel: +44 (0) sales@crawfordtech.com FORT COLLINS 2950 East Harmony Road, Suite 291 Fort Collins, CO Tel: sales@crawfordtech.com Crawford Technologies 2013, All Rights Reserved Crawford Technologies, CrawfordTech and the Crawford Logo are the property of Crawford Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Performance may vary depending on the environment. No warranties expressed or implied. CTI-T