The Thursday session, and main day of the Zia Summit, kicked off with a delicious breakfast overlooking the ice rink and mountains at the Keystone Lodge and Spa. And it was just as beautiful as you imagine. Shortly after, we began registration and then the speakers kicked off with Phil Robinson, SVP of Zia welcoming everyone to the Zia Summit 2015 and what was in store for the day. From there we quickly delved into our speaking lineup and the exciting things that will be seen in ECM over the coming year and beyond.
Zia 2015 and Beyond
Mike Mahon, CEO of Zia
Career Isn’t Over: Top 5 signs your CIO will still be there in 2016
The traditional role of a CIO has been focused on information security, information governance, and internal cost savings. These are still requirements but increasingly CIOs have been asked to look at technology as a competitive advantage for the business. How can they accomplish both traditional and modern CIO roles? With help from Zia—starting with these top 5 signs your CIO will still be there in 2016.
5. We’ve solved ECM avoidance by guiding companies through the dramatic increase in the percentage of content that is under management by the ECM repository. This is accomplished by implementing our EasyECM approach that allows users to continue to work with existing tools, while providing the IT governance that the enterprise needs.
4. Zia has solved SharePoint issues through Adhere for Alfresco with integration, synchronization, federated search, and more.
3. You weren’t the next Sony. Through our partnership with Covertix, Zia provides Universal Document Security (UDS) which delivers secure collaboration for both internal and external use cases from email and Dropbox to USBs.
2. Everyone’s a records manager and nobody knows it. EasyRM from Zia allows documents to be stored in a DoD-certified records management system without users even realizing they’re using one.
1. They’ve made a measurable contribution to the P&L with content solutions that change the way your business is run.
Growing with Alfresco
Doug Dennerline, CEO of Alfresco
Alfresco continues to strive to make partners and customers wildly successful. This is done through a focus on ease of use for upcoming products and by continuing to invest highly in technology—at a significantly higher rate than the competition. In addition, the company has expanded the executive team with senior-level hires in both Sales and Marketing.
Companies everywhere are trying to determine what content is acceptable to have in the cloud, and what must remain on-premise. As the market leader in “Hybrid ECM”, Alfresco is focused on continuing to deliver enterprise-class ECM for the corporate data center to provide compliance and security, while also providing easy-to-use solutions for external collaboration in the cloud.
Traditionally, Alfresco has been focused only on content management services, but now they are expanding into workflow processes with Activiti Enterprise. This expansion is helping them to become a one-stop shop as an ECM platform, allowing for a wide range of business solutions to be created by partners like Zia.
The key themes for 2016:
- Ease User Adoption
- Increase Security and Efficiency
- Open, Modern, Hybrid Infrastructure
- Activiti Enterprise for Workflow
- Support ECM Consolidation with Alfresco as the Content Hub
An Alfresco Solution to a Cancerous Problem
Jeremy Day – McKesson
As one of the top-ranked electronic health records companies for oncology, according to Black Book™ Market Research, McKesson knows how intensive document and records management can be. Jeremy Day, Director of Regulatory Affairs and Quality Assurance at US Oncology Research/McKesson Specialty Health spoke on how Zia created an Alfresco-based solution for McKesson that vastly decreased the time spent on the paperwork for new clinical research applications.
Before implementing Alfresco, the average amount of time it took to complete an application packet was around 35 days—from creating forms and sending them back and forth to necessary parties for their manual signatures, to resending if there were any errors. After three months with their new ECM system, McKesson is experiencing a nearly flawless business process—including electronic signatures—that has cut down dramatically on the time it takes to collect necessary signatures. Some trial packets are now complete in just two weeks, with further gains expected in the coming months.
Solving SharePoint: Introducing Adhere for Alfresco
Mike Mahon, CEO of Zia and Dan Anderson, EVP of SeeUnity
Across both the public and private sector, SharePoint has become pervasive as a content collaboration tool, yet many feel the need for an “true” ECM for proper information governance. Why can’t SharePoint function as an enterprise CMS? Many find that it lacks advanced site creation, configuration, and rule-based provisioning. The archival system is not robust and doesn’t have decommissioning functionality or advanced storage optimization. In addition, compliance can’t always be met due to lack of automation which places increasing responsibility on users as well as a lack of governance and security controls. But with all these issues, we know SharePoint isn’t going away.
This is why Zia has joined forces with SeeUnity to create Adhere for Alfresco. The modules in this solution deliver integration and synchronization, as well as federated search, and bring Alfresco records management together with SharePoint through a simple, streamlined business process. Users don’t even realize they’re using these programs thanks to the automation and classification happening behind the scenes.
SeeUnity provides a highly adaptable, modular software that is easy to configure with one or many connectors such as Alfresco, Salesforce, OpenText eDOCS, IBM FileNet, and more.
Alfresco 5: What’s Here & What’s Coming
Gi Lee, Principal at Zia and Bindu Wavell, Chief Architect at Zia
The recent launch of Alfresco One 5.0 included many key enhancements to the software. Some are provided to increase ease-of-use to end users while others bring new and improved integrations and capabilities to administrators and developers. In addition to several bug fixes, SharePoint Protocol was replaced by Alfresco Office Services and now supports property mapping and better browser support. HTML5 preview includes full text search and the ability to download or permalink from the preview—all without Flash.
The latest improvements to solr 4 will bring a more responsive and faceted search to the software. This includes inline actions for search results as well as the search criteria defaulting to AND rather than OR. Support for clustering/sharding and term highlighting is expected soon as well.
In addition to these advancements, the following list touches on some enhancements. In depth information can be found at https://www.alfresco.com/5ready
- CMIS 1.1 Item Type
- Site Manager and Analytics
- More Aikau components
- Advanced inline HTML editor (TinyMCE4)
- Many Explorer-only features added to Share
- Content encryption at rest
- Improvements to docs.alfresco.com
There is much more to learn about the latest innovations in Alfresco 5.0 from both a technical and end user standpoint that simply can’t be covered here. If you would like to learn more please contact us at sales@ziaconsulting.com
Growing & Innovating with Zia
Kristen Harris, Director of ECM Solutions at Zia
The morning session wrapped up with Kristen Harris, Director of ECM Solutions at Zia speaking on howZia can not only address the traditional CIO role of information governance and security, but truly help you innovate and grow your business. The “Content Consultancy” services from Zia deliver an end-to-end assessment of your existing content processes and a roadmap for how document automation and other enhancements can provide a measurable impact on your organization’s success.
Every year technologies change and force the industry to innovate and grow. Because of a passion for innovation Zia is able to create strategic technology partnerships that support both business and tech teams. These partnerships are on a continuous cycle with ups and downs, input from different places, repetitions, failures, and many steps back and forth. Once innovation is embedded in a company’s culture, there are still seven other factors need to be aligned to allow that innovation to flourish:
- People and skills
- Technology
- Infrastructure
- Organization and governance
- Risk management
- Measurement and KPIs
- Funding
Continued growth in a company requires diligence and process: vision, planning, iterating, and adjusting—within agreed upon frameworks. A framework based on proven best practices mitigates the risk of enterprise technology projects that can be large and costly. And even the best framework is empty without the players willing to participate. Enterprise projects are time and resource intensive making a framework that stakeholders understand and participate in the most powerful approach.
Having a methodology and framework in place that everyone is supportive of is a key aspect of what Zia aims to put in place for customers. By creating a customized solution for clients there is less risk of user avoidance—it’s a methodology that works for clients, not just for Zia. Which is how Zia helps customers get more on every single engagement.
At the conclusion of Kristen’s presentation, the group adjourned for lunch sponsored by Ephesoft and some time to digest the morning’s information and network with peers and industry leaders.
Watch for our next blog post featuring the afternoon’s presenters including Brian Gray, Managing Director of Baldwin & Lyons and Pat Myers, EVP of Zia.