Six Chat Questions with Jon Langdon with DocuWare about DocuWare 6.10
Just a little bit of background for everyone. Jon Langdon is Vice President for Product Strategy & Quality for DocuWare. In December 2015, we had the chance to chat with Jon about Dealer Value with DocuWare version 6.8, DocuWare Forms, Mobility & SMB adoption.
Thus, I thought it would be a good time to check back in with Jon and chat about the latest version DocuWare 6.10.
Art: Hey Jon, did I see that you received a recent promotion?
Jon: That is correct Art, and I’m very excited for my new role. For the last couple of years I’ve been a Vice President of Product Management – and I’ve been responsible for the teams which define our roadmap and design the features in our product portfolio. In my new role as VP Product Strategy and Quality, I’ll continue to have a focus on our product portfolio and in addition I am responsible for a new strategic effort around ease of use and user excitement in our products. I now oversee our global Quality Assurance operations and will be building a new team which is focused on quality in all our software development lifecycle activities – from ideation to design to technical specification to release. Our goal is to bring our users to the next level of excitement when working with DocuWare. We want to surprise and delight them with the things we add to our products, and we want to make sure we execute with the highest level of quality.
Art: A recent Xerox International research effort reveals that nearly half (46%) of SMB’s will turn to office equipment resellers for help with paper free solutions. In addition, 25% will look to their IT provider and 37% to the product manufacturer.
How can DocuWare help office equipment dealers capture a portion of that document lifecycle business?
Jon: Document management increases hardware contract/lease retention because a secure document repository is strategic to the customer. While hardware suppliers may have to compete on price alone, document management is so tightly integrated with other business systems customers rarely switch document management systems.
Selling software gives sales representatives something else to talk about with prospects who are leasing hardware from another vendor. They don’t have to wait for a competitor’s product lease to expire to start the conversation. They can sell a document management solution now, and increase their odds at getting a hardware lease when it comes up for renewal. The competition may sell hardware at a lower price but equipment dealers who include document management in their portfolio increase their chances of selling.
Selling document management provides an additional revenue stream. Software tends to have a higher value-add and higher margins. It provides an on-going annual service and support revenue opportunity and helps protect the fleet of hardware customers and retain leases.
Art: I heard there was a new version released in September — DocuWare 6.10 —what’s new and what's the added value for DocuWare resellers?
Jon: DocuWare 6.10 is a huge release for us, with well over 50 new features. DocuWare’s focus is on creating a great user experience, so we are equally focused on usability and new functionality. For our resellers, I think there is a lot of benefit to this approach– we want to add to their toolbox new solutions and approaches for solving the problems their customers are facing every day. For the customers, we want to make that problem disappear and delight them with an intuitive and easy to use product. I want to quickly highlight four of the new features that we released in 6.10:
Folders – We’ve always had great ways to store and retrieve documents in DocuWare – simple and intuitive and just a few clicks to get to the information you are trying to find. In 6.10, we extended this to a dynamic folder structure. Users can create their own views of documents stored in DocuWare in a folder structure based on the index data of those documents. For example, let’s say I am working in HR and I store employee records. Each document is indexed with the employee’s name, their location, and their department. I could create my own view which showed all employee records in a folder structure by location or by department, or a combination of fields like Location\Department\Last Name. Because so many people are used to working with folders, I think this concept is a very natural way to work, and for our resellers I think it makes it easy to convince people that working with DocuWare is going to be easy.
Super Simple One-Off Workflows – Our resellers that have been with us for a while know that DocuWare has one of the most powerful workflow engines in the industry. While our workflow designer is pretty easy to learn and has a nice graphical workflow designer, it’s overkill for the very simple one-off processes that people encounter every day. Have you ever been working on a document that you want a few people to review before you present it at the company meeting? Need a quick yes/no decision from a group of managers? Want confirmation that everyone has read the new policy we are putting in place? These are the types of workflows that we are enabling. From any document in DocuWare, you can now select a group of people to send a document to (all at once, or in an order you define) and ask them to make a decision on that document (Yes/No, Approve/Reject, Thumbs Up/Down – whatever you want). The documents get routed to them automatically, they get a notification via email, and once they’ve made their decision, the originator is updated automatically to let them know what was decided.
Local Data Connector – These next two features are around our Cloud offering – which, by the way, continues to be a really fast growing part of our business – over 25% of our new systems last year were Cloud system. This new feature, the “Local Data Connector”, is a great piece of technology – what it allows our Cloud customers to do is leverage data that is stored within their own servers with their DocuWare Cloud system. For instance, a customer might have a large database of vendors in their ERP system – the customer wants to be able to put a select list of vendors in an indexing screen in DocuWare Cloud. The Local Data Connector is a thin application that is installed in the customer’s network – it does all of the communication with the customer’s databases, and then sends that information real-time (in a totally secured & encrypted way) to DocuWare Cloud. It means that customers who want the benefit of a cloud system, but the flexibility and integration capabilities previously only available to on-premise solutions, no longer have to compromise.
Hybrid Cloud –We at DocuWare are real cloud believers. We think that not just the ECM industry, but the software industry as a whole, will continue to shift to Cloud where almost everything that businesses do will be driven through cloud solutions. We have had a front row seat over the last couple of years watching this shift, and we are certain the shift is still in progress. For some companies, there is a distinct need for the benefits of cloud but at the same time a need for some data to remain in their own server rooms. With DocuWare 6.10, we introduced a new File Syncing mechanism that allows an on-premise DocuWare system and a DocuWare Cloud system to sync selected data from one system to another, continuously and in real-time. This Hybrid cloud solution gives companies the opportunity to have the availability, scalability, redundancy, and ease of access to a cloud system while keeping complete data control, or keeping sensitive information in-house.
Art: What is Intelligent Indexing, and what is the advantage and value to an end user?
Jon: Intelligent Indexing is one of my favorite features. In one line: It’s magic automatic indexing of documents – I upload a document to DocuWare and it figures out all of the index information based on the content of the document. DocuWare developed this patent-pending technology a few years back, and it’s pretty amazing. It works by a user uploading a handful (about 3-5) documents to DocuWare. The user shows DocuWare what data it wants to extract from the document and what index field to put it into. After doing this 3-5 times, DocuWare figures out its own rules of how to find that data on the documents and then does it automatically from then on. It lets you know how confident it feels about its indexing, and you can check or retrain it at any time.
Art: What are the Web forms and what are the benefits to the end user?
Jon: DocuWare Forms is a newer feature of ours, and it’s become very popular last year. DocuWare forms allow businesses to take paper-based forms and replace them with web-based forms. For example, let’s think about when a new employee starts at one of our customer’s companies. On their first day, they fill out a lot of forms – Direct Deposit, Emergency Contact, I9, W4, etc. All of those forms ask for some of the same information – Name, Date of Birth, Social Security Number, and on-and-on. Now rather than having an employee fill out those 10 forms by hand, and then have another employee take those forms, make photo copies, manually enter the data into the payroll processing system, send email copies to hiring managers, etc – the employee can fill out just a single web-based form. That web form takes that data and automatically creates all of the same forms that use to be on paper (you can even use the original paper form as a template), puts those document in DocuWare, and then sends them through electronic workflows automatically. The time savings is significant, there is no duplicate data entry, and nothing gets lost.
Internally at DocuWare, we’ve completely streamlined our purchase order process, and replaced excel sheets and emails with DocuWare Forms, and it’s been fantastic. As a requestor, it takes me about half the time it use to when putting in a purchase order request; as a manager and approver, it takes me about 1/10th of the time to approve POs now and the process as a whole probably takes 30% of the time it used to. Those are real efficiency gains and savings.
Art: One more question for you. In reference to the SMB market, what is the current percentage of Document Management Software Adoption?
Jon: We define the SMB space to be companies between 50-500 employees. In the USA, there are approximately 290,000 companies this size. We believe that 70% of these companies do not have a Document Management solution, so that’s only a 30% adoption rate. For our partners, we see a lot of greenfield opportunity.
Art: Thanks for the time today, I’m this sure this will be an awesome read for our members.
Jon: No problem Art, thank you for checking in with us
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