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One of the most terrifying crises an enterprise will face is the hacking of their data or the hostile takeover of their servers, a practice carried out with malicious code known as ransomware.  Production coming to a halt is the smallest worry of these situations - costs to repair, replace, and reformat drives can be extensive and even then is no guarantee that all data will be recovered.  And, in some industries there are serious legal and business consequences in response to breaches of customer data.  But what about cloud data storage?  That offsite data can be the most vulnerable.  To counteract this, it is critical that all businesses maintain a backup system should a server be compromised.

Microsoft, a PaperFree partner, offers one such solution in its Azure Backup product, which has been designed with the security of cloud data in mind.  Azure Backup works with a three step approach to security:

1. Prevention: New authentication layer added for critical operations like Delete Backup Data, Change Passphrase. These operations now require Security PIN available only to users with valid Azure credentials. 
2. Alerting: Email notifications are sent for any critical operations that impact availability of backup data. These notifications enable users to detect attacks as soon as they occur.
3. Recovery: Azure backup retains deleted backup data for 14 days ensuring recovery using any old or recent recovery points. Also, minimum number of recovery points are always maintained such that there are always sufficient number of points to recover from.

By having a proactive backup system offered in a product like Azure Backup, administrators can react quickly - as a hacking is underway - to secure their systems.  But when all else fails Azure Backup is also a cloud-based backup system - meaning that its secure data servers allow customers to restore their production and backup systems from its secure backups.  All of this comes together for a measure of peace of mind for businesses that want to protect their data.

PaperFree is happy to direct you to the resources you need for proper and secure data backup - just give us a call!  To learn more about Microsoft Azure Backup please visit their website.

In late 2016 PaperFree joined forces with Avnet, a global leader in electronics fulfillment, to offer the full line of Dell EMC storage products to its customers.  This move not only expands PaperFree's product portfolio; it enables clients to take advantage of purpose built hardware to power their systems.  This means that enterprises can easily do away with dusty old servers and switch to streamlined, fast, and manageable platforms with the help of a trusted and proven provider.

Currently, Dell EMC offers a variety of storage solutions from large to small:

• XtremIO - designed to speed the storage and access of data for large enterprises.
• VMAX All Flash - designed to be a stable and reliable storage platform with all Flash-based storage.  No spinning disks!
• DSSD D5 - rack-scale storage solution with shared access in mind.
• Unity - a streamlined storage solution for smaller businesses.
• ScaleIO Ready Node - endlessly configurable Flash or hybrid storage.

To learn more about Dell EMC's storage solutions please visit our Storage Solutions Page.  To find out what Dell EMC storage solution is right for your business, please contact us.

In a recent blog post Rohit Ghai, Dell EMC's President of the Enterprise Content Division, reflected on the successes of Dell EMC in the past year.  2016 has been a year of great change for the company with mergers, new products, and numerous events catered to partners and customers.  Mr. Ghai's post reads:

For many, this time of year is full of the hustle and bustle of the holidays, preparing for time with families, and pondering what the New Year has in store. For Team ECD it’s no different, only this year there’s additional activities, excitement and anticipation about the road ahead as we prepare to join forces with OpenText.  With this in mind, I wanted to take a moment and provide an update on progress to date and unwrap a little of what’s to come.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

It’s hard to believe that we just passed the 90-day mark since signing the agreement with OpenText in September. Since then, the focus has been primarily been on you, our valued customers and partners. We’ve spent hundreds of hours talking with you and receiving feedback through webcasts, Customer.Next events in the U.S., Momentum Europe in Barcelona, and a multitude of 1:1 meetings across the globe. As always, our goal is to be as transparent as possible with our ECD family and ecosystem, and we hope you’ve found these interactions as valuable as we have. If you missed any of these events, please take a moment to review the resources here.

On a tactical level, the main driver behind our “hustle and bustle” has been to ensure consistency and continuity – everything from the products to the processes to the people – we want to make the transition as seamless as possible for you.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Closing…

There has also been tremendous effort focused on delivering the items that are needed for regulatory approvals and closing the deal. I’m pleased to report that everything seems to be moving ahead as planned. Just as we were all fortunate to participate in the close of the Dell EMC deal, the team is looking forward to celebrating this next step for ECD in the New Year. As we get closer to finalizing a close date, we will share opportunities for you to get involved and celebrate with us.

A Toast to You

It’s been an amazing 2016, with big, successful events like ECD Ready, Momentum in Las Vegas and Barcelona, and Customer.Next. We’ve delivered more than 65 products, solutions and betas over the past 12 months, with major initiatives across the product families, including the release of 5 LEAP apps and the LEAP Platform beta; Documentum 7.3 with significant updates to the full Documentum family and vertical solutions; and the introduction of extreme archiving with InfoArchive 4.0 and Clinical Archiving 2.0. We’ve been recognized as a leader by five industry analyst firms, including our 13th time as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, and have won multiple product and strategy awards.

And it’s all for, and because of, you. On behalf of the entire ECD team, I’d like to raise a virtual toast to you – for your continued business, loyalty and friendship. Cheers and best wishes for a happy holiday season and a joyous new year!

Click here to read Mr. Ghai's post on Sparkblog

In a recent piece written by Brant Clark, Product Marketing Director of Mobile Products and Solutions at Kofax, the changes that an increasingly mobile workforce have brought about are explored.  Smartphones are in nearly every hand and access to wifi and cloud-based technologies is easier than ever.  Research is showing that mobile workers are growing in numbers and that trend is expected to continue - increasing from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million mobile workers in 2020. By the end of the forecast period, research company International Data Corporation expects mobile workers will account for nearly three quarters (72.3 percent) of the total U.S. workforce.

Mobile workforces are also changing how businesses are run - no longer are all workers under one roof during specified hours - communication now requires some sort of electronic device.  Clark reports:

• 61 percent of workers report working outside the office at least part of the time
• The average employee uses at least three devices daily for work activities
• The number of devices managed in the enterprise increased 72 percent from 2014 to 2015

But how does this affect the daily process of a business?  Here's how:

1. Employees interacting with business processes across a variety of devices: your organization needs to be able to view processes from start to finish – regardless of the device used to complete them – in order to manage them.
2. Employees completing processes at varying times: when employees are completing tasks across time zones, you risk bottlenecks and work duplication if you’re not tracking processes carefully.
3. Increased chance for error and miscommunication:
4. Real-time resource allocation: if you can see how your processes are working, you can adjust quickly when required.
5. Increased experience expectations:your employees and customers are always connected – so they expect you to be, too. Expectations of performance, response time and self-service capabilities are increasing.

So, how is a company to manage the changing work environment while maintaining order in their workflows?  It requires "process intelligence" - an idea that goes beyond basic analytics to reveal real-time insights within a company to show what bottlenecks and speedbumps are hindering progress.  Process intelligence allows management granular access to how tasks are run - showing the who, when, where, and how employees are working.  Tasks that have been performed incorrectly can be easily identified and addressed, and clear plans to streamline work across the enterprise can be organized.

With the ongoing shift to mobile workforces companies must respond now to avoid headaches in the inevitable future.  To do this, they must implement proven process intelligence tools and prepare themselves for a workforce that will bear little resemblance to that of today.

Read "Five Ways a Mobile Workforce Impacts Business Processes" by Brant Clark

Dell EMC, a worldwide leader in information capture and management technology and PaperFree partner, has been making recent strides in their product offerings and has announced a lineup of new high performance computing (HPC) products designed for integration into the cloud.  These advances into software, systems, and customer results serve to make high performance computing available for enterprises of all sizes, all while improving the technology and ultimately making it more easily available.  “The global HPC market forecast exceeds $30 billion in 2016 for all product and services spending, including servers, software, storage, cloud, and other categories, with continued growth expected at 5.2 percent CAGR through 2020,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “Bolstered by its combination with EMC, Dell will hold the number-one position in total HPC revenue share heading into 2017.”

HPC products that were announced include:

• The Dell EMC HPC System for Life Sciences will be available with the PowerEdge C6320p Server with the Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor by early Q1 2017. This accelerates results for bioinformatics centers to identify treatments in clinically relevant timeframes while protecting confidential data.
• New cloud bursting services from Cycle Computing, enabling cloud orchestration and management, connecting to the three largest public cloud services including Azure, AWS and This allows customers of all sizes to most efficiently utilize their on-premises systems while seamlessly providing access to the vast resources of the public cloud for HPC needs.
• Dell EMC will offer customers the Intel® HPC Orchestrator this quarter to help simplify the installation, management and ongoing maintenance of high-performance computing systems. Intel® HPC Orchestrator, based on the OpenHPC open source project, can help accelerate customers’ time to results and value in their HPC deployments.

Additionally, Dell EMC announced that one of their high-powered HPC systems will be installed in MIT's Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center.  The system will consist of a 648-node HPC system that features an Intel Xeon Phi processor, over one petaflop of processing speed, and an overall quadrupled computing capacity boost over the center's previous ability.  This supercomputer will be used for research in the areas of space observations, robotic vehicles, cyber security, machine learning, sensor processing, electronic devices, bioinformatics, and air traffic control.

To read more about Dell EMC's enhanced HPC offerings, please click here

Kofax, a partner of PaperFree Corporation, made the following product announcements on November 21, 2016:

Major Update to Kofax E-signature Family of Products

Lexmark has refined the product offerings within its E-signature line and consolidated them into one easy to update and use product.  This product continues to serve a diverse range of signing needs include mobile and desktop capture, signing workflow orchestration or middleware, and a software development kit.  Click here to learn more about Kofax E-Signature

Kofax Communication Server (KCS) 10.1

Also announced was the new Kofax Communication Server, a reliable and scalable platform that automates all communication-heavy business tasks.  This product is agnostic of location, media types, and applications, which allows users to communicate seamlessly regardless of their individual location or device.  KCS also integrates with business systems to optimize and accellerate processes.  KCS 10.1 adds features such as a web based configuration and management portal, improved security features, and new certifications for the integration with SAP and Avaya.  To learn more about this product please watch the KCS 10.1 What's New Overview

Many businesses and schools have taken advantage of the comprehensive tools available in Microsoft 365, and the introduction of Microsoft Teams to the suite expands this functionality even further.  Microsoft Teams is designed to improve communication within an enterprise by "bringing people, conversations, and content together" - including video and voice communications as well as threaded conversations organized by user-created topics and tabs.  In a collaborative environment these utilities are critical in ensuring that all team members are up to date on changes, plans, and most of all can easily contact each other, especially if members are located around the world.  And, according to Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice-president for the Office team at Microsoft, it "provides a modern conversation experience for today’s teams."  Teams has been designed to work seamlessly with standard Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve.

In recent years, Microsoft has expanded its interest in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the first of which being the Cortana AI found on Windows phones.  By applying the lessons learned and the technology they've developed so far, Microsoft hopes to make its Teams product more intuitive by responding to users' vision and speech as well as processing language, knowledge extraction, and web searches more accurately and efficiently.  The distinction between Teams and past efforts at AI is that the software has now been "trained" to learn, and with varying needs within an enterprise this ability to adapt is critical.  And, paired with new lighting-fast field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, cloud-based AI solutions can perform complex and extensive requests in milliseconds.  Microsoft demonstrated this ability by having a AI utility translate spoken French to English and Dutch simultaneously.

By applying AI methods to office technology, Microsoft hopes to learn more about how individual businesses work and how to best provide products that are able to take on tasks previously performed by workers.

To read more, visit ComputerWeekly's article on Microsoft Teams and AI

Gartner has released its most recent Magic Quadrant report on the state of the Enterprise Content Management industry.  In it they have found:

• By 2018, 50% of enterprises will manage their content using a hybrid content architecture.

• By 2018, more than 20% of the enterprise content management solution sales will address multiorganization "ecosystem" content.

• By 2018, enterprise file synchronization and sharing will be a standard capability of enterprise content management and collaboration offerings.

• By 2018, at least 50% of the leading enterprise content management vendors will rearchitect their offerings into cloud-based platforms.

• By 2018, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines.

• By 2019, 70% of all business content will be nontextual, which will require organizations to invest more widely in analytics as part of their content management efforts.

On the whole they have found many factors that are driving the need for enterprise content management in the workforce, namely new digital technology and demand, cloud services, needs for mobile data input, and a content-centric attitude within evolving business tactics.

As part of the report, Gartner has evaluated several of PaperFree's partner companies for their ability to provide competitive products in the competitive content management industry.

Alfresco

Focused on platform expansion, scalability, and optimization, Alfresco's open-standards development makes them an attractive vendor for customers who wish to customize their content management solution.  And, with a refinement of their target verticals, Alfresco now has expertise in three specific areas: financial services, government, and healthcare.  Recent strong growth has propelled the company into new regions, especially Asia and Pacific countries.

Dell EMC

Del EMC has long been the leader in enterprise content management solutions, serving a wide variety of verticals.  It has a broad set of offerings, including Documentum, ApplicationXtender, Captiva, and others.  Dell EMC's recent focus has been on cloud-based solutions, targeting the advancing technologies that its customers demand.

Microsoft

In the ECM marketplace, Microsoft is best known for its powerful SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office 365 products.  These products make it easy for customers to utilize cloud-based collaborative solutions in a streamlined and intuitive way.

OpenText

OpenText recently acquired the ECM arm from Dell EMC and is the new owner of several EMC nameplates, including Documentum and InfoArchive.  However, it has developed its own product lines from the ground up, including the well-reviewed OpenText Suite 16 that offers a modern UI and better access to data.  Its cloud based or traditional solutions serve the needs of many industries that have need of enterprise content management.

Click here to read Gartner's entire 2016 Magic Quadrant report.

Dell EMC, a leader in enterprise content management solutions, has announced Suite, a unique product suite within EMC Documentum for Life Science for enterprises who operate in both the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.  Suite provides clinical, regulatory, and design history file/device master record document features to fully enhance the lifecycle of products from design to manufacturing.  Not only is it compliant with industry regulations, its use is efficient and includes quality control features that greatly assist in product trials.  eTMF capabilities are enhanced as well, giving you a detailed view of your data with support for both 2.0 and 3.0 DIA eTMF Reference Models.  And, development of new products couldn't be easier with a R&D inventory to speed regulatory submissions and compliance.

Suite is comprised of four complementary solutions:

• Electronic trial master file (eTMF)
• Research and development (R&D)
• Submission store and view
• Quality and manufacturing (Q&M)

Suite is designed to improve efficiency, user experience, and visibility of critical information across the enterprise.  Says Andy Crowne, Vice President of Industry Solutions and InfoArchive:  “Many Life Science organizations have difficulty implementing a cohesive solution for both pharmaceutical and medical device documentation, since available systems are often too complex or cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses.  EMC Documentum for Life Sciences solution suite brings both options together in a single repository, giving companies of all sizes the choice and flexibility of implementing a single medical device solution or deploying R&D and Q&M independently to align with business functional areas.”

Read more about Suite on Dell EMC's press release

Click here to learn more about PaperFree's solutions for Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals

OpenText has announced Fax2Mail for Healthcare, a cloud-based data capture solution within the OpenText EIM portfolio that has been specifically built for healthcare workflows and to improve patient care.  Operating on a fax-based platform, Fax2Mail addresses the ongoing paper burden faced by healthcare providers by centralizing and standardizing all forms of document exchange.  By standardizing paper and digital data and integrating with existing clinical workflows, Fax2Mail digitizes the entire patient record process.  This increases efficiency, reduces errors, and ultimately proves to reduce costs associated with manual data entry and paper filing methods.  The solution can also be configured with additional connectivity to complement distributed medical practices or large healthcare groups.

Fax2Mail offers the following benefits:

• Reduces the burden of paper-based and manual healthcare workflows and enables digital transformation in the healthcare industry
• Combines all forms of information exchange and manages healthcare workflows in a single location with built-in integration to external systems, such as EMRs
• Enables fully electronic, interoperable, digital patient information exchange to connect with other healthcare providers using any form of common exchange such as fax, Direct messages and scanned documents
• Eliminates fax machines and fax-related onsite infrastructure, software fees, telecom charges and capital costs

Learn more about Fax2Mail in the OpenText press release or learn more about PaperFree's healthcare solutions.  PaperFree is an OpenText partner.