DocMaster is a Single Database Document Management System. Its is used to manage large collections of loosely related documents, for example Policies & Procedures, Application Help, User Manuals, System Documentation etc. Of course the DocMaster User Manual and Application Help are written in DocMaster. Originally developed in 1994, it has been constantly enhanced over the years in response to user suggestions. Here is a link to the original DocMaster posting with more details.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
A Thought on SharePoint as File Server 2.0
A while ago Ed Brill had an article in his blog which mentioned SharePoint being described as File Server 2.0 (a phrase coined by Sean Burgess). This got me thinking - originally Vista was going to have a new data storage and management system called WinFS. I had even read somewhere that WinFS was going to be very much like Lotus Notes in the way it handles data. Then in June 2006 Microsoft shelved those WinFS plans. Did they pull the plug because SharePoint was going to fill that need? Basically could they make more money packaging the functionality as SharePoint that they would building WinFS into Windows? Of course there is no way to know one way or the other, but the phrase File Server 2.0 certainly did get me thinking.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Added Document Issues in DocMaster release 4.2.x
What do you do when you are reading though a published document like a policy or procedure, and find a problem or error? DocMaster now has an answer: create an issue. Issues are a special form of comments, complete with a simple (but customizable) workflow. In the screen shot below you can see an example of a new issue, along with the issue categorization and workflow.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Added Sarbanes Oxley (Sox) to DocMaster in release 4.2
One of my responsibilities at work is to ensure that IT is Sox compliant. Unfortunately the usual manual processes based on spreadsheets and word documents simply don't work very well, and are a lot of effort to maintain. And since Sox procedures should be integrated with other IT procedures, it made sense to extend DocMaster to specifically support Sox.
Possibly the most useful feature added is the "Sox Documentation" view, which includes a color coded calendar showing the current status of Sox monitoring. This is a huge time saver, and has organized our Sox work so well that, at the end of May 08, we are completely up to date! See screen shot below with annotations.
Adding monitoring tasks to the calendar is pretty easy: simply check the appropriate month check box on the control document. See screen shot below.
Sox documentation usually consists of control narrative documents, which are summarized by a spreadsheet. The problem is that it is impossible to keep the narrative documents in sync with the spreadsheet. DocMaster solves this problem by using a separate document for each control, and then summarizing these documents in a Control Matrix view. That normalizes the information, and because the information is now only maintained in one place, total solves the synch problem. DocMaster has special views of the Sox control documents, but those control docs can also be put in folders, along with other policies & procedures.
Once Sox controls are in place, you are required to monitor them to ensure they are working. DocMaster allows you to attach monitoring documents to the controls. This means that when the next monitoring event is due, you can use previous monitoring as a template - a tremendous time saver. It also means that when auditors look at your documentation, they can easily find all monitoring - a tremendous money saver! To track actual monitoring there is a view of all monitoring, categorized by month. See screen shot below.
Release 4.2 also added document issues, but more on that tomorrow.
Possibly the most useful feature added is the "Sox Documentation" view, which includes a color coded calendar showing the current status of Sox monitoring. This is a huge time saver, and has organized our Sox work so well that, at the end of May 08, we are completely up to date! See screen shot below with annotations.
Adding monitoring tasks to the calendar is pretty easy: simply check the appropriate month check box on the control document. See screen shot below.
Sox documentation usually consists of control narrative documents, which are summarized by a spreadsheet. The problem is that it is impossible to keep the narrative documents in sync with the spreadsheet. DocMaster solves this problem by using a separate document for each control, and then summarizing these documents in a Control Matrix view. That normalizes the information, and because the information is now only maintained in one place, total solves the synch problem. DocMaster has special views of the Sox control documents, but those control docs can also be put in folders, along with other policies & procedures.
Once Sox controls are in place, you are required to monitor them to ensure they are working. DocMaster allows you to attach monitoring documents to the controls. This means that when the next monitoring event is due, you can use previous monitoring as a template - a tremendous time saver. It also means that when auditors look at your documentation, they can easily find all monitoring - a tremendous money saver! To track actual monitoring there is a view of all monitoring, categorized by month. See screen shot below.
Release 4.2 also added document issues, but more on that tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
More Excel Woes!
Although the technique "copy as table and paste into spreadsheet" works, it is limited, e.g. if the view is too wide, you can't copy it as a table (but shrinking the column widths does work). Also, graphic icons in a view don't get pasted.
An alternative thought occurred to me: Why not export the view as a Lotus 123 file, and then import it into a IBM Symphony spreadsheet. Surely two IBM products would be compatible with each other? Surely...? Not a chance! The error message is "IBM Symphony do not support this file format." (love the grammar!) Unfortunately Open Office can't import Lotus 123 spreadsheets either, and I haven't yet been able to find any filters on the web. I'll keep trying because there is a need coming up in a few weeks.
An alternative thought occurred to me: Why not export the view as a Lotus 123 file, and then import it into a IBM Symphony spreadsheet. Surely two IBM products would be compatible with each other? Surely...? Not a chance! The error message is "IBM Symphony do not support this file format." (love the grammar!) Unfortunately Open Office can't import Lotus 123 spreadsheets either, and I haven't yet been able to find any filters on the web. I'll keep trying because there is a need coming up in a few weeks.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Excel import workaround that’s better than the original!
Well, you learn something new every day, and sometimes from the most surprising sources. Although we use Outlook for email, we had created an Asset Management application in Notes (using rich text fields to store scans of original invoices etc). We needed a way to export information from this application to an Excel spreadsheet to further manipulate it. This was where I discovered that Excel 2007 no longer imports Lotus 123 - see blog post from April 23.
A few days later the finance person using the Asset Tracker came back to me and said she had solved the export / import problem - just use "Copy as table" and paste into the spreadsheet! Wow - this finance person had never used Notes before, and come up with a work around that was much better / easier to use than the original process. (Note: Although cell background colors are preserved in Open Office, they are miss aligned. Background colors don't paste into MS Excel.) This just goes to show that you never stop learning, and that potentially anybody can teach you something.
A few days later the finance person using the Asset Tracker came back to me and said she had solved the export / import problem - just use "Copy as table" and paste into the spreadsheet! Wow - this finance person had never used Notes before, and come up with a work around that was much better / easier to use than the original process. (Note: Although cell background colors are preserved in Open Office, they are miss aligned. Background colors don't paste into MS Excel.) This just goes to show that you never stop learning, and that potentially anybody can teach you something.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Excel 2007 can’t open Lotus 123 spreadsheets
We hit this problem today trying to export a Notes view as a spreadsheet, and import it into Excel. Older versions of Excel could import a wk4 spreadsheet, but not so in Excel 2007. Maybe IBM / Lotus will finally provide a means to export native Excel files directly from Notes (or maybe this is just wishful thinking...!)
Monday, March 24, 2008
Problems with Microsoft Server 2008?
Microsoft obviously run Windows servers, which they tout as highly reliable. Yet their eOpen web site has had a problem for the past 6 days (and maybe longer - it is just that I have been trying to download some software that we purchased for the past 6 days). I can only presume they are upgrading to Windows Server 2008. But that hardly inspires confidence when considering Windows Server. If Microsoft has this much difficulty getting their software to work, what will I experience?
The strangest thing is that I can reach the eOpen page with Firefox, but not with IE. But that doesn't make any difference, because I can't log in anyway.
The strangest thing is that I can reach the eOpen page with Firefox, but not with IE. But that doesn't make any difference, because I can't log in anyway.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Outlook 2007 Calendar Bug
As a long-time Notes user who now uses Outlook at work, I always keep an eye open for problems / differences etc. Here is one problem with Outlook 2007 where if you drag an HTML email to your calendar, you loose the formatting & images. See the before and after images.
The original email before dragging it to the calendar
The calendar entry created from the email
The original email before dragging it to the calendar
The calendar entry created from the email
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Thoughts on User interfaces - Pages vs Dialogs
I am one of those people who like to keep their financial affairs in order. To help with this task I have used MS Money since about 1993. A while ago problem with Money made me decide to change to Quicken. It was then that I realized the difference between the two classes of interface you find in the software world: broadly speaking they are dialog boxes versus pages.
Dialog boxes developed out of the character mode world where screen real estate was very limited. These days typical Windows applications have dialog boxes scattered throughout. A dialog box works by popping up over the underlying screen, and displaying relevant, context sensitive information when it is needed. Although dialog boxes work very well in some situations, they tend to be over used. Quicken (2006 version) is a very good example of this. When working with Quicken it is very easy to get into a situation where so many dialog boxes are open that you have no idea of where you are. And at that point the user interface has failed. What also shows up in Quicken is that dialog boxes do not scale. They work well when deployed on a small scale, but quickly break down when they are over used.
Although MS Money uses dialog boxes in many places, they also use pages to control many options. Because pages are larger, you can get more on them without cramming everything in (just like printed page layout, white space is important to help make sense of everything presented.) But there is something else going on here: it turns out that the paged interface is just easier for people to use. Our brains seem to be wired that way. As evidence I offer the way the internet has caught on. I think a large part of the success of the internet is that people relate to pages much better that they do to dialog boxes.
I spent about three months reviewing Quicken before taking the plunge and changing over. Doing my homework, reading the reviews, deciding that this was the right thing to do, etc. But very soon after converting my files and using it with real data, it became apparent that a huge mistake had been made. Now I have been working with software for over 10 years, so learning a new package should not be that hard. Yet even allowing for the fact that Quicken was a new package, I was taking 2 to 3 times longer to get the same tasks done compared to MS Money. And that was after using Quicken for two months. I can only attribute the difference to the user interface. And a large part of that is the difference between over using dialog boxes and the page interface.
About six months later when Microsoft release their new version of Money that could import Quicken files I swapped back. And, finally, I can balance my loan accounts again (you simply can't do that in Quicken.). And I get my accounts done in less than half the time it too with Quicken.
(Note: In this article I am not reviewing Quicken. I am simply comparing the Quicken user interface to the one in MS Money to illustrate the difference between the two approaches. If you have been using Quicken for years, it obviously works for you.)
Dialog boxes developed out of the character mode world where screen real estate was very limited. These days typical Windows applications have dialog boxes scattered throughout. A dialog box works by popping up over the underlying screen, and displaying relevant, context sensitive information when it is needed. Although dialog boxes work very well in some situations, they tend to be over used. Quicken (2006 version) is a very good example of this. When working with Quicken it is very easy to get into a situation where so many dialog boxes are open that you have no idea of where you are. And at that point the user interface has failed. What also shows up in Quicken is that dialog boxes do not scale. They work well when deployed on a small scale, but quickly break down when they are over used.
Although MS Money uses dialog boxes in many places, they also use pages to control many options. Because pages are larger, you can get more on them without cramming everything in (just like printed page layout, white space is important to help make sense of everything presented.) But there is something else going on here: it turns out that the paged interface is just easier for people to use. Our brains seem to be wired that way. As evidence I offer the way the internet has caught on. I think a large part of the success of the internet is that people relate to pages much better that they do to dialog boxes.
I spent about three months reviewing Quicken before taking the plunge and changing over. Doing my homework, reading the reviews, deciding that this was the right thing to do, etc. But very soon after converting my files and using it with real data, it became apparent that a huge mistake had been made. Now I have been working with software for over 10 years, so learning a new package should not be that hard. Yet even allowing for the fact that Quicken was a new package, I was taking 2 to 3 times longer to get the same tasks done compared to MS Money. And that was after using Quicken for two months. I can only attribute the difference to the user interface. And a large part of that is the difference between over using dialog boxes and the page interface.
About six months later when Microsoft release their new version of Money that could import Quicken files I swapped back. And, finally, I can balance my loan accounts again (you simply can't do that in Quicken.). And I get my accounts done in less than half the time it too with Quicken.
(Note: In this article I am not reviewing Quicken. I am simply comparing the Quicken user interface to the one in MS Money to illustrate the difference between the two approaches. If you have been using Quicken for years, it obviously works for you.)
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