How to Change the Annoying Copy Address Feature in Mac Mail
Although there are not many annoying features on Mac OS, this small "copy address" function really slows things down when pasting into another application. The way that pasted email addresses appear as default is like this:
Joe Bloggs <joe@bloggs.com>
If you were just after the email address – which is, intuitively, what you would have thought "copy address" would give you – you then have to remove the name and the surrounding brackets.
Thankfully, being Unix based, there is a quick 'straight to the roots' fix via terminal. Simply open up terminal and enter the following:
defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO
Now, restart Mail and give it a try!
What is CMIS?
There are many Electronic Document & Record Management systems out there and it's probably fair to say that the majority don't have a bulk scanning front-end to them. Certainly if they do, its not the core focus of the product so it can be 'flakey' to say the least. This is one of the reasons why products like Kofax Capture and Input Accel have excelled in the marketplace, their ability to 'front end' the process of changing physical documents to electronic is very good. This, however, has often come at a cost; release scripts are customised for each client and are different no matter which EDRM system you choose to adopt.
Whilst, as a salesman, I love the idea that a customer can part with a small fortune to customise their capture, and from then on they are tied in to me as a customer because we have written some proprietary code, the businessman in me says there has got to be a better way. I don't like proprietary and I don't like being tied to a single manufacturer for business processing, which is probably why I've enjoyed getting under the hood of a number of Open Source technologies. One phrase that I came across very early in my research was Content Management Interoperability Services or CMIS, which – to me as a specialist in the capture of documents – was very interesting.
CMIS is an open standard. The concept behind it is very simple and driven by the fact that most EDRM and ECM installations are at departmental level, so the solutions are purchased on an 'as required' basis. This has left behind a legacy of islands of data and documents which could be used by the whole enterprise but are in actual fact only accessible by individual departments. Making these individual systems talk to one another is very hard and very costly, but as time goes and technology evolves the corporate requirement is beginning to vastly outweigh the individual needs of users. As a standard, the ultimate aim of CMIS is to simplify this process of integration or interoperability. This massively reduces the costs and effort involved.
So why was I so taken by CMIS? Well, as a first step, it makes a proprietary system like Documentum or Open Text a little less proprietary. But for me, being focused on the capture side of things, it makes integration with repositories from a single point of capture much easier. It means that we don't need to write custom integrations with a number of EDRMS solutions and we can image enable current repositories, even if clients have a different one for each department with the same method of capture. This, to me, makes an awful lot of sense and relieves a large amount of pain and management from the IT department, certainly when you consider that capture is just a small part of the overall solution.
Who's signed up for CMIS? Well here's a list of some of the EDRM solutions that are CMIS compliant:
Alfresco
EMC Documentum
Fabasoft
IBM FileNet
HP Autonomy Interwoven
Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010
OpenText
As for the Document Scanning/Document Capture, as far as I know, the only company that has picked up this banner is Ephesoft. Whilst, at this point in time I think that CMIS is at a very early stage in terms of adoption and impact in the decision making process, I think in the long run it can have a big impact.
Conceptually, my ability to go to a client and say "...your knowledge workers are using Sharepoint, HR are using Documentum and Accounts are using FileNet but that actually doesn't matter too much to me as they are all CMIS compliant – I can use a single capture platform for all without writing complex release scripts..." is a pretty powerful idea and one not to be overlooked.
The Electronic Mailroom (Part 3)
Here's the final part of my blog on the Electronic Mailroom.
So far we've been using the analogy of 'dirty washing' to highlight our process and bring it to a much simpler level of understanding for everybody.
In Part 2 of the blog we sorted the washing and washed it. In business terms, we worked out what the documents were and then extracted data. There are still two stages left for the washing: it needs to be ironed
and put somewhere ready for use.
The Ironing
We've completed the washing, it's all dry and the next step is to iron the clothes (after all, you wouldn't go out in clothes that were covered in creases!). What we are doing here, hidden away in the corner of our software solution, is verifying our data (ironing out the bits we don't want to be there). The documents are taken to other applications and databases and are checked to ensure what we have is correct. Making sure, for instance, that a customer reference number is already in our CRM system or a PO Number is allocated in the accounting package.
There is a lot of complexity under the hood here and, from a user's point of view, you should be assured that the right system will gather all the relevant information from line of business apps and databases without any human intervention. Meanwhile, we should remember that the dirt that was extracted is still sat in the machine and linked (invisibly) to the item of clothing it came from.
Putting The Washing Away
We're now ready to put the washing away in the right places, well, for the physical items/documents that invariably is a cupboard or chest of drawers. Think of these as databases. You're better off having on large cupboard to store all of your clothes rather than a number of different places. It just makes things easier to manage.
All of our documents now wind up in their rightful places, but how do users get at them? That's where the dirt comes in: the dirt (extracted data) is used to cross reference line of business applications, databases and which drawer (document type) it came from. Essentially, the data is used by users to start internal business processes and to manage their archives.
Well, there you go, that's a very high level, very simplistic overview of the Electronic Mailroom. This technology is here now. There are so many benefits to this type of solution and with the basis of understanding you have learnt from these posts you are now on the right path towards getting the most out of the Electronic Mailroom. It's a lot more than just capturing a document as it comes into a business, there's a whole load of intelligence there behind the scenes.
Click2Scan Limited have been working in this sophisticated niche of the document management marketplace for some time now and our expertise is utilised by businesses from all walks of life, including charities, manufacturers and universities.
The Electronic Mailroom (Part 2)
In Part 1 we started looking at the world of the Electronic Mailroom and how we best explain its uses to those people who have not come across the concept before. I tend to use a lot of analogies to cover this, and in this case we're using 'dirty washing'. I've used this on numerous occasions to speak with non technical people about, and place a seed of understanding as to, the processes we undertake.
Sorting the Washing
When we receive the washing it's all muddled up. It contains lots of different colours and they need to be sorted because we can only wash colours together if they are the same colour. This is a pre-washing process and would be undertaken by a human. However, in the electronic mailroom world the software is intelligent enough to identify the different colours. Now, remember that the colours I'm referring to are your different document types. The first thing the software will do is use its business-specific logic to find out what 'colour' the 'washing' is. Is it blue? (maybe an invoice), is it red? (maybe a letter), is it yellow? (maybe an application form).
So, sorting the washing is the same as identifying the document types. This is important because we need to know what the document type is for the next stage of the process.
Doing the Washing
This next stage is where we put each different type of washing in for its specific wash.
Before we put on the load we need to remove the dirt from our washing. The 'dirt' is the data that we need to extract. This part can be really complicated as we may need to verify that we have removed the right dirt by looking at samples from elsewhere. But in its simplest form we just want to remove the dirt!
Now, we have an item of blue washing – it's an invoice – and we need to extract the PO number, invoice number and many more different types of data. There's only one thing holding us back at this point: we don't know where on the page this information is, because we may have different 'shades' of blue for different suppliers or the dirt may be in different places. In an electronic mailroom scenario the software uses business logic to find the dirt, or data, and remove it automatically.
So, there we go, we've Sorted our washing and washed it. In a practical world though, theres still more to do. It needs to be ironed and placed into the cupboard, ready for use. These two final stages I'll cover in part 3 of the blog.
A Quick, Nerdy Valentine’s Gift from Click2Scan
I bet when you woke up this morning the first you thought was definitely not, "Hmm...I wonder if Google can produce me something cool to celebrate valentines day". Neither did I, but I was amazed to see this great use of Google Graph and we would like to give it to you as our gift.
All you have to do is search the following maths equation in Google:
sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01 from -4 to 4
Or let us Google that for you?
If you think you're a maths genius and can make our design even better then why not tweet us @click2scan? If we think your design is good enough then we may just re-tweet it!