Overview of Signate Technology
Signate is based upon a few broad themes, derived after years of observing other document management and imaging systems in operation. They are:- Search is better than folders
- Data about documents changes
- The data you want to capture changes
- Bottlenecks are usually at the Capture phase
Search
The easiest way to find the documents you're interested in is searching for them. This is the dominant form of navigation on the Web, and is becoming the dominant form on the desktop PC as well. Why vendors continue to produce document management systems with nonexistent or inferior search is beyond us. The case is simple: if you have too many documents and too little time to hierarchically catalogue them on your personal computer, then what are the chances that a business with vastly more documents has that time as well?Accordingly, we identified search early on as a critical component of our system. Not only that, it had to be freeform search. Directed search is too limited and clunky for most users, rather just type what you're interested in and let the machine figure out the rest.
The search engine we use is well tested, scales to billions of documents and is one of the fastest search engines on the planet.
Metadata
Metadata, or data about data, is critical in Document Management Systems. It is all very well putting a document into such a system, but how are you going to find it? How are your businesses processes going to know what to do about it? Metadata can be broadly divided into two main categories: structured and unstructured. Structured metadata is useful for computers and processes; it can be used to decide what happens to a document in your business, for example that claims documents go to the claims department. Structured data is incredibly useful and powerful. However, some of the information in the document does not fall so neatly into structured data. This unstructured data can be very useful as well, especially for finding documents. Signate is one of the few systems that support both forms of data.An important point about structured metadata is that it can change, even if the document it is based on does not. A typical example would be marriage. Given a woman who is getting married, and has decided she will be changing her name from Smith to Jones, what do we do about all the documents that refer to her as Ms Smith? Do we leave them as is? That is certainly more "correct", but it means we won't easily be able to find the documents about her. Do we update all the old documents metadata to Mrs Jones? But that means we lose historical information. Signate has a simple solution to this issue. In Signate, the metadata is versioned as well as the file. This means that in our example, the old records would each have two versions: one referring to Ms Smith, and one to Mrs Jones. Both can be searched and thus all our worries about the metadata fall away.
In similar fashion, Signate also allows you to easily change your mind about exactly which data you need captured against a document. Consider a situation where you've decided that you capture the Surname, the First Name, and the Identity Number from a document. Now, for various reasons, you decide to remove Identity Number from the mix. All well and good, most Document Management systems will happily allow this. But now consider what happens if you decide you made a mistake, and want to bring Identity Number back. In every Document Management system we've ever see, the system will consider Identity Number a new field entirely and you will have it back, except without any of the data that you had previously captured against it. Not with Signate. In Signate, information you have captured is never lost. In Signate, the only data "missing" in this case would the documents which were captured when you said you didn't want Identity Number. Since it wasn't captured, it won't be there.
No other Document Management even approaches Signate's level of security and flexibility when it comes to your Metadata.
Concurrency
Computers can do many things at the same time. So, one wonders, why do you spend so much time waiting for your computer to accomplish tasks? Well, sometimes what you've asked it to do is both complex and is required for you to complete your work. A major area in Document Management where computers make your staff wait is when they are adding or classifying the documents. Classification is a particular problem, since those very few systems that allow you to specify validations on your data invariably stop the user continuing with their work while the validation executes. Since such validation often connects to slower line of business systems, this can be a significant bottleneck.Signate takes advantage of the multiprocessing that computers are capable of to avoid such bottlenecks. Data validations are performed in the background as the user completes the data capture form, ensuring that little or no data remains to be validated when the user completes their work. This has the advantage of providing swift feedback to the user as well. Once the user completes the work, there is no necessity to have them wait while the system is updated, and so Signate immediately moves them on to the next piece of work, which it had been automatically downloading as the user worked.
Such optimisations account for only a few seconds, but a few seconds every document over weeks and months can add up to an enormous amount very quickly. Consider a situation where you save 5 seconds out of every minute. That works out to about 168 hours a year saved, per staff member. That's a full working month of 21 days. If you have 12 staff, then they're working as if you have 13. That's not due to extra training or motivation or any of the other mechanisms you can use to boost productivity, that's just because their computer system didn't waste their time. Every single bit of productivity improvement you get out of your staff goes straight to your bottom line instead of being wasted staring at progress bars or frozen programs.
Signate Vault
One of the major advantages of a document management system is that you don't have to worry about paper anymore. Except, that's not entirely true, you still have to keep the paper for legal reasons, in case you end up in court. Well, that's unless you use Signate Vault. Vault is a mechanism where Signate verifies that a document has not been tampered with since it was added to the system. Not only that, it can prove which person added the document and they certified to the system that the document was a faithful reproduction.This greatly reduces your burden of proof and makes it far more likely that the electronic document will be accepted by a court. Nothing makes it 100% certain, but Signate Vault ensures that the technology itself won't disqualify the document.
Other Technology
Signate also has a great deal of technology that assists in areas not addressed in detail here. Signate Vault ensures the fidelity of your documents by use of Digital Signatures. Signate also has a very powerful and customisable workflow system built into it which allows you to make fundamental changes to the way your documents are processed. Our powerful error reporting and update system allows us to swiftly resolve any issues you encounter.Conclusion
Too many systems behave like glorified file shares, a passive receptacle for documents that helps you not a jot in terms of organising them, finding them or managing them. Signate explicitly rejects such an approach; in fact, this form of operating is actually infeasible in Signate.Signate enforces a way of working with documents that means your documents will be secure, easy to find and easy to manage.
