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SynApps Moves Into Exciting New Area: Financial Compliance!

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As we move into what looks like an economy shaking off the last of the doldrums, many financial services firms will probably feel they have more than enough on their hands.

I am sure they will have, however they also need to manage an important piece of core business, even as they plan to seize new market opportunities. The problem can be summed up by two key acronyms: XDMP (for ‘Disclosure Management Platform’) and XBRL.

It’s a key area of compliance reporting that SynApps has started to work in, partnering with a great dedicated firm in this particular area, CoreFiling, as well as our prime tech partner, EMC, and a major global consulting brand. (In fact, CoreFiling, which is based in Oxford, is viewed as the leader in this market.)

The basic background is that globally, regulatory reporting is going electronic. Authorities, post the Credit Crunch/global financial crisis, are looking at banks’ financial reporting and making decisions on whether banks have enough equity, in order to prevent the issues we suffered from over the last few years.

They are also standardising the way they want international banks to share this information with them, with most work being done around XBRL, which is to say the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, a freely available and global standard for exchanging business information.

Banks need to generate a standard financial report to meet these regulatory demands; these reports are being produced such that the auditing and compliance organisations can get a clear report of whether the bank has over-stretched themselves or not. This standard format is called XDMP, which is where CoreFiling come in, as it produces the best tools available to input data from Excel spreadsheets, transform it for the XDMP format and then output it into files that can be sent to the regulator containing all the compliant information they need.

Provision of reports in the XBRL format is becoming mandatory from April this year (2014), when all banks will need to be able to produce this information. The truth is, they can do it today – by getting 20 to 30 people to run about, find the information, convert it manually into the XBRL format to send to the regulator.

But it is a very laborious, error-prone, manual way of doing it. We are used, as a document and content management company, to helping organisations replace cumbersome back-end, paper-chase style processes. So we have developed the XDMP solution to help financial firms crack their XBRL problem and get the process automated, with the system sitting on our core Documentum technology. What’s even better, we have a customer. It’s a well-known High St brand, but at the moment we can’t reveal the name. As soon as we can, we’ll be telling you more about this fascinating engagement!

This is a new area for SynApps but one with fantastic potential – and so I am sure it’s a topic we will be talking to you about over the next few months as we move to help other firms get to grips with their core compliance reporting issues.

 

 

XDS: A Key NHS IT Term You Need To Know For 2014

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Last year we spoke a lot about the power our NHS customers had started to get from sharing patient information safely but electronically using Vendor Neutral Archives, or VNAs (e.g. ‘Why Does VNA Matter – And How Do You Identify It?’). The idea is to extend proven electronic content formats from the PACS and large radiography image sharing field toward a possible new basis for the kind of grass roots Electronic Health Record the Health Secretary would like to see a lot more of – as would we all, of course.

As the new year gets properly underway, many NHS managers will already have started taking these powerful ideas forward.

Indeed, we are really excited by the conversations that we see starting to happen here. Many are subject to confidentiality, as I am sure you understand, so I will have to discuss in general terms. But believe me, this is a real debate I’m reporting on – and one which the participants are convinced will deliver real results soon.

Some context first. What we’re seeing in the market is that VNA is becoming a relatively well-understood topic to most Trusts. At the same time, we think NHS managers are also starting to realise that a PACS vendor ‘owning’ their VNA option is not really a solution either: what many are starting to realise is that what they’re after is a content management solution which includes VNA.

This is the conversation we’re seeing in a number of Trusts we’re talking to. It’s a conversation driven by IT realising that if they can put a piece of technology in place that will address both their DICOM challenges/needs and also their non-DICOM data, the clinical notes and documentation they need to worry about, they will have killed two birds with one stone. This is leading many to go to market and look at ways to do VNA and EDM in the same platform.

What’s helping drive this is proven pioneer success, like our ground-breaking engagement with Liverpool plus, Trusts understand the rationale, the basic principles make sense – it’s the practicalities of harnessing the power of VNA that is the discussion now.

But what’s genuinely excited to see is that the debate here is also taking in what I only talked about briefly in 2013: XDS, Cross Document Sharing. You may be aware that we have done some great work with our partner firm Sectra at Kingston Hospital .

Briefly, we are repatriating huge amounts, 19TB in fact, of DICOM data from the Trust’s long-term archive into our Vendor Neural Archive which will be integrated with Sectra. And part of the reason Kingston is doing this is because it is pursuing this long-term vision of VNA and electronic data and content management all living in one unified repository.

Our primary ECM partner EMC has also sold a similar solution to a neighbouring NHS institution, St George’s NHS Trust. As a result, a number of other institutions in South West of London are contacting us – SynApps, Sectra and EMC – to see what we can do to build on this, for their region.

All I can really safely say at this stage about what seems to be emerging from these neighbourly chats is a completely new and effective way of doing NHS information sharing, based on XDS.

There’s some work to do here in addressing technical challenges to do authentication and patient consent – and how you can build on security functionality to help protect patient confidentiality in a way that also makes information available to clinicians.

I think these are problems that will be solved. I also think XDS is going to be a term you will hear more and more about in the course of 2014 – which I think can only be a good thing for anyone who wants to see true Electronic Health Records take off in the UK.

Ten Years of Innovation. How About Many More Years of The Same?

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I never thought I’d be saying this – but we are ten years old!

SynApps Solutions is celebrating our first successful decade.

November 2013 marked ten years of us providing powerful content management integration solutions that have been transforming the way our customers work.

One of the foundations to this ten years of success is the fact that our business never seems to stand still. Continuous innovation, in a range of fields, from Documentum and Alfresco support services to our work with Electronic Health Records and development of our ConX range of applications – all of which wrap up to provide ‘scalable content and records management solutions that exceed our customers expectations’ – that’s become our ‘brand.’ And that’s something we are incredibly proud of.

The demand for constant innovation was in our DNA from the start. To offer our customers the maximum benefit, all our solutions and services had to be relevant and fit-for-purpose – addressing their current and emerging business challenges, too.

Let me remind you of the SynApps’ ‘garage story’ – how all this came about. Jim Whitelaw and Richard Wiffin, formerly members of the north European professional services senior management team at ECM (electronic content management) leader Documentum, found out they shared the same vision: to innovate and take solutions to areas that were limited by COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products.

A delay that led to a long journey

In the spring of 2003, Jim and Richard had ended up stuck at Heathrow Airport by a delayed flight. While usefully passing the time networking, with some relaxation time in the bar thrown in, the seeds of SynApps were sown. 

That initial conversation was built on with a series of other convivial chats with soon-to-be co-founders Jason Scholes, Paul Edwards, James Paton and Neil Johnson at that well-known hangout of tech entrepreneurs – the Spaghetti House restaurant near Victoria Station in London.

In such salubrious surroundings, the shape of an exciting new business was soon visible, and SynApps was founded on November 10th, 2013.

Drawing on the founders’ project delivery skills, we began by focusing on ECM consultancy and implementation services for large, blue-chip organisations. We soon had customers not just in the UK, but in Benelux and beyond – one of our very first assignments was to design and implement a loans processing system for a major bank based in Australia, for example.

Solidifying our heritage with Documentum, we became that supplier’s first premier level European partner. That relationship matters to us, albeit (because Documentum became part of the EMC family) now under EMC’s C3P partner programme.

In practical terms, that means in addition to content strategy development and consulting services, the resale and implementation of the market-leading Documentum ECM platform, as well as hosting and support services, is part of the portfolio of services we jointly offer.

Achievements

Some key milestones over ten years of hard work:

  • 2003 SynApps founded
  • 2004 Mark Winstone joins as Sales & Marketing Director. ECM portfolio expands to include specialist software and hosting services, as well as consultancy and implementation
  • 2006 Development and release of ConXLoader, a bulk content migration tool
  • 2009 Development and release of ConXSys, an integration framework to connect content from line-of-business applications to an enterprise content management platform
  • 2010 SynApps becomes a Gold Partner of Alfresco
  • 2011 We released ConXMail and ConXOffice, tools that allowing content from Microsoft email and office systems to be incorporated in ECM
  • 2011 We were proud to be awarded EMC’s prestigious IIG Partner Innovation Award for the ConXApps suite of ECM solutions
  • 2012 A very big year for us as we partnered with both EMC and J4Care to design and deliver healthcare-specific content management solutions, particularly in the area of vendor neutral archives (VNAs). We are now an established leader in this field, helping a growing number of NHS Trusts migrate towards more open content-sharing environments (especially where medical image records are involved)
  • 2012 – 2013 We’ve developed and then launched a comprehensive set of SaaS offerings through the UK government’s G-Cloud in the areas of case management, document and records management and content capture
  • 2013 Last but not least (and have you visited us yet?) we moved into our new home – a dedicated, high-security support office in Hemel Hempstead.The things Jim and Richard talked about when they were stuck at Heathrow helped accelerate our growth in the past ten years, despite a tough market, creating an organisation which now has a headcount of 40.

    And as a team we have continued to extend, hone and develop our offerings, formed some strong partnerships and we have become an acknowledged leader in the ECM market. In addition to our long-standing EMC relationship, we are now an Alfresco Gold Partner, plus we have forged strong partnerships with major systems integrators like CapGemini, CGI, CSC, QinetiQ and Computacenter, all of whom we support with specialist ECM solutions and services.

    Thank you!

    We are very proud of what SynApps has achieved in the last 10 years and are looking forward to continued growth and success over the next few years,

    It goes without saying that we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for our creative and immensely hardworking people – nor our ambitious customers and the visions which they have asked us to help make real. I want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all those who have shared in our journey. Here’s to the next ten years!

Content Migration In Practice: The 30 TB Example

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In our previous blogs (‘ECM Data Migration’ (I) And ‘ECM Data Migration’ (II): How Could We Help Here?’), we explored some of the benefits that customers can get via smart use of content migration services. But it’s one thing to talk about benefits in the abstract, the real proof of the data migration ‘pudding’ is in real-world customer success. So, today, let’s look at just such a case study – as I am sure you will find it insightful, even if you are in a different sector.

We are delighted to be able to report the successful completion of a big data migration project earlier this year for Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust. It was a large move! It involved the transfer of over 30 Terabytes – encompassing some 95 million individual medical images – to a new open standard, vendor-neutral archive (VNA), which is going to be the main foundation for the Trust’s EPR (electronic patient record) strategy going forward. Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest and busiest in the North of England. It will move into new state-of-the-art premises in 2017, but wants to be paper-light in the way it manages patient records first.

To put the move another way, it’s the medical image content needed to look after over 560,000 patients as held in 96 million study files. We took seven years worth of DICOM image data from the Trust’s older PACS to its new home (Carestream). We also managed the migration of the most recent two years’ data to the new Carestream PACS. SynApps worked in a successful partnership here with Pukka-J, a specialist in medical imaging and software development.

The new platform, based on our partner EMC’s Collaborative Healthcare Solution, has already started the easy archiving/retrieval of medical images from the Trust’s Radiology PACS systems in and out of the VNA.

What’s great about this system is that it’s a real example of what I talked about before – keeping what’s important and relevant even as you move to a new paradigm. In this case, we’re supporting all Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen’s historical Radiology data from 2007 onwards but also providing a home for other types of medical image content in both DICOM and non-DICOM format, all of which is currently residing in other departmental systems  – therefore maximising its future use, potential and value.

The customer has gone on record about the value content migration has given back. James Norman, CIO at the Trust, comments: “This entire project is pivotal to our strategy of advancing patient care and creating easy access to complete, unified electronic medical records. SynApps has been meticulous in its work, and has delivered against every target, which is no mean feat given the extremely high volumes of content.”

As with any data migration of this size, there was a considerable need for continuous planning, testing and monitoring to ensure the successful completion of this exercise within the required timeline. Close involvement with the Royal Liverpool Radiology PACS administrators was also critical to our success.

 This was a great project and I think it says a lot about content migration’s possibilities.

 

How To Get Your Users To Buy You More Beer…

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When we last spoke about PST files, we started talking about our great new range of tools, the ConXApps family. It’s now time for us to talk about how all this technology works with that very widespread collaboration standard, Microsoft’s SharePoint.

There is something of a stock phrase in the IT world at the moment that everyone has SharePoint – but not everyone knows what it is! The idea is that Microsoft, a fiendishly effective sales organisation, has been able to get a massive number of licences for this platform, but that not all its customers have done that much with it yet. There may be some truth to this, but SharePoint unquestionably provides an excellent collaboration capability. What’s more there will always be people who want to go down the SharePoint route, which is a great use for your corporate licence for it.

Our view however is that while SharePoint is a great route to try, there are limitations. Worth noting if you are a public sector customer, for one: SharePoint doesn’t do the Records Management very well. If you are in healthcare or social care, where Records are particularly important, you are not getting a solution (unlike with ConX, which works in tandem with market leading ECM platforms) that is able to identify and help you manipulate Records as you are working.

Think, for example, about when you want to declare some data as a Record. That’s typically a very arduous process in many public sector user’s environments, which is why people either don’t do it or it is a task left to people who’ve done it all their lives and that is all they understand.

If you have the ability for an end user not to worry about that, it is going to be very useful, I’d contend. That’s going to mean you can say to the team, Store your e-mail, interact with people, collaborate on that information and then when it reaches a particular part of its life cycle it will be automatically declared as a Record and that’s all taken care of in the background with the ConX approach.

They’re going to be queuing up to buy you beers for that, as it will take a huge amount of hassle out of their working day.

 For more information on the SynApps ConXApps range, please go to https://www.synapps-solutions.com/products

 

 

ECM Data Migration (II): How Could We Help Here?

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Last time we spoke, I started to talk about the issue we are seeing when organisations want to move to a more modern or fully integrated ECM (enterprise content management) solution but struggle with all the legacy content and variety of data formats they want to preserve, as these form a kind of corporate memory.

There are a number of professional services firms that can help, but what we would say to a customer facing this issue is to look to working with a company like ours that has specific technology and product to help. Let me explain.

For a start, we can quickly help you transform older data into a format which can be displayed in your new system. Typically, that encompasses converting such content into a PDF or an image so you can expect to easily navigate through your preserved content in more of a visual way.

We can also offer you a set of services to take you through the data analysis. In fact, once we have analysed the data, we’d work with you to either develop specific tools to extract the content (if need be we may need to develop some new ones) though in most cases we can usually get around it by using our existing tool set. (This is where our ConXLoader tool comes to the fore; it comes to you with a set of already on-boarded migration services, basically.)

We can then go further into the process of extraction of data, the mapping of that to the target data structure, and any formatting or reformatting of content that is required. Think of a series of iterations where we take bite-size chunks to work out exactly what is the most appropriate process for getting the data out from the source and into the target and then turn those bite-size chunks into slightly larger ‘plates of food’, so that we can take it into a test environment, that will wrap around an application which is developed… I hope you see the process here, and agree it is pretty rigorous and fool-proof.

And it works in real life – with one NHS customer we migrated approximately 100,000 patient records from their existing system into Documentum using ConXLoader, while with a very large well-known retailer we migrated roughly 6 million invoice records out of a proprietary system into a new SAP platform. Plus we are in the process of working with a central government agency with around 5 million records at Impact Level 3 (IL3) to move to a new system too.

To sum up on this crucial ECM issue of well-structured content migration service projects, my experience with customers convinces me there are a number of things we can help you with:

  • Confidence that your legacy data will be preserved (Who likes to lose anything – especially if it is of value?)
  • Enhancing of the data’s value; a great side effect of a good ECM data migration process is enabling you to find information much more easily and readily
  • The process of being able to search and retrieve information
  • Instant access, or instant visualisation – by which I am thinking of the ability to see previews of your information once it has been migrated.

We’d love to talk to you to see if you agree we can do all this for you!

In any case, best of luck with your data migration journey – may it be less hassle than it too often can be.

 

ECM Data Migration (I): What Is It And Why Do You Need To Worry About It?

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What is data migration, and why is it a real issue for users of enterprise content management (ECM)?

Organisations have a requirement to manage their information – be that their documents, their engineering drawings, their NHS scans, whatever it may be. And as we know, many rightly look to ECM or a good Content Records Management system to manage all that content.

The reality is, though, that in a lot more cases than people care to think about, their information is housed in legacy systems – which could be as simple as a file system, an older document management system or perhaps a combination of both (or more). They want to be able to wrap that information in some intelligent data so they can find it at a later date, bringing it into their enterprise repository, with the vision that the enterprise repository is going to be where all of their core information is going to be: maybe research information, scans, documents they work on a day to day basis, reports – all this information needs to be held somewhere so they can go and find it.

Here’s the problem: the idea of the repository is a sound one and we recommend it. But just how do you get all that important information held in these legacy systems into that corporate repository? This is made more complicated by the fact that in many cases the older systems are coming to end-of-life – and you don’t want to lose any of that information.

So, welcome to the data migration issue. If valuable information the business needs or wants to keep is on a platform that may be about to stop being supported, what can you do?

More and more companies in this situation are turning to specialist, dedicated content migration services, like the SynApps one. We work with you to understand what information it is you want to maintain, what the data model is that sits around it, what information you wrap around your content so that you can go and search for it and retrieve it. That will allow us to then take the information perform a data-mapping between the source and the target system (the ‘source’ being the legacy system, the ‘target’ being the brand shiny new car).

So what we also need to do, as well as understand the data, is to understand the different content types that you have to ensure that you are able to view that information in the new system. I do have to say that in some cases that information may be held in a format that is no longer available and there aren’t tools to display that information, e.g. some old word-processing format. But we work to salvage data in that situation too.

In the next SynApps blog, I’d like to delve a bit more into the details of the specific help we can give you on this important issue. But I hope you agree that it is a real challenge – and I also hope you have started to think about how you will cope with it too.