Tags: ECM

SynApps Launches New Tool, ConXAudit, To Combat ECM Suite Audit Trail Build-Up

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System will turn your passive ECM audit trail into the true business tool it needs to be

Maidenhead, UK – February 10, 2015 – SynApps Solutions, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions leader, has launched ConXAudit, an indexing tool to transform endlessly-growing ECM audit trails into highly indexed forms that are much easier to work with.

ConXAudit addresses a big issue that many ECM users struggle with: audit trail build-up. Enterprise ECM suites have a built-in audit trail feature which is useful for quality control and compliance – but the trail builds as more use is made of the system, leading to a database of potentially millions of rows.

A database that large is inherently difficult to navigate and interrogate, removing the value of an audit trail, plus it acts as a major brake on the overall performance of the ECM itself.

SynApps’ ConXAudit deals with both problems but also makes the audit trail into a useful source of management information by opening up the data for reporting and KPI purposes via a highly graphical, easy-to-use interface and powerful statistical analysis and graphing tools.

“Customers tell us that by turning to ConXAudit they are finding a difficult to use feature of their ECMs, the audit database, is becoming a truly mission-critical, useful business tool,” commented Mark Winstone, Sales and Marketing Director at SynApps.

“One of the first customers of ConXAudit is a major transport entity which has turned an audit database with 65 million rows in it into a useful management dashboard after years of problems,” added Winstone.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, SynApps provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum and Alfresco, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies.

Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow us on Twitter @SynappsSol

 

 

Another Key Year For ECM – And Synapps – Is Starting

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Mark Winstone gets out his crystal ball to try and see what 2015 looks like delivering for both NHS and other Enterprise Content Management customers

January is a natural time of year for reflecting briefly on what 2015 looks like shaping up to be.

Here at SynApps Solutions, the answer is ‘a pretty good one!’ We are going into 2015 after a strong 12 months. In particular, 2014 was a very strong year for us in the UK healthcare market. This was due to our work in the first part of the year around our Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), which has now evolved into our new Clinical Content Store.

Some really significant customer wins are starting to come through on this, like our project at Northampton General Hospital (https://www.synapps-solutions.com/news/northampton-general-hospital-chooses-a-synapps-vendor-neutral-archive-content-store), more of which we will be sharing with you soon and which will be the basis for very strong growth in the months ahead for us. Which is great for us, sure – but the real significance of VNA/CCS is the way it’s starting to help NHS Trusts start to work together and start properly (and securely) sharing patient data at long last.

No wonder, then, that I and the rest of the SynApps team think our 2015 healthcare ‘story’ is going to be all about expanding our footprint in the Vendor Neutral Archive space – both with our existing and new customers, starting with conversations around the entry level VNA and then the Clinical Content Store. That’s because we see enormous potential in potentially retiring legacy systems that they have and transferring the real ‘gold dust’ into the Store.

We are also very much aligned, meanwhile, with the overall NHS mission of going paperless by 2015 (http://digitalchallenge.dh.gov.uk). That drive from central government is making budget available and allowing Clinical Chief Information Officers in the NHS to finally start investing in VNA-style platform implementations as opposed to print solutions, as the market finally moves on from the National Programme (for all of its many positives, it really is time to start thinking beyond it now). Oh, and one more thing we are really excited about, the development of Open Source ECM solutions especially for those areas of the NHS that have been neglected until recently.

Let’s conclude on the public sector side of things for now with a quick set of thoughts on cloud. We are getting a lot of interest outside the NHS as regards cloud-delivered ECM. (In the NHS, there are applications such as the personal health record which do lend themselves to more of a cloud-based application, but our take on that is that security concerns will tend to push managers to more of a ‘hybrid’ approach.) But we do have to express a bit of caution about any expectations that 2015 will be a massive year for G-Cloud (or what we must all now start calling the Government Digital Marketplace (https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk). What we are finding as a long-term G-Cloud support and supplier is that G-Cloud seems to be more for commodity items buying and not for more configurable solutions. We are very happy with the CloudStore but, as it stands at least, expect to get more business with the UK public sector via the other buying frameworks out there as they tend to be more applicable to the kind of configurable solution we as a company tend to sell.

What do I mean by configurable? G-Cloud is great for when you say, ‘I want to buy an HR personnel records management solution for x pounds per month,’ you buy it, the functionality is fixed, it does what it says on the tin. The reality is, though, certainly with enterprise content management, that pretty much every customer we work with doesn’t want that – they want their ECM to be configured to work in line with how their specific business works. So for 2015 at least, we don’t think there will be a lot of content management procurement that will go through the Marketplace.

A move to platform ECM?

Healthcare was a very important area for us already, but the growth of acceptance of our VNA approach to helping hospitals deal with patient imagery and data is putting it ever-higher in our business mix; I would say probably 40 to 50% of our activity in 2015 as a company will be in healthcare, in fact.

But that doesn’t mean that our other corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) work is getting de-prioritised; far from it! We are going great guns with our key partners of EMC and Alfresco in promoting content management in all sorts of markets. Our business is about providing content management solutions, with healthcare as just one face of that.

What of that market, though – the wider content management one? It’s going to be another good year for ECM, we predict. For one, it is still very much a growth market and a growing business. In terms of other drivers, 2015 will see ECM become more and more about mobile access, we think – about being able to get your content management on the go/wherever the business needs it, there is quite a push in that direction in the marketplace. We are also definitely starting to hear more from our customers about a general move towards hosted solutions and many more ‘all cloud’ solutions, too.

What’s behind that shift: businesses are much keener on platform solution these days. Or rather, whereas at one time we used to see ECM as all about one application or project, now it’s much more about creating a more sustainable, long-term environment for important information. Just before Christmas, for example, I spoke to a manufacturing company who see their 2015 mission as about getting proper control of what they call their ‘crown jewel’ documents – documents that contain the ‘secret recipes’ for the most profitable products they offer – but who are simultaneously looking at content management as a platform for their organisation over a long period of time. In terms of crystal ball gazing, I expect to have a lot of similar conversations in the next 12 months.

Well, there you have it – our view on what we expect to see for us as a company in 2015 in the health and wider ECM sectors. Can I take this opportunity to wish you all the very best in this bright New Year!

Major UK Trust Selects SynApps As New Image Management Solution Partner

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Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust says this will provide us with the basis to share patient information and radiology images more easily within the Trust and with other London hospitals

Maidenhead, UK – 14 January 2015 – Content management leaderSynApps Solutions has today announced that London’s Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will use its VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) platform to secure transparent and safe access to images and patient information throughout a patient care pathway. 

SynApps has signed a ten-year contract to supply a VNA Clinical Content Store (Vendor Neutral Archive) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Platform.

The solution comprises the VNA, an emerging standards-based way of extending PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) services to incorporate DICOM and other format content to make the sharing of medical data easier for clinicians, as well as making patient records available across any combination of service providers – within both the NHS and beyond. The solution also incorporates XDS Repository/Registry cross-document sharing capability, which Kingston can use to create electronic patient records that can be readily accessed by doctors.

The need for a PACS system is driven by the fact that most patients undergo radiology examinations as part of routine diagnosis and treatment process for their illness or injury. The management and communication of the resulting images and information rapidly and efficiently with healthcare stakeholders is increasingly being seen as central to delivering high quality patient care, according to NHS England.

“We feel we are making real a long-term vision of VNA and electronic data and content management all living in one unified repository with the SynApps solution,” confirmed Norman Harling, Deputy Director of Information Management & Technology at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

“We are delighted to be helping Kingston improve the availability of patient information and radiology images to Kingston clinicians and eventually to other London hospitals through our VNA,” added SynApps Solutions’ Managing Director, Jim Whitelaw.

“What makes a VNA-based solution so powerful is that we know it works, we know it’s in place – and that a VNA approach can lay the ground work for a truly integrated electronic patient record as demanded by the NHS 2018 Paperless challenge.

“The interest and take up of the solution by UK Trusts is testament to the VNA approach’s huge potential.”

About Kingston Hospital

Kingston Hospital supports around 350,000 people in the surrounding area including Kingston, Richmond, Roehampton, Putney and East Elmbridge. We were the first acute Trust in south west London to gain Foundation Trust status when we were authorised in May 2013.

We have approximately 520 beds and directly employ around 2,750 staff with another 300 staff employed by contractors but working on behalf of the Trust. Our main site is the Kingston Hospital site but we also run a number of outpatients clinics in the community, including in Raynes Park, Surbiton, Queen Mary’s Roehampton and Teddington. We provide a full range of diagnostic and treatment services and our flagship services include maternity, day surgery and care for patients with dementia.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies.

 Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @SynappSol

 

SynApps To Host PHR Healthcare Event with Alfresco on 2nd December

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Royal College pf Physicians London NW1 927fe9f5872ded83949f001a62895253_400x300SynApps is hosting a PHR Healthcare Event entitled ‘Unveiling the World’s First Open Source Personal Health Record’ with Open Source vendor Alfresco on 2nd December.

The event is open to IT and Healthcare professionals and takes place at the Royal College of Physicians in London. It will chart the benefits of the Personal Health Record (PHR) and other portals using the world’s leading Open Source platform. A Personal Health Record is generally defined as an EHR that the individual patient controls.

The event will feature talks from real Open Source and Healthcare Practitioners and attendees will be able to learn from their experiences. Participants are also invited to join SynApps and Alfresco for post-event cocktails and canapés.

Key Speakers are:

Peter Coates, Open Source Evangelist, NHS Health England

John Pomeroy, VP EMEA, Alfresco

David Walliker, CIO of Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust

Mark Winstone, Strategic Enterprise Content Management Specialist, SynApps Solutions

Event Details

1.30pm – 5.30pm (including drinks and canapés from 4.30pm), 2nd December 2014, Linacre Room, Royal College of Physicians,11 St Andrew’s Place, London, NW1 4LE

Please click here for more event detail and to register

The Perils Of The ‘Garbage In’ School Of Content Migration

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Last time we did a quick overview of all the different elements that typically make up an organisation’s internal ‘memory bank’ – the ‘content’ that it will seek to preserve when it upgrades its systems. That content goes all the way from file systems to commercial or bespoke CMS to email via databases of all shapes and sizes.

Well, just how do we migrate all this variety of stuff? Well, people tend to try a small number of approaches: let me detail them.

One way we see trialled a lot is to leave all that content where it is and run parallel systems, so keep the old but then run new stuff alongside; all the new stuff goes into your new system and all the old content sits there, but you are still able to access it and read it. That is one option, which is basically to do nothing, which has some advantages (it is certainly easy).

Next option: you could migrate all the content, as it is, into your new information management system. This is basically taking a huge mass of information that you want in one huge port. This has the advantage of reducing the overall migration effort, but there is a high probability you are going to have duplicate and erroneous data in there, with content also being exposed to corruption as it gets shunted from one system to another. That is not ideal: you might want to think of the old data processing adage, GIGO (aka Garbage In – Garbage Out!).

Extensive Hoovering before the visitors come

The more sophisticated version of this is to carry out an extensive and thorough data clean-up prior to migration. So you look at the data you have, analysing and cleansing along the way, categorising the information and picking the good stuff you want to bring over. This means an increased up-front analysis effort but you get a better quality of final data downstream. Another variant is to carry out the data clean-up during the migration.

Those are the main approaches people take. It’s probably useful to discuss where working with SynApps and our content migration service experts could specifically help.

One way is if you’d passed the data clean up migration process over to the business. In that case, we’d come in to work with you on the migration stage. Another is where you want more collaboration with the business. We come in at this point to help you establish the quality of your content, and then help you address any deficiencies.

We can enhance the quality of the information by asking for additional information on the material provided by the business, through analysis and algorithms that you might apply during that process.

In the ‘leave things be’ option, instead of just leaving things static, we provide an interface which allows the team to search and retrieve the content in the old and the new. This is a powerful tool – the equivalent of getting a Google-like interface to access all this valuable corporate information.

I should also say we try to deter the approach of taking the old content and porting it over in one mass and sorting it when it’s available in the new system. You may not be surprised to learn, it’s GIGO. You’re just taking rubbish from one place and moving it to another.

That’s probably all we need to cover here. Next time we will be looking at two key techniques for content migration: data enhancement and de-duplication of the content.

 

 

SynApps and CoreFiling Build Powerful Regulatory Disclosure Management Platform to Help Financial Firms Meet Crucial April Compliance Deadline

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SynApps partners with CoreFiling to produce a specially tailored, flexible solution to assist financial services firms in meeting critical European compliance

Maidenhead, UK – March 5, 2014 – SynApps Solutions, the content management solutions leader, is now offering software to help financial services firms meet their reporting obligations under the new Capital Requirements Directive (CRD IV) and Solvency II regulation, including the technical requirement to submit disclosures in the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format

XBRL is a widely used reporting standard which brings consistency and accuracy to the reporting process. Under the Implementing Technical Standards specified by the EBA (European Banking Authority), XBRL is now the mandated reporting format for the submission of COREP, FINREP and Liquidity reports. April 2014 marks the start of Liquidity reporting in XBRL, closely followed by the first COREP reports during May, with FINREP scheduled for mid-November 2014.  The first mandated full Solvency II reports in XBRL are expected to be submitted in early 2016, although in January 2014 EIOPA introduced an interim reporting period, during which National Competent Authorities (NCAs) must either comply with the regulation or give reasons why they cannot.

To help compliance teams meet the challenge of both the new XBRL reporting format and the looming April deadline for the first Liquidity filings, SynApps has partnered with CoreFiling, the leading developer of XBRL software. CoreFiling specialise in XBRL, and the company’s senior management and developers are active members of the XBRL consortium which oversees the development of the XBRL specifications.

Together, the companies have produced a specially tailored, flexible solution to help investment firms and credit institutions meet their CRD IV and Solvency II obligations. SynApps integrates the CoreFiling standards-based XBRL software components using its specially developed ConXReporting business process and data collation solution

The other key partners behind the solution are EMC, with ConXReporting sitting on the Documentum platform, plus a major global consulting brand.

The new functionality covers all aspects of the financial reporting workflow, including data aggregation, XBRL production and validation, document review, full document management, audit and security. The solution incorporates proven, standards-based XBRL components, combined with the resources and expertise to help banks and insurance companies prepare for the introduction of the CRD IV and Solvency II reporting regimes.

Beyond the immediate compliance requirement, the SynApps and CoreFiling solution will help financial institutions deal with any future XBRL reporting needs in a consistent manner, say the partners. The rapid deployment model offers accelerated compliance and complete conformance even when the taxonomies change. The solution can take input from a variety of data sources including Excel and CSV, resulting in a more flexible, efficient and scalable solution. “We look forward to working with Content Management experts SynApps to help NCAs, investment firms and credit institutions take advantage of a solution that will meet both current and future XBRL reporting scenarios, as well as providing their content management needs,” said Philip Allen, Executive Chairman, CoreFiling. “Banks and insurers need to generate a standard financial report to meet these regulatory demands,” noted SynApps MD Jim Whitelaw.

“We help organisations replace cumbersome back-end, paper-chase style processes – and we are extremely pleased to be partnering with acknowledged XBRL experts CoreFiling to capitalise on our experience and help financial firms address their XBRL issues,” he added.

About XBRL

A new Capital Requirements legislative package was adopted by the European Parliament on 16 April 2013, and ratified at the end of June. Under the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD IV) the European Banking Authority (EBA) has stipulated that as from 1st January 2014 it will collect COREP data from the individual National Competent Authorities (NCAs) in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format. Collection of FINREP data will begin in November 2014, using the same XBRL format.

In November 2013 the relevant EU institutions reached provisional agreement on Omnibus II (incorporating changes to the 2009 Solvency II Framework Directive), EIOPA, the European insurance industry regulator, has also stated that insurance companies will have to submit their first full Solvency II reports in XBRL starting from 2016, although an interim reporting stage was introduced in January 2014, with the first XBRL interim submissions expected during 2015.

Organisations affected by these new statutory requirements need to start preparing now in order to be ready for the new mandates and the introduction of XBRL reporting.

 http:// www.corefiling.com/solutions/banking/prudential.html

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies.

Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @Synappssol

 



 

 

Bottom up – The way to get to a fully digitised NHS

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Content management specialists SynApps Solutions’ Sales & Marketing Director Mark Winstone argues that the only way to a ‘paperless’ NHS is by extending what we know works. 

According to a 2013 study, The NHS Information Evolution, produced by the Intellect trade body, voice of the British IT industry, for too long NHS IT has been designed and implemented locally. And while these systems have worked perfectly well in a limited context, the important information in them has often been difficult to access, either internally within Trusts or by other Trusts and fellow health and social care institutions.

To read the full article, please visit:http://www.integratedcaretoday.com/2014/02/24/guest-post-bottom-up-the-way-to-get-to-a-fully-digitised-nhs/