Today, I’d like to talk to you about an exciting range of products we’ve been building at SynApps that we call ConXApps. We think that we can both save you a lot of time and also maximise your electronic content management investment with this technology, the result of lots of time talking to customers about what they really want to do with their information.

At the top level, ConXApps is split into four: ConXSys, ConXMail, ConXOffice and ConXLoader. Let’s briefly describe each in turn. ConXSys is going to give you the ability to Content Enable Vertical (Business) Applications (CEVA). If you’re not familiar with the term, it was first coined by analyst leaders Gartner some years ago to denote where an organisation has a number of structured data centric applications but also needs to manage associated unstructured data such as that contained within a variety of content – images, video, documents, and so on.

ConXMail, meanwhile, allows users to store emails and their attachments directly within their corporate Repository, thereby enabling a much finer control around the security and distribution related to the information; sharing content as a link to the repository, rather than circulating the physical document, ensures that the data integrity is maintained and appropriate security levels maintained.

With ConXOffice, you’re going to be able to store Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly within that same Repository, so that these can be shared using ConXMail. This promotes collaboration within the workplace. So having created content with ConXOffice, you’re now able to share content easily using ConXMail in a way that promotes collaboration within your workplace.

Last, but definitely not least there’s ConXLoader – an extremely flexible content migration tool that allows you to safely and easily transfer content and metadata from a wide range of custom, in-house and proprietary applications, including file systems and databases.

You may have started to understand why we’ve created these products from those brief descriptions, but let’s be more explicit: we want your users to be able to use their regular, familiar Office applications, their productivity tools such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint and so on, and be able to save information easily into their organisations wider enterprise content/records management system. Why is that something worth doing? Because the number of clicks your users have to perform to do that, is often so many that they just won’t (sometimes can’t!) do it. What they have been waiting for: a nice simple interface to allow them to store, search and reuse information easily.

Let’s say a member of the organisation gets an e-mail that is important to a business transaction. They can now store that email, plus any attachments, either as a single e-mail, a single document or as an encapsulated e-mail with attachments inside in the organisation’s proper ‘memory bank’ (the Repository, of course).

How? Literally by one easy move – a simple drag and drop step, you drop it onto the appropriate folder, a dialogue pops up and allows you to add additional information to the e-mail and/or document. The beauty of all this is that your users never need to work in any other user interfaces and can work from within their regular productivity tools.

Of course there are very many other productivity features that we can go into another time, but the great advantage is that corporate information is easily shared across the team or to the most appropriate person, as defined by your information policies. Let’s look at how that can save your organisation considerable hassle. Most of us spend most of their day working in e-mail; but when we are all working with Outlook PST files like this, that PST file is typically local or stored on a server and is not generally shared. This results in a lot of duplication because people send stuff in e-mails all the time, because they think, ‘Have you got that e-mail I sent?’ ‘No, I haven’t got it,’ ‘Let me just send it to you again’ – and this conversation/process gets repeated over and over again, of course!

Many large corporates are now running into issues with email and document duplication as a result of this over-use of email (and with the associated problem of sharing information). However, we are finding that with the ConXApps products, the business is able to share information easily and ensure that it is available correctly at last. Through the ConXApps suite, which I have described here, users are able to directly declare mailed documents as records from within their application tools. That is quite important for many of the government organisations that we work with, because they need to be able to store their information as records so that it is held in a secure environment and retained for the appropriate period of time, and that there is an appropriate schedule in place for the deletion of it when it is no longer required and the retention period is up

I hope you agree that ConXApps provide a very powerful set of tools that will make a big difference. Let’s pause here, as that’s a lot of information about the ConXApps to absorb at once!

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