Secondary Benefits of Document Management

I was recently asked by CCH and AccountingWeb to write up a discussion paper on the less obvious, second-tier benefits of Electronic Document Management – the stuff that doesn’t become apparent until a system (any system – not just CCH’s) has been in place for a little while.

Return On Investment is a commonplace mantra with technology offerings for business at the moment (as indeed it should).   The ROI of Document Management can be quite tricky to pin down at times, because the impact tends to happen in terms of lots of little advances and benefits – how do you quantify the  benefits of NOT losing a client file?

Anyway – you can access a copy of this White Paper at the CCH web-site.. here.

There was follow-up discussion on the subject on AccountingWeb here.

Singleview and Office 2007/2010

Singleview’s last major release was in mid-2007 – too late for MYOB to take account of the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office.   It transpires (more by luck than judgement, it has to be said – although I should pay tribute to the heavily abstracted architecture created by James Cullingham for making this possible) that Singleview’s configuration can  be adjusted to provide support for Office 2007 and Office 2010.

I have created a knowledgebase document that describes the steps needed to alter Singleview in advance of any Office 2010 roll-out.  You can download this by clicking on the following link….

Singleview and Office 2007  (PDF, 1.2Mb).

White Paper – “Retiring Singleview”

Good old Singleview – which has been around in one form or another for the best part of a decade – is now in ‘maintenance’.   This is another way of saying that it’s no longer being developed.   It’s not dead yet, as there are more than a hundred organisations using it every day, but CCH are starting to make noises about migration to their new product: CCH Document Management.

CCH have put a fair bit of effort into ensuring that most (but not all) of Singleview’s features are present in the new product.  Nevertheless, the new software is very different (visually and in terms of the underlying ‘ethos’).

I’ve prepared a free white paper that discusses the differences, and provides guidance on how to start planning for the inevitable.

White Paper – Moving from Singleview to CCH DM  (PDF – 2Mb)

CCH are pretty goood about support for old products – they don’t cut users off at the knees like some software providers.  Nevertheless, the product inevitably starts to age, and  it won’t be updated for future versions of Windows or SQL-Server, making it more troublesome to keep using.  CCH did release an update to resolve an issue with Outlook 2010, but this is going to be the exception rather than the rule in the future.

This white paper was written to compare the final version of Singleview (v4.40) and CCH Document Management v1.3.