You just got home from the store with a big box full of shelves, top, bottom, screws and the ever important instructions. You have your Saturday planned around assembling the latest addition to your Family Room. The model in the store looked perfect and you are sure you can conquer the contents  of this box to that same perfection.

Once you have labored and your new purchase is perched in the Family Room you are likely to have a high emotional attachment to this item. This high emotional attachment or value is known as the IKEA Effect. Named for the Swedish manufacturer of “some assembly” furniture.

I believe a primary reason Microsoft SharePoint has taken off is it applies the IKEA Effect. It allows you to be involved in the building of the technology. Blogs, Wikis, Facebook and YouTube are additional proof that we are ready to take ownership of our technology in a new more in-depth way.

I will be spending some time and effort around applying the IKEA Effect to Document Management for Local Government. How can we build solutions with you? Can we offer interfaces and applications that come “ready to assemble”?

I would love your input and help in aiming my efforts.

I have spent some time thinking about 2010 and making sure our team is preparing for success. Will we be out of the recession? – Maybe.
The GEORGE Team must consider the technologies that will be important to our customers next year. We have a couple solutions that we are spending a great deal of effort towards. Those technologies include Automated Redaction, SAP Integrated Doc Management, ESRI Integrated Doc Management, Document Management powered by Sharepoint and Archive Transfer.

We believe these technologies are relevant, provide a cost savings and will help agencies manage their office. A strength of CASNET has always been our ability to integrate Document Management technology with existing systems. We will be investing in our training and user adoption programs because we believe the best technology is ineffective if it doesn’t appeal to the users or the users feel disassociated with it.

On our GEORGECASNET.com site we have web demo’s, screen shots of our emerging technologies. If you have input on improvements to these solutions or additional technologies that will be purchased in 2010 then please send me a note or comment here.

The bottom line: We are investing in local government, help us make that investment worthwhile for both of us.

Copley Township didn’t know that records dating back to the 1800s were in the ceiling in a restroom, but once found they turned to CASNET to assure they would be digitally preserved.

Read the complete story from the Akron Beacon Journal here

OnBase 9.0 Now Available

We are pleased to announce that OnBase 9.0 is now available. Below is a preview of some of the benefits:

• Richer functionality that reduces the costs and complexity that end users often see as a barrier to change when it comes to adding new capabilities or updating existing solutions

• Support for the latest Microsoft platform technology

• New modules that create additional sales opportunities and deliver even more value to customers

• New features that make it faster and easier to implement, upgrade and maintain OnBase solutions

• Improved performance particularly in the Web Server and Web Client, and a more consistent user experience across the OnBase user interfaces

• Enhancements to deliver the latest capabilities and support integration with the latest complementary technology