A year packed with highlights
Egg, Switzerland, 17 December 2015: The year 2015 is drawing to a close. The last blog of the year again features a look back over the past 12 months. So this blog entry is perfect for those people who don’t have / haven’t had the time to read all the blog entries. As always, the look back over the year compactly summarises all the most important innovations that have taken place.
There were a number of highlights this year, with the first no doubt being the ArchivistaBox Bachtel. Just a year ago it was unthinkable that a quad core CPU with these features would be possible; but three months later, there it was. Which underlines the fact that one’s view of the future is always relative; what makes it and what doesn’t make it is ultimately only apparent in the present.
However, something that is certain is that data backup will be ever more important in the future. This is for the simple reason that the data carriers available today are not necessarily more durable than those that existed a decade ago. Which means that creating backups is very important. The ‘Backup à la carte’ blog entry highlights this, along with various other issues. It is also the case that, thanks to a unique data storage concept, the ArchivistaBox has provided the same data structures since 1998: a 30-year guarantee regarding data is unique to the ArchivistaBox.
And it is equally true that the development of software is, as we know, never finished – this holds for ArchivistaDMS just as it does for ArchivistaERP. Furthermore, there is almost always the problem that the development could or should go more quickly. Nevertheless, the two products ArchivistaDMS and ArchivistaERP were harmonised in 2015 in such a way that data can be exchanged between them without any additional functionality i.e. in their basic forms.
With ArchivistaDMS there are now customer installations featuring many terabytes of data, although this volume is not reached with ArchivistaERP (and probably not with any other ERP solution either). It therefore makes sense to run the two products separately, as this ensures, for example, that different concepts can be made available regarding backups. Additionally, it can also be clearly stated that ArchivistaERP is not provided with preferential treatment compared to third party ERP solutions in the context of connections to ArchivistaDMS.
The arrival of the ArchivistaBox Bachtel coincided with the integration of a low-cost scanner this year. There are of course now many devices available for scanning and these devices can send the scanned images directly to the ArchivistaBox approval path. However, there is an extremely light scanner that quite simply belongs to the extremely light ArchivistaBox Bachtel; this works directly with the ArchivistaBox Bachtel without the need for an extreme supply of power.
The new version of Windows on the market was an industry topic earlier this year. However, the arrival of new versions of Windows is basically not such a big thing these days. This is because the market, at least in the consumer sector, has moved strongly towards the use of mobile phones and tablets, so new versions of Windows simply no longer have such a dominant role as was previously the case. Nevertheless, as ArchivistaBox runs with all current browsers, compatibility was also ensured with the new Edge browser.
Until now we had not offered any boxes in which eight processors (CPUs) were available. Firstly, it is not a stated objective of ArchivistaBox to simply give customers the most expensive and bloated hardware around, and secondly, the existence of eight cores is only useful if the software is optimised for them. Now though, as inexpensive ArchivistaBoxes with eight cores became available as a further highlight, it was necessary to tune the software to handle parallel processing to a greater extent. And all customers benefit from these improvements, because with the previous quad core boxes the parallel processing also provides an increase by a factor of 2 or 3.
Eight cores also raised the question of whether the software should be implemented as a cluster, and thus independent of a computer’s bandwidth. The answer to this question is: OCR cluster. This allows text recognition (incl. the creation of searchable PDF files) to be scaled. As a result, volumes of well over 1 million pages per day can now be processed with an ArchivistaBox solution. The new OCR cluster is thus the third highlight of the year. Again, such a product was unthinkable just a year ago.
Office closed 21/12/15 until 03/01/16
The period around the middle and end of December is used to fill up with new energy. Specifically, this means that our office will be closed from the end of the 18th December 2015 until the end of 3rd January 2016, and the company Archivista GmbH will take a break. New orders will not be processed during this period. Customers with maintenance contracts will of course be provided with support if required. It also means that new projects will be implemented with renewed vigour in 2016. We wish you a Merry Christmas and all the best for 2016.
Urs Pfister, Archivista GmbH
