Carma Financial Services has deployed a 50 licenses DocuShare v2.2 on an NT server. The DocuShare is being used as a repository of documents created and received in their business workflow. Presently, majority of the DocuShare content are faxes associated to Credit Inquiries. Other types of documents such as legal documents are expected to be retained in DocuShare in the near future.

Carma Financial's IT team has deployed a Power Builder application to automate their business workflow and data processing. One of the key indexes in this application is the CASE NUMBER, which uniquely identifies a series of data and documents associated with a particular credit collection case. Presently, this application and DocuShare are not integrated. Cross-referencing DocuShare documents to collection cases in the Power Builder Application is a manual process.

To streamline the business operations associated with document retrieval and archival, Webernetic provided the following deliverables as part of a consulting contract.

Customized Keyword Search

Since each DocuShare document are assigned a CASE NUMBER in the keyword field, the ability to bring up documents relating to a CASE NUMBER from the Power Builder Application will be a time-saving feature. Two approaches are available to integrate DocuShare to Power Builder for performing this keyword search.

Server Based Approach - Designed a server script for which the Power Builder application can launch in a web browser. The keyword and other queries can be passed to the server script as parameters. Webernetic is recommending this approach because it requires minimal integration effect on the client side, easier to maintain and distribute, and the custom search form can also be made available on the docsrv site.

The relationship between the Power Builder application, the custom search function, and DocuShare is illustrated as follow:

This URL will invoke a custom search function, and return the matching documents in the search result page. User can view the title and description of the documents that match the criteria and open the one that they require.

A custom search page is also be available on the docsrv's web interface. This search page is customized to accept parameters relevant to Carma Financial business such as case no. and customer ID, thus increases the usability of the system for the user community.

File SendTo application

When users save document into Docushare using the client application, a number of mouse click and data entry are needed before the save transaction can be complete. A typical example is that when user saves the fax document from FaxIT, they have confirm saving into Docushare, navigate to the collection they want to save to, enter the document title and other property fields, then press save button to commit. Consider the large amount of faxes coming into Carma Financial on a daily basis, the repetitive steps to select Collection and enter document title is time consuming and mundane to users.

Webernetic delivered a PC client application to streamline the file SendTo function.. Specifically, this application is to be associated to the FaxIT application for the File View operation. When a particular fax file is selected for View, this SendTo application will appear as a windows dialog box prompting users to enter parameters to save file in Docushare. This dialog box will have the Docushare file title defaulted to the file name and the containing Collection defaulted to the previously selected Collection. The conceptual layout of the dialog box is illustrated in the diagram below.

This simplified SendTo function will save between 30 to 60 seconds for each SAVE operation. The saving will be significance for the large volume of incoming faxes (500+) processed everyday.

Automated File Archival

Due to the large number of files being generated for Credit Inquires, the Inbox will become too large too soon to be useful. For ease of use and data maintenance, Webernetic deployed an auto-archive function to move documents in a designated Collection (e.g. Credit Inquiries) to archival Collections periodically. The Archive Collections are named by date, and their file content are readily retrievable by the Search function.