A Win-Win Situation: Rethinking Presentations, Part 2

By Tammy Kaehler | Posted April 14, 2011| Comment on this Article!

Last month I posted a blog on breaking out of the PowerPoint mindset that was short on solutions. I’m still working on them. But there are a few more tidbits I gleaned from Presenting Data and Information, by Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com), that can be useful as you think about presenting, regardless of the content or medium you’re dealing with.

First, a refresher: the bottom line, no matter what you’re doing, is that content should drive design. The content is what’s important, not the design (the message is what’s important, not the medium, for any Marshall McLuhan fans).

Once that’s established, a couple points about developing your content …

• There are two vital aspects to every presentation: What’s the story? and Are you credible? The story is your content, and it needs to include the problem, cause, journey, and solution. Balance all aspects of the story—don’t overemphasize the journey; don’t show only the solution without context. And be sure to demonstrate your competence with a thorough knowledge of all parts of the story.
• Be approximately right, rather than exactly wrong. Have an approximate answer to the correct question, rather than the exact answer to the wrong question. We’ve all endured presentations that were overstuffed with detailed information we didn’t care about at all—that presenter was giving us exact answers to questions we didn’t ask.
• Break out of “flatland” whenever possible. Every interesting problem or situation is a multivariate one, but we talk about them in two dimensions, usually just data on a screen. Give people paper, hand out a detailed diagram, play with props … do anything you can to break up the monotony of staring at a screen.

If I’ve taken away your PowerPoint, then what?

That’s the big question, isn’t it? What Tufte recommends for reports and summary presentations—and what I’m considering suggesting even for software engineer peer demonstrations—is the following:

1.       In advance: Prepare a write-up, report, or handout and deliver it to the audience.

2.       At the meeting:

a.       Make sure everyone’s read the handout, and give the room some minutes to do so if they haven’t.

b.      Do a short demonstration and discuss highlights or specific points in the report that you want to emphasize.

c.       Take questions.

What this approach does for you is shorten your meetings and presentations while still conveying more information than you might have done verbally—which will display inherent respect for your audience.  Sounds like a win-win to me.

You Know You Need to Go Paperless When…

By Sarah Kellison | Posted April 11, 2011| Comment on this Article!

If you find yourself saying any of the following, you might need to go paperless:

“It seemed like the file cabinets had more office space than some of our senior advisors.”
-Level Four Group

“TAMUK’s  president, touring the campus, opened the door to a shower room in an old gymnasium—and found 70 filing cabinets of old business records.”
-Texas A&M University, Kingsville

“Then there was the massive national warehouse where another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and perhaps most memorably, ‘vermin damage.’ Yes, rats were eating the paper.” 
-Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project

“Why did we choose Laserfiche? Well, my file room was going to explode!” 
-Regional Medical Center at Memphis

Must Watch: Information Governance Webcast Featuring Gartner

By Sarah Kellison | Posted April 8, 2011| Comment on this Article!

Meeting information management challenges is more difficult now than ever before. And while central control of information assets enables compliance, organizations are also finding that business units need flexibility in order to operate in a proficient, cost-effective way. So how do you overcome the paradox? The answer for more and more organizations is a governance framework grounded in a foundation of Agile ECM. This program will examine the approaches to governance and, more importantly, how to turn your information into an organizational asset. We’ll also find out how a governance framework enables sustainability for organizations.

Toby Bell, Research VP of Gartner, and Kimberly Samuelson, Laserfiche Director of Government Marketing, discuss:

• What information governance is and why it’s important.
• Ways IT, legal and records managers drive governance.
• The information governance framework and the governance maturity model.
• How implementing a governance framework can help organizations stay agile.

Watch the pre-recorded video webcast.

Q & A: Configuring Custom Login Profiles within Web Access

By Sarah Kellison | Posted April 4, 2011| Comment on this Article!

Q: I have a client that has asked for a custom configuration of Web Access. They need to give some users the ability login with Windows Authentication, while allowing other users to use a Laserfiche username and password instead. Can I accomplish this?

A: With Web Access 8.0.1, we introduced profiles, which allow administrators to configure multiple login methods per repository. You can include which profile should be used in the URL, so you can easily configure and share this link with those users who have windows authentication or will use a Laserfiche username and password. Here is a white paper that contains step-by-step instructions on how to configure these multiple profiles for Web Access.

Ya, We Can Do That.

By Sarah Kellison | Posted March 31, 2011| Comment on this Article!

For the past week and a half, I’ve been out on the road, spreading the good word about Laserfiche at the AIIM International Conference at Info360 and at Gartner’s Portals, Content and Collaboration.  The usual buzzwords (ie- SharePoint 2010, the cloud, information governance) aside, there was one phrase I found myself repeating over and over again— “Ya, we can do that.”

DoD 5015.2 Certified Records Management?
This one was almost too easy.  Laserfiche has been DoD certified since 2003 meaning that we’ve consistently proved the product against the gold standard of records management through multiple rounds of certification renewal.  But we didn’t stop there.  We went above and beyond to develop our Transparent Records Management (TRM) approach, and inject it into the product.  Today, TRM allows both everyday users as well as records managers to work with records in a way that’s natural and efficient.  Ya, we can do that.

…with SharePoint?
I heard a lot of “How do you work with SharePoint?” My obvious reaction was to showcase our five part integration which inclues the ability for users to scan directly into the system from their SharePoint portal and the ability to search content within both the Laserfiche and SharePoint repositories.  But for a lot of folks, the DoD 5015.2 records management functionality really struck a chord.  In fact, some attendees I spoke with didn’t realize that the records management functionality within SharePoint 2010 isn’t DoD 5015.2 certified.  Wake up call or not, the end result was often the same: “I need to look at Laserfiche.”  Here’s how one of our customers, the Port Authority of Virginia, uses Laserfiche Records Management in conjunction with SharePoint.  Ya, we can do that. Read more