OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Just a week ago, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, GA became the latest victim of a major data breach involving protected health information (PHI). The health network announced it was unable to locate 10 computer discs containing PHI for more than 300,000 patients treated between 1990 and 2007.

According to a local news article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Emory President and CEO John Fox admitted that the discs had not been properly stored. Although they were in an office with restricted access and nightly lockdown, the cabinet they were in was not locked.

We can hope that the discs were simply misplaced rather than stolen or destroyed, but incidents like this still occur far too often in the healthcare industry. At risk is not only the privacy of the patients whose health information could now be anywhere, but also Emory itself, because it is bound by strict regulatory mandates like HIPAA and HITECH. Non-compliance can result in crippling fines and a loss of public confidence. Emory has already committed to providing identity theft resources to all of the affected patients.

This latest breach comes just six months after an internal breach in which an employee perhaps unwittingly printed medical records that eventually found their way to an identity theft ring. Nine of 32 affected patients reported that their identities had been stolen, and Emory alerted another 7,200 patients who had been in their care at the time. All told, industry analysts calculate the average cost per breached document at $240. Though the employee was let go, Emory spokesperson Lance Skelly said the printed documents were within the scope of the employee’s job duties. In other words, the paper was the problem. To see how OpenText helps medical facilities of all sizes tackle this issue, watch last month’s webcast with TMCnet.

While many healthcare providers are making great strides in effectively managing today’s patient information, how many of them are effectively evaluating the risk associated with “misplacing” historic documents that fall outside the scope of their EMR deployment? For many organizations, it’s unlikely that their next data breach will result from a virus or a group of teenage hackers. The real threat may simply come from the theft of unattended paper documents or an overzealous cleaner diligently “cleaning up.”

OpenText has a solution designed for problems exactly like this. Alchemy, our document server solution, can capture document images from paper or just about any electronic file format, file them or route them to specific users, and track every instance of access: where, when, and who sees them. Had the files on those discs or the leaked paper medical records been scanned into Alchemy, the physical media could have been safely destroyed and Emory would be in the clear.

Click here to check out Alchemy’s latest release, version 9.0.

Recently we co-sponsored a well-attended webinar highlighting the current state of security and compliance in the healthcare industry. Speakers Rebecca Herold (the Privacy Professor), privacy, security and compliance guru , and Chris Patterson, IT Administrator at Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, were extremely helpful in enlightening the audience using real-world examples and the most up-to-date data.

We’ve had some time to reflect on the webinar, and also to take a look at the responses to the polling questions. Here are a few realities we can take away from these resources:

■ Security and compliance remain the most important issues in healthcare after quality
patient care

■ The healthcare industry is not yet where it needs to be in terms of securing
private health information

■ Solutions do exist to mitigate the problems

■ Digital fax and document delivery will continue to play a central role in these solutions

The problems
Healthcare providers need to maintain a high level of data security for three main reasons: patient care, patient privacy and regulatory compliance. The rise in the use of fax to securely manage and deliver electronic medical records (EMR) solutions are  helping institutions address these concerns, but even fax is vulnerable to tampering if not properly protected, and data leaks continue to plague the industry.

Rebecca shared several real-life examples of recent breaches in fax security including hacking of fax servers, wrong numbers/email addresses, use of standalone fax machines and public networks, and improper document disposal. These problems come from a mixture of human and technological error and often lead to costly failures of compliance with government mandated regulations like HIPAA and HITECH.

According to the poll, about half of healthcare providers are unsatisfied with their ability to comply with HIPPA using digital documents, and more than half of physicians still rely primarily on paper charts.

The success stories 
The good news is that digital fax and document management solutions like Fax Appliance, RightFax and Alchemy are working for thousands of healthcare professionals, including Patterson. After deploying an OpenText fax solution, Patterson reported that security has improved and the hospital has enjoyed savings of more than $200,000 in the three years since implementation. Patterson also said his fax solution paid for itself within two months and has effectively replaced the work of two-and-a-half full-time employees.

Tens of thousands of businesses around the world already use OpenText’s Alchemy Server to manage their critical documents. On April 18, 2012 new features in the areas of capture, access, workflow and retention were released as Alchemy 9.0. See the full press release here.

Alchemy 9.0 is a simple solution for managing documents. Any business that relies on thorough and precise tracking of records will benefit from Alchemy’s unique capabilities. Here are a few of them:

• Alchemy 9.0 captures and archives paper or electronic documents from MFP, desktop, back-office and third-party applications.

• All of your documents reside in a single, centralized database.

• Full-text search allows “Google-style” search of all documents just by plugging in a word or phrase.

• Alchemy 9.0 helps you create simple workflows so documents are automatically routed to the correct decision-makers depending on their status (e.g. “accepted” or “rejected”).

• Retention utilities let you manage the lifecycle of your documents from creation to deletion based on any criteria you choose (e.g. you can tell Alchemy to delete certain records days, weeks, months or years after a chosen event).

Immediate benefits include reduced payroll burn from manual document management like faxing and filing; reduction of paper and paper-related supplies; less hardware and maintenance on MFPs and fax machines; and audit-readiness for less risk of compliance failure.

Alchemy is particularly useful for small- to medium-sized businesses with an internal or mandated need for secure document management. Healthcare, legal, financial and manufacturing institutions in particular face severe fines for improper, inaccurate or incomplete document access and management.

We are very excited about this release and the enhanced capabilities of Alchemy 9.0, and you should be too!

Check us out at http://getdocumentmanagement.com or to view more fax and document solutions, see OpenText’s full suite at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com.

Darren Boynton
Product Marketing Manager
OpenText Corporation

As many of our customers know, Alchemy is an incredibly useful tool for departments and small- to medium-sized businesses to manage their documents. One of the most difficult challenges though, is getting the documents to the right place in Alchemy and indexing them with the most relevant metadata. One of the guys in our Dutch office realized this and worked with a developer on the Services team to come up with a solution to solve the issue. Jaap Jan’s idea, combined with Eric’s skills resulted in one of their most successful collaborations.

Fast forward a year or two and now that solution is being offered as a core product: The Alchemy Productivity Suite v9.0. Its still a little ways out but it’s exciting that we are allowed to talk about it publicly. One of the first ways you can learn about it is a video I created that covers the basics. I hope to release a few more Alchemy videos in the coming weeks and months.

There are a bunch of other changes slated for the Alchemy 9.0 release and as we get closer to that point, more of those details will start to trickle out and I’ll talk about it here. If you have any comments about Alchemy, comments about this video, or suggestions for future videos, share them with me here or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Also, be sure to check out all of our videos on our new video channels site: http://faxdocs.tv

One of my goals each year for the last few years has been to create videos about our products. I really enjoy doing this, but it’s not always clear how our customers consume those videos. We can’t see if they like the video, or drop off after a few minutes. We can’t really control what our YouTube presence looks like or how to organize the videos beyond a certain level. And we have plenty of customers who just cannot see the videos at all, either because the corporate firewall blocks it or because they live in a country that forbids access to YouTube.

So we decided to come up with another solution that solves those problems. FaxDocs.tv is that new solution. It is a single site you can go to and watch all of the latest videos from our group. You can easily find all of the videos relating to each of our main product areas, as well as those targeting different audiences. We will create special pages as needed with pre-programmed playlists for topics like RightFax Fundamentals, etc.

At first (and for the foreseeable future) we will be cross-posting on YouTube and on FaxDocs.tv, but we expect most people will choose to view the videos on FaxDocs.

I hope you like the new FaxDocs.tv website. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve the site, share them with us here on the blog.

For over 25 years, Price Brothers (UK) Ltd has been part of the Great Man-Made River water supply project in Libya, a project set up to bring fresh water from deep under the Sahara Desert to coastal towns and cities. They were responsible for the original design of this 1600km underground network of pipes and aqueducts, which is recognised as being the largest of its type in the world.

During this time, Price Bothers amassed a huge library of documents. Current project documentation alone is estimated to be three quarters of a million paper documents – a mixture of drawings, plans and critical correspondence.

Using OpenText Alchemy, a document management solution, ProcessFlows partner Castle Document Management provided an electronic filing cabinet for Price Brothers which exactly replicates and retains their manual filing system.

Searching for information and drawings is now a quick and easy desktop function. Documents can be retrieved and viewed from the CDs at the click of a button and office space taken up by large filing cabinets has been reclaimed, as there is no longer a need to retain the paper documents.

Having dealt with current project documentation, Castle Document Management is continuing to work with Price Brothers to electronically archive older information. Once the process has been completed and everything is in electronic format, backed-up and secure, the paper will be securely destroyed, in line with compliance regulations. There is also the option for Castle Document Management to host the Alchemy repository. Users would then be able to access their documents from any web enabled device. Either way, there is no need for a dedicated document storage server.

Read the entire Price Brothers case study here for more information.

Go to the Google books web site and search for “The Internet For Dummies” By John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young. If you then search for the word “social” Google will tell you that there are 39 occurrences spread across 432 pages. Our friends in Mountain View are always good for an easy warm-up session that doesn’t tax the body too much.

Let’s try a similar exercise on a much larger scale. Jog over to your IT department and nimbly request access to all fax documents your organization has ever sent or received which contain the vendor ID for the company that supplies your office with staplers. For many firms this request will give you more than enough time to catch your breath and perhaps write a book yourself. While it’s great for one’s cardiovascular system, searching for highly specific snippets of information in large, unmanaged repositories is frequently an exhausting, overwhelming and imprecise process.

Even though many organizations have taken steps to better manage their inbound and outbound fax communication, a large percentage still haven’t installed measures that enable them to maintain a long term, secure archive of searchable fax documents. This seemingly minor omission in a corporate information management strategy is unfortunately capable of doing much damage when the time comes to respond to an audit or discovery request. Conversely, not having a complete grip on those information assets can prevent companies from identifying documents that may strengthen their position in legal disputes or, assist in resolving issues concerning costly business transactions.

Introducing a dedicated fax archive into your fax management solution substantially mitigates many of the risks associated with the long term management of high volumes of fax documents. By deploying an archive which performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on faxes on their way into the archive, IT organizations can be confident that they can quickly search through the entire contents of the archive for faxes containing a particular set of characters, words or phrase. This granular level of indexing often proves far more useful than narrow searching on fax header data many companies are limited to today. In those cases where faxes need to be provided to an external party, a well-managed archive will allow for rapid retrieval and multiple distribution options such as burning to optical media, sending to portable storage devices or uploading to FTP sites. In short, the fax archive provides a safe, accessible haven for faxes ensuring they remain as a long-term asset rather than a future liability.

OpenText customers have long been able to deploy highly searchable archiving capabilities using RightFax’s sister product, OpenText Alchemy. As of March 15^th 2011 those RightFax users who have not yet added an archive safety-net will be able to do so by selecting one of four new RightFax Archiving bundles. The “Basic” bundle will provide core capabilities for the smaller RightFax systems with the “Standard”, “Professional” and “Advanced” editions providing increased recognition capacity along with more advanced encryption and access features.

I am confident that reading through the last 508 words has provided more than enough exercise for the day but for those of you who need to “feel the burn” a little more, why not push your body to the limits by reaching out to your OpenText partner for more information on these forthcoming RightFax Archiving bundles?

This article has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease (unless it’s fax related in which case we’ll fetch our scalpels)

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By Matthew Brine

Casey’s furniture, a family-owned business founded in 1921, is one of the longest-standing furniture retailers in Ireland. Their manual paper-based order fulfillment processes were causing costly delays, inefficiencies and errors. Many of the errors were expensive to fix and caused long delays for customers. Some employees were spending the equivalent of a full day per week on paper-based busywork to keep the business running.

Casey’s worked with Inpute Technologies, an Open Text Fax and Document solutions partner in Ireland, to digitize and streamline their order fulfillment process with an integrated, paper-free content solution utilizing Microsoft and Open Text technologies.

Casey’s orders are now routed for approval by Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Open Text Workflow Server, .NET edition and then electronically faxed to suppliers via Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. Finally, they are stored in an accessible, easy-to-manage digital database with Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition. Employees also have the benefit of being able to send and receive faxes directly from their desktop and to utilize many of the other features of RightFax and Alchemy.

RightFax is the world’s leading fax server for sending and receiving mission critical documents such as purchase orders, invoices and legal agreements where secure transmission and proof of delivery is required. RightFax is used to reduce costs associated with standalone fax machines and paper-based processes.

RightFax has extensive integrations and product certifications with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other business applications and is the product of choice for unified communication vendors such as Cisco and MFP vendors like HP, Ricoh and Xerox. RightFax is a leader in production fax and FoIP (fax over IP) solutions and has over 100,000 servers installed worldwide.

Alchemy is a cost effective document imaging and archive solution for departments, work groups and small-to-medium businesses. Alchemy creates a digital file cabinet for your organization so you can securely store any document type and then find it within seconds, even years later. Thousands of customers use Alchemy today because it is easy to install, configure and use.

Among other results, Casey’s Furniture:

Eliminated fax machines and unessential printing for a reduction in printing and stationery costs of more than 60%.

• Reduced average time for order delivery to suppliers by up to eight days.
• Increased profit margins by meeting discount deadlines and reducing duplicate orders.
• Reduced order-related busywork close to 20 percent.
• Sped response time to customer inquiries by up to two weeks

Casey’s Furniture also improved customer service by increasing quality control and consistency of order-related processes, minimized redundant tasks across branches with central, integrated management and supported distribution efficiency with accurate, accessible information.

To read the full Casey’s Furniture customer success story, go to Casey’s Furniture Success Story.

Do you have a customer success story around RightFax or Alchemy? I would love to hear about it. You can contact me at mbrine[at]opentext.com and you can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mattbrine.

Matthew Brine
Vice President
Fax and Document Distribution Group
Open Text Corporation

http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/ and http://www.futureoffax.com/

Recently I got the following comment on Twitter, regarding my post on building a custom MMC for building Alchemy databases remotely:

Can the mmc trick be implemented to add db’s to Alchemy Server instead of havin to do it manually? or, can it be automated?

The problem is that albatch can only really do what the Administrator application can do. The only real way around that is to use the API, and specifically the AuServerApi. You can use this in whatever language you like. Perhaps Powershell is convenient for you, or VB/VB.Net, or something else. I like to use C# with the Alchemy API. So below is some code for creating a database and then adding it to the Alchemy Server. I wrote this a few years ago for the Captaris Partner Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

As you can see, actually adding the database to the server is as simple as connecting to the server and then calling AddDatabase.

static Alchemy.Application auApp = new Alchemy.Application();
static AuServerApi.ApplicationClass auServer = new AuServerApi.ApplicationClass();

if (args.Length>0)
{

	string dbName = args[0];
	if (dbName.ToLower().EndsWith(".ald"))
		dbName = dbName.Substring(0, dbName.IndexOf("."));

	string dbPath = "c:\\databases\\" + dbName + ".ald";

	Alchemy.Database auDB = auApp.CreateDatabase(dbPath, dbName, "", false, "", "", "", false);

	auApp.Databases.Remove(dbPath);

	auDB.Logout();
	auServer.Connect("capadev", 0, 0, 0);
	auServer.AddDatabase(dbPath);
}
else
	Console.WriteLine("Please enter a database name");

I hope this is helpful. If you have any questions about any other Rightfax or Alchemy topics (or Workflow), let me know. You can do that on here or contacting me on Twitter where I am technovangelist.

Did you know that you can create a custom management interface for pretty much any Windows application with zero coding? Did you realize that you probably already have all the tools needed to get this done on your Windows workstation? Well you do, assuming your version of Windows was created in the last 10 to 15 years. The Microsoft Management Console, or MMC, was first made available for NT4 and Windows 9x and is the framework on which many built-in and 3rd party management tools are based. Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition ships with a few MMC-based tools, including the Server Console, and the Web management tools. The reason I am tell you about this is that it was the solution to an interesting issue a customer asked me about recently.

You see, they had a decent number of people who would be contributing information to an Alchemy repository. But after the training I delivered, they realized that the Administrator application gives those who use it a bit too much power, especially when it comes to completely destroying a database. The problem is that the Administrator is the only client application that can initiate a Build. So if they end up using Index Station for most of their users, how do they trigger a Build?

At first I suggested Scheduled Tasks. You can create a task that saves credentials and then can be run from the command line. The command I was going to run was albatch, which is a command line driven tool that comes out of the box with Alchemy. Unfortunately I couldn’t get albatch to work on a remote machine. Even with a SysInternals tool called psexec, I still couldn’t get anything going. So that’s when I remembered the MMC approach. I’ll explain both psexec and albatch in more detail in a short while.

My first experiment with MMC was when I was in the Education Marketing Group at Microsoft. I spent a good deal of time building cool demos of the technology that was part of Windows 2000. One of those demos involved allowing a group administrator or receptionist to reset the passwords of the workers in their group. That’s a function you can perform from Active Directory Users & Computers, but that’s a pretty daunting tool to use. If you create a new MMC and add the AD U&C Snap-In, you can drill down to a specific group or OU. Once there you create a taskpad when displaying a list of users, save the view and you have a custom password reset tool that can cause no extra problems. You can create this tool from scratch in less than 2 minutes with zero coding. I think that is pretty cool.

The tool I wanted to create for Building Alchemy was the Alchemy Builder Console, with one button each for building the databases in my environment. Here is a picture of the console configured to build just a single repository.

So how do you create this? Well, I am glad you asked. The first step is to launch MMC. Close the tree and maximize the main window. On the Menu bar, click Action and choose New TaskPad View. For this simple MMC, I like to use No List for the style. Next your way through the rest of the windows, giving the MMC a name along the way. When it comes to creating the first task, choose Shell Command. This tells the MMC that when you click on the button, you are going to run a command at the command prompt. So what is that command going to be?

This is where psexec and albatch come into view. Albatch comes with Alchemy and provides command-line access to many of the features of the product. The parameters are as follows:

albatch <database-path> /<command> <other-parameters>

So to build a server controlled database called Total on a server named Server, I need to run:

albatch alchemy://server/total.ald /build

That command works fine if you are on the server, but I need to run it from a remote PC. To run the command remotely, I can run psexec which is in the pstools suite from SysInternals.

In case you haven’t heard of SysInternals, go to their site now and read about all of their tools. Every single one of them is useful. As you can see in the screenshot below, psexec allows me to run an executable on a remote machine. Since I will be running this MMC on other PCs, I need psexec to be able to access albatch on the server.

Of course, you can’t run any command on any machine on your network without a valid username and password. So I created a local user on my server called albuilder. With that in mind, the command I used to run albatch is:

psexec \\server /u alcbuilder /p password "c:\program files\captaris\alchemy\albatch.exe" alchemy://server/total.ald /build

If the program completes with an error code of 0, you know that it ran without any problems. Now that i have a valid command, I can plug that into the shell command dialog in the MMC. To get the screenshot about, I went to the View | Customize window and turned off a few features. I also went to the File menu then Options. From there, choose User Mode Single Window and give the console a name. You can also change the icon if you want.

If you want to see a video walk-through of the entire process, check out the video on our YouTube channel.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfrKY4qgdlQ]

The video also shows how to create a custom Event Viewer, as well as a modified Alchemy Server Console that allows you to pick a database from the list and then click the build task. It uses the parameter parsing features of batch files that I had never seen before.

I hope you find this post and the YouTube video useful. If you have any questions, post them here. Also, if you have any ideas for future videos, let me know. Some ideas I am working on include setting up NLB for Shared Services, setting up a Cisco 2611XM router for simple FoIP, using SQL Profiler to get a view of what RightFax does behind the scenes, and more. Come back to this site often to see more from us on these topics.