GMB's RecFind User Group (RUG) Newsletter
Special 20th Anniversary Edition, April 2004

It's our 20th Anniversary and we thought it would be fun to show you how far we've come in the past 20 years. Thank you to all of our customers who made our first 20 years such a success!

In This Issue » President's Report » GMB's History » GMB's Product Timeline » New Product Release!! - GEM 5.0 » Product Spotlight - RecQuery TC API » RecFind 5.0.0B Service Pack 2 Release » Training News » Tips & Tricks » Customer Focus » 2004 RUG Meetings

President's Report

It is hard to believe that GMB has been in operation some 20 years just as it is hard to believe that I began my career in IT in 1965. What is it they say, "Time flies when you are having fun?"

Then I start counting the products and product versions we have produced and began to wonder how we managed to do so much in such a short time. How many of you actually remember products like DocFind, Eva, CtVt, Sutes, PACT-1100, Diary or our integrated television broadcasting systems for TCN9 (Election coverage and football) or our athletics systems or our NEC multi-PABX integration software?

From 1984 up until the end of the 1980s we did research and development and systems development for organizations such as Sperry Univac, Burroughs, NEC and IBM (an AS/400 version of the character version of RecFind). The revenues from this work provided ninety-percent of our turnover and provided the capital we needed to design and develop our own products. Then beginning around 1989, we began 'reinventing' GMB as a 'shrink-wrap' software company and moved away from external development to concentrate on our own products such as RecFind. Within 5 years one-hundred percent of our revenues were from our own products.

One of the lessons we have learned during these 20 years is that all companies need to periodically 're-invent' themselves to better adapt to the world of today and tomorrow. GMB is undergoing a major re-invention at this time. We are changing our business model as well as our products. We are also adding some new people with the skill sets we need to achieve our new objectives.

You will see a plethora of new products this year, as well as major improvements to existing products. On the business side we are still privately owned (the McKenna family) and debt-free and we see no need to corporatize (i.e., IPO) in the near future as our business is profitable and our R&D is funded. We are however changing the way we do business. 

Our objective is to produce high quality, robust, scalable niche solutions for the records, document and knowledge management domain. Products that simply do the job and work day in, day out, year after year. Our products will be 'special' and unique and will be specifically designed to make your life easier and to increase productivity by removing the need for end-user involvement. We will simplify and automate all the processes involved in records management, document management, imaging and content management. The core features of all of our new products will include:

• Totally automatic processes
• Rules (business-process) driven functionality
• Absolute configurability
• Ease of installation and roll-out
• Low maintenance costs
• Lowest possible TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

The first examples of this new paradigm will be GEM and RecCapture.

We will also stop chasing after the various (ever-changing and different, state to state and country to country) 'standards' and instead, build configurable processes into our products so the customer can modify our products (without programming) to meet any required standard. The first example of this will be a user-configurable XML engine that will allow you to import or export any object or Metadata and easily meet any required XML standard, (of which there are literally thousands).

In short, we want the functionality of our products to be driven by real-world customer needs, not by the wish-lists of RFPs and the ever-changing and conflicting demands of multitudinous state and national 'standards'. In short, I want to get back to the business of solving business problems, not implementing a plethora of useless, inappropriate features that no one will ever utilize.

We will also maintain our 'budget' pricing algorithms to continue to provide our customers with the most cost-effective solutions (and to drive our competitors crazy).

Our 'face' to you the customer will be friendly, co-operative, easy-to-do-business-with and flexible. At GMB we will look after you.

We will invest in our people, especially those that have been with us through good times and bad and been the heart and soul of GMB. This is in fact the most important lesson I have learned in the last 20 years. Without the right people you can't do anything. With the right people, you can do anything.

Thank you for your support over the last 20 years. We look forward to being of service over the next 20 years.

Frank McKenna
President
GMB Group

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GMB's History

GMB Solutions Pty Limited was formed in August 1983, and began operations in April 1984. The company name GMB came from the initials of the three original partners being Gillett, McKenna, and Bachmann. Mr. Frank McKenna is the founder and is now the only one of the original three still involved with GMB. He is the President of the company.

GMB Research & Development Pty Ltd was formed in January 1985 and is the major Australian subsidiary of the GMB Group.

GMB Knowledge Management Inc was formed in Jan 2001 and is the parent company of the GMB Group. This company is based in San Diego, California, USA. GMB Support Inc, which was founded in 1989, is the US trading company.

Major Activities

• Research and development for both GMB and outside clients. Over the last 20 years, GMB has invested more than 20% of its turnover on research & development.
• GMB product development. Each year, we produce at least one major new release of our products.
• Sale of GMB products via a direct sales force as well as distributors in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada and the USA.
• The supply of services to our clients in the form of conversions and data take-ups, consulting, general support, installation support, software maintenance and training.
• The supply of 3rd party products to our clients including barcode labels, barcode equipment and scanners.

Research & Development Activities

GMB's own research and development efforts have been in the areas of application development tools, proprietary indexing and retrieval mechanisms, (as seen in the RecFind and DocFind product ranges) and extensions to GMB application products in the specific areas of image processing and electronic document viewers.

Major one-off developments for outside clients in the past include an SCO Unix based imaging product for NEC Australia, the Australian Jockey Club inter club communications system; the TCN9 Cricket Broadcasting system; the TCN/9 Election Broadcasting and Forecasting system; and the TCN9 State of Origin Rugby League Broadcasting system.

Whole of Life Service

The logo may have changed but GMB's mission has not. That is, to provide only the highest quality products and services to its customers and to provide a complete, 'Whole of Life' service. We take your need from vision to design to development to installation to ongoing support. We provide all of the services necessary to ensure that you meet your objectives: consultancy; design; development; training; support and maintenance. We take your idea and nurture and develop it until it is a full grown, robust product - acorn to mighty oak tree. We provide a complete solution so that you can concentrate on your core business.

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The GMB Product Timeline

Date Product Release 1983 First DocFind Software - a combined records and library management system. 1984 Sutes Software - Sperry UTS Terminal Emulator. 1985 PACT 1100 - Sperry 1100 Mainframe Emulator. 1986 First RecFind Software - Records Management software with file, document & information storage and retrieval, free text searching, thesaurus function, security control, full barcode support. 1986 EVA Software - 'Effective Visual Architect' - produces presentation visuals - text, graphics, cartoons, maps 1987 LibFind Software - Library Management software with cataloguing, circulation functions, borrower tracking, on-line public access catalogue, full barcode support. 1987 GMB 'Office' Software  - Office Management software with multiple appointment diaries and teledexes, daily to-do list, alarm functions, electronic mail, note pad, conference scheduling, itineraries, word processor and mail merge functions. 1988 RecFind/ImageFind Software - imaging capabilities introduced to RecFind. 1993 RecQuery Software - The low cost way to RecFind-enable desktops. Give everyone in the organization the ability to search for, display and print information from the RecFind database. Works with both RecFind Professional and RecFind Corporate. 1994 DocFind Software for Windows - The perfect home office or small business electronic record keeping system. Manage paper, scanned images and electronic documents with one easy to use product. RecFind Lite/RecFind Ultra Lite Software - cut down versions of RecFind. 1995 RecFind Button Software - Integrates RecFind to popular desktop office suites and e-mail clients. A fast and non-invasive way to capture electronic documents at the desktop. 1996 AIM Software - Low cost performance tool for clients using heavily loaded Wide Area Networks (WANs). Designed to remove 95% of this load from the WAN. 1997 OLE Software - Gateway to facilitate ease of communication between RecFind and any other application. 1997 RecFind Color Labeling and Lektriever Integration 1998 High Speed Scanning Module Software - designed to provide the easiest and fastest way to batch scan large numbers of documents and 'automatically' index and store them in the RecFind Corporate relational database. 1999 RecQuery Thin Client Software - The thin client (Browser resident) version of RecQuery. Runs on a Web server, links to the RecFind database via ODBC and to the user via Microsoft Explorer or Netscape. Runs on Intel and Apple clients (via the Browser). 2000 GEM 3.2 Software - Email Management Software - designed as a server-side application that connects directly to your email servers and captures all incoming and outgoing emails, including internal emails. It captures emails according to the rules you set up in the GEM Configuration utility. You determine which emails to capture and which to ignore by configuring appropriate rules. 2001 ISYS Search Integration with RecFind - GMB incorporated the award winning ISYS text search engine from Odyssey Development. ISYS Search is a search on the full text of any attached document, (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).  2003 RecQuery TC API Software - provides an object-orientated way to easily and quickly 'connect' RecFind to other systems and transfer data. It allows another application to expose File and Document objects within the RecFind database via a series of HTTP calls to RecQuery TC. 2004 GEM 5.0 - Email Management Software - GEM 5.0 is a completely new product that shares no DNA whatsoever with GEM 3.2. Unlike GEM 3.2 it is based on the very latest 32 bit technology and was designed from the outset to be 100% compatible with our information management product RecFind 5.0.  2004 File Database Transfer Utility - an easy way to move records between different RecFind systems

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New Product Release - GEM 5.0!!

GEM 5.0 is in it's final pre-production testing at our GEM Beta sites and is scheduled for release in early May.

GEM 5.0 Demonstrations

If you would like to see a 'Free' online demonstration of GEM click here. The demonstration will take place online via an application that we use called DesktopStreaming. The screen-sharing plug-in lets both you and the GMB Consultant communicate via a chat window on your workstation.

Also, a simple PowerPoint presentation on GEM 5.0 is available for download from our web site and can be accessed by clicking on the following hyperlink http://www.gmbsupport.com/GEM 5.0 presentation.zip. This can be used to explain and present GEM 5.0 to your management and users. It includes speaker notes.

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Product Spotlight - RecQuery TC API

In this newsletter we thought that we would bring some attention to one of our new RecFind add-on products called the RecQueryTC-API which was released late last year.

The RecQueryTC-API is an additional purchasable product that allows you to link to your RecFind information from a third-party application.

For example, if you are a Council, from within your property system you will be able to press a button that will display the relevant file folder (s) from RecFind for that property.

In order for this link to work there must be a common identifier in RecFind and the third-party application – for example, the property system must know the RecFind file number.

In order to use the RecQueryTC-API, you will also require RecQueryTC which is our web browser based client.

For more information, please see http://www.gmbsupport.com/Products/recquerytcapi.htm or email sales@gmbsupport.com.

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RecFind 5.0.0B Service Pack 2 Release

Service pack 2 for RecFind 5.0.0B has been released and is now available from our website for immediate downloading.

To download the service packs and view the release notes, please click here. 

Please contact GMB support should you have any questions relating to the service pack.

On-line: http://www.gmbsupport.com/Support/index.htm#helpdesk

E-mail: support@gmbsupport.com

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Training News

Training Program

City Scheduled Dates » Adelaide, Australia 24-28 May 2004 » Brisbane, Australia 31 May - 3 June 2004 » Perth, Australia 14-18 June 2004 » Tasmania, Australia 21-25 June 2004 » USA/Canada TBA - customers interested in attending RF5 Training in the USA/Canada please email training@gmbsupport.com.

Professional Services Update

Written by Gregory Warrilow, GMB Trainer/Consultant

Australia
The end of 2003 saw the V5 Upgrade courses proving to be just as popular as from when they were first scheduled at the beginning of the year. Upgrade courses were held in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne Perth and Sydney. Having done a years worth of V5 Upgrade courses, I've been interested to find out which of the new features have been the most popular. Whilst all of the new features have been adopted throughout the plethora of RecFind installations around the globe, one of the big winners would have to be the Cloning function (see Tips & Tricks below). This feature alone is a real time and data entry saver, so happy cloning everyone!

The last half of 2003 also saw consultancies being conducted in every state, in both regional areas and capital cities. Prior to upgrading to V5, many sites have taken the opportunity to invest in a post implementation consultancy. This can prove invaluable in making sure RecFind is being used to it's full potential, now that many sites have decided to implement EDM.

NRG Gladstone Power Station Queensland, Australia NRG Gladstone Power Station - one of many sites utilizing Post Implementation Consulting to implement EDM, including the use of barcoding, RQTC and workflow.

Canada
A V5 Upgrade course was conducted in Edmonton, Alberta for ten students. All of those in attendance were experienced RecFind users and once again it was great to get some feedback on how different sites utilize the functionality within RecFind.

Snow Machine, Edmonton, Alberta Canada "After the initial shock of a -15 Celsius temperature and thick snow, the training warmed up with a lot of questions and feedback. Thanks to all of those in attendance for your hospitality".

USA
A week of scheduled training was conducted in Los Angeles at the Microtek training facility in El Segundo. The course was attended by a small group which made the week relaxed and opened up the dialogue for exchanging ideas. Thanks to the Microtek staff who looked after us and made sure the week went without any hitches.

Two days of customized training was also conducted in Washington DC at the Australian Embassy. This was a return visit and it was great to see the leaps and bounds that have occurred within their RecFind installation. My first training trip there was conducted on V3.2, this one was conducted on V5 and took in RQTC and EDM as well.

Whilst in Washington DC I also conducted a site visit, accompanying our partner UNISYS, at a Federal Government installation. They were using the HSSM to store a large volume of electronic documents. I also had the opportunity to call into the UNISYS office in Maryland to meet the guys I had trained previously.

Australian Embassy Washington DC, USA RecFind Trainees Los Angeles, USA

2004 is shaping up to be an exciting year. With the release of RecCapture and GEM 5.0, Professional Services is looking forward to the challenge of providing and promoting new training courses, to ensure that RecFind and it's associated products, are used to their full potential.

If you are interested in attending a RecFind 5 Training course please email training@gmbsupport.com.

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Tips & Tricks

Cloning a File Folder

If a sequence of files needs to be created using the same titling structures etc, a single file record can now be cloned. This means that all the data fields from an existing file record can be copied to another without having to re-enter the same data over again.

To clone a file record, use the following procedure:

1. Select the ACTIVE tab.

2. Select the FILE MAINT module.

3. Select the Select drop down menu.

4. Select the required file.

5. Highlight the required file on the work list.

6. Select the Clone function button. The Clone function can also be selected by using the File drop down menu.

7. Add any additional information as required.

8. Select the OK function button to save your file record.

Alternatively, if your worklist is empty, you could select the Clone function button, then the desired file. The file will then automatically open in the Clone File Screen.

Please Note: RecFind will allocate the next file number in the sequence that has been configured by the RecFind Administrator, however should multiple sequencing be in use, the characters that will trigger the next number in the sequence will need to be entered in the File Folder Number field.

Document and Box Profiles can also be cloned in RecFind 5.0.

Tips & Tricks is a regular feature of the RUG newsletter to help you get the best from your RecFind 5 installation.

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Customer Focus

A small insight into one our longest serving customers...

National Gallery of Victoria

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) comprises NGV Australia located at Federation Square, which houses Australian art, and NGV International on St Kilda Road which houses International art.

There are over 70,000 works in the NGV collection.

Arthur Sliwinski is Coordinator of the Records Management Unit at NGV.

Prior to 1990 there was no records management system in place. Records were stored in cardboard boxes and it was often impossible to find previous correspondence. A manual records system was introduced in 1990. At the time of setting up manual system 100,000 documents and 10,000 manila files were found around the organization. Most records prior to 1990 were in archival storage. Records from the 1800s-1960s were sent to the Public Records Office of Victoria.

RecFind Text version was introduced in 1993. All files were entered into RecFind with the old file numbers in the Old File Number Field. Documents began being recorded from 1994.

When the RecFind Windows version was introduced in 1997, a two-tier titling structure and 3 multiple file number sequences were introduced. Document numbers went through a variety of number changes, from straight digits to alpha/numeric. Barcode technology was also introduced in 1997, which simplified file audits.

NGV have had RecFind Version 5.0.0B installed since January 2004. They are also using a pre-printed one-piece color coded numbers with barcodes on files.

NGV currently have 9,300 files with 12,000 documents. There is a scanning pilot project in progress for Director's incoming mail and Email management is under consideration.

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