Hyland’s CommunityLIVE Rocked!
Last week, ECM developer Hyland Software hosted its annual user conference, Hyland CommunityLIVE. End-users, system and IT admins, and executives representing Hyland’s diverse customer-base — including healthcare and financial services providers, insurance and construction firms, institutions of government and higher education, retailers and manufacturers — descended on Cleveland, Ohio, for four days of education, training, networking, and quite a lot of fun.
The agenda was hectic, with 67 hands-on technical training sessions, self-paced lab hours, and 316 breakout sessions. Layered in between were keynotes (with some very interesting introductions) from entrepreneur, choreographer and software engineer Miral Kotb and “the world’s best brain trainer” Trever Moawad, as well as Hyland’s Bill Priemer (CEO), John Phelan (EVP, CPO), Ed McQuiston (EVP, CCO), Glenn Gibson (director of product communications), and Colleen Alber (product evangelist). And because the folks at Hyland (and Cleveland, in general) know how to celebrate (and want you to celebrate with them), attendees were treated to a performance by Third Eye Blind (of Semi-Charmed Life fame) at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame AND an Indians game.
Here’s what the executives had to say:
When it comes to your business’s critical systems — managing content, contacts, contracts, business processes and so on — you typically have to rely on a number of tools to make sure things function smoothly. These tools can be expensive and aren’t always that easy to use.
According to Ed McQuiston, 45% of businesses use 100 applications each week, while 17% use over 1,000. That’s a lot of tools. You can imagine how unwieldy that must be for your IT team to handle. McQuiston made the case that Hyland’s portfolio simplifies this messy toolbox, replacing it with the Swiss Army knife of the solutions world, providing customers with a complete view of all their information, enabling intelligent automation of business processes, allowing organizations to be agile and adaptive, and offering tailored solutions to help customers optimize their business.
During his keynote, Hyland’s CEO Bill Priemer discussed the company’s current portfolio, and where Hyland is going to take their platform in the future. At the moment, Hyland offers a vast portfolio of solutions, including their flagship ECM product, OnBase; Brainware (capture); ShareBase (collaboration); Content Composer (customer communications management); and Perceptive Content (content and process management).
Impressive as it may be, the company is still striving for more and better solutions to help its customers succeed. Hyland is a research-driven organization, with a 1,100-person-strong R&D department. Leadership at Hyland has given the R&D department a three-pronged mission: to introduce functionality to make solutions more capable, powerful, and valuable; to make the platform easier to implement, manage, and use; and to modernize the architecture leveraging the latest technology.
To improve functionality, Hyland will focus on perfecting nine components: capture, content management, process automation, case management, customer communications management, collaboration, analytics, search, and retentions and record management.
To make its solutions easier to use, Hyland is putting more focus on UI/UX, leveraging templates and leveraging the cloud and off-the-shelf solutions to streamline and simplify deployment and maintenance of solutions. “We know the UI directly impacts user adoption, productivity and satisfaction,” he said. So now, Hyland is devoting more resources than ever to their front-end design. The goal is to provide simple, visually pleasing experiences that can be tailored to a particular user’s function or role. To ease deployment, Hyland is identifying and defining repeatable solutions, so that they don’t have to start from scratch every time and go through a lengthy discovery process. This includes solutions standards that outline functional requirements, core functionality, and implementation guidelines. They’ve also created off-the-shelf solutions for AP invoice processing, contract management HR employee file management that can be used completely out of the box or customized if needed.
Finally, they’re leveraging the power of the cloud to make life easier on customers. Hyland Cloud, already used by 1,000 customers, is tailored specifically to run the Hyland Platform. Unlike public commodity cloud services (like AWS), Hyland takes responsibility for installs, upgrades, maintenance, synchronizations of test systems, monitoring for optimization and performance and availability. They also ensure security and compliance and provide disaster recovery of the app itself and not just the infrastructure.
At the end of his keynote, Priemer announced Hyland Foundation, an updated product versioning system. Rather than releasing version x.x each time Hyland is ready to update its products, those fixes, updates and new features will be applied to the Foundation through “Enhancement Packs” throughout the year. The Foundation paradigm will begin with OnBase — Priemer announced the release of EP1 for OnBase during the keynote — and move to OneContent and Perceptive Content in the near future.
Foundations will serve as the connection point for the forthcoming “Hyland Experience platform.” This is a true cloud, multi-tenant SaaS platform that enables customers to utilize services locked within individual projects. Hyland will enable customers to purchase these features and functionalities, like the ability to OCR or classify documents, as standalone, cloud-based microservices.
When companies want to talk about instant access to information from anywhere on the globe to the people who need it, we’re listening. We all experience pain points now and then, but intelligent automated capture and data processing; data analytics and reporting; customer, case, and contract management; and purpose-built tools help soothe those pains. Throwing in quintessential hits from the 90s at a live concert, a tour of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a baseball game just makes it all that much more fun to be a part of.
is president and senior analyst for BPO Media, which publishes The Imaging Channel and Workflow magazines. As a market analyst and industry consultant, Ames has worked for prominent consulting firms including KPMG and has more than 15 years experience in the imaging industry covering technology and business sectors. Ames has lived and worked in the United States, Southeast Asia and Europe and enjoys being a part of a global industry and community.
