Boston, MA

Monday, August 24, 2009

ViewONE deployed as a SharePoint Web Part for key Technology Partner



Company FACT FILE:



Geographic Location

Fairfax, VA

Industry Sector

Information Technology

Environment

Microsoft SharePoint

No of ViewONE users

101 - 1000 users

Products Purchased

- ViewONE Standard Edition

- ViewONE Pro

Company PROFILE :

Headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia with over 1,000 employees worldwide, NISC is a leading provider of innovative information technology solutions, information management, and strategic consulting services in support of national interest and security initiatives. NISC distinguishes itself by aligning our services with the customer mission in five focused areas: Intelligence, Defense,

Homeland Security, Energy, and Federal Health/Civilian agencies.

1. Challenge to overcome

NISC needed a viewer that would display both the document image and associated meta data in the same SharePoint window for our customer, NOAA's NCDC (National Climatic Data Center). SharePoint out of the box relies on the user's default image viewer which would have opened in a different window and not displayed the metadata. The NCDC SharePoint system hosts over 54 million environmental, climate and weather documents/images for the Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP) at NCDC.

2. Daeja's Solution

We integrated ViewONE into SharePoint as a Web Part. This provided a solution to viewing image files such as TIFF and PDF, and their associated metadata, within a single window.

Based on discussions with Microsoft, this is the first instance of a Java applet being deployed as a SharePoint Web part.

3. Benefits to NISC and their customer NCDC

With ViewONE, NCDC SharePoint users can view any image type without having a viewer application installed on their PC. The fact that ViewONE is Java-based and hosted on our servers provides NCDC users with a consistent viewing experience that we control. We don't have to depend on users having particular viewing software installed locally on their PC. NCDC was very satisfied with the use of ViewONE in our legacy product, which SharePoint replaced.



The INTERVIEW :



Please introduce yourself and explain what your job role is within the company?

I'm Ed Fisher and I'm a Program Manager for NISC (National Interest Security Company), formerly IMC.

How did you find out about Daeja Image Systems?

We originally found Daeja via a web search and have been using ViewONE within our company's custom data archive application since 2000.

Describe how ViewONE is integrated into your workflow:

We provide data hosting services to our customers, which enables them to view their documents online. For our NCDC customer, these include TIFF & PDF images, with associated metadata for each document. We have developed a SharePoint Web Part that uses ViewONE to display TIFFs & PDFs. Based on discussions with Microsoft; this is the first instance of a Java applet being deployed as a SharePoint Web Part. Eric Wagstaff, a Technical Project Manager at NISC, first did a proof of concept using ViewONE as a SharePoint Web Part and the customer accepted our recommendation in 2008. Diron Anderson then completed the development and the customer has been using ViewONE as their SharePoint image viewer since August of 2008.

Did you set out to look for a replacement for an existing viewer? If so, what compelled you to look for a replacement?

Due to our satisfaction with ViewONE in our data archive web application, we decided to use it in our SharePoint development.

How did ViewONE compare on product specification and performance?

Our long association and satisfaction with ViewONE's performance and support convinced us it was best to stay with ViewONE.

When you made your purchase from Daeja, what proved to be important factors in the decision?

e.g. Product Specification/Performance, Available information, Ease of integration)

1. Our previous excellent experience with ViewONE

2. Our customer was very satisfied with the use of ViewONE in our legacy product, which SharePoint replaced

3. We were comfortable working with ViewONE and integrating it into Web applications

4. ViewONE allowed us to display all of the images types stored by our customer

How did the integration of ViewONE with SharePoint go? Were there any

issues/challenges that you faced during this process?

The most significant challenge we faced with the ViewONE integration was using the applet with Windows Authentication. Specifically we had to bypass the requirement for users to re-authenticate when the ViewONE applet loaded. We found that even though a user had already provided their credentials when logging into the site, they would be forced to re-authenticate in order to view images with the ViewONE viewer. To get around this we ended up creating an anonymously hosted byte serving page that uses a web service to retrieve documents for authenticated users. This allowed the applet to load images without having to provide authentication, while ensuring that only authenticated users would be able to view images. We faced some problems viewing PDFs, but we were able to work through them with Daeja's support.

When compared to other lightweight viewers, what would be your evaluation of Daeja's Support

and Service Levels?

Daeja has provided excellent support and service to us since 2000.

Which of the features of ViewONE do you find most beneficial?

Our customer, NCDC, can view any image type without having a viewer application installed on their PC. The fact that ViewONE is Java-based and hosted on our servers provides our customers with a consistent viewing experience that we control - we don't have to depend on the customer having particular viewing software installed locally on their PC.

Are there any other features that you would like ViewONE to have?

We have discovered Daeja's new full text searching facility for PDFs which will prove extremely useful to us.

In what way does ViewONE benefit your business?

One of NCDC's requirements was to be able to display both the document image and associated metadata on the same screen. We were able to integrate ViewONE into a SharePoint WebPart that allows the image to be displayed in the original SharePoint window, along with the associated index data.

Jennifer Walker

Daeja Image Systems

Boston, MA

845.559.3770