Collaborate 2011 Conference Shows The Road To The Paperless Office Is Paved In Green

On October 12 through October 14, Cabinet NG (CNG) held its annual Collaborate User Conference in its hometown city of Huntsville, Alabama. A nationwide audience was treated to advanced training, networking and integration help from CNG staff and key partners including Epson, Canon, Ricoh, and PSIGEN. It's clear from the customer stories, feedback and overall excitement, that the road to the paperless office is paved in green. Customers and resellers alike were touting the numbers and metrics they were using to showcase a real ROI. The most common theme was the ability to provide faster and better customer support.

Attendees learned some important tips to use their document management software more efficiently, use new and improved features and get a glimpse at what's around the corner. Training included merging with Microsoft Word, using an iPad for business, and integrating with scanners, portals and other software.

Andrew Bailey, President of CNG, started things off by showcasing how the CNG solution was used in disaster recovery efforts, keeping the company operational despite a series of EF5 and EF4 tornadoes that paralyzed Northern Alabama earlier this year. Bailey took the attendees through a timeline of what transpired. CNG's cloud-based solution, CNG-WEB, helped their customers (as well as CNG) through a variety of incidents, including snowstorms, fires, floods, power outages, pipe leaks, and more. Read more about CNG's experience in their diary of a real disaster recovery here: http://www.cabinetng.com/Blog_new/?p=174.

What's New with CNG
"CNG-WEB provides an ideal cloud-based platform to keep documents safe and accessible and is ideal for organizations wanting to quickly tap the benefits of going paperless with minimum effort and training," was echoed by James True, VP of Business Development for CNG, as he extolled the benefits of document management in the cloud and what's new with CNG's cloud offering. CNG-WEB makes it easier to deploy CNG-SAFE functionality across multiple locations. Whether you are traveling, visiting a customer or working late from home, it allows the user to connect to CNG-SAFE from a computer with a browser and an Internet connection. In its latest version, CNG-WEB now adds the ability to support folder workflow, folder notes, and folder alerts over the Internet, an industry first. CNG-Schedule makes it simple to collaborate with multiple users on multiple tasks to improve efficiency. You can even pretest internal processes before adding them. They have also made working with folders and documents even easier with speed bars, drag and drop functionality and side-by-side document comparisons. CNG rounded things out with new customized management and complete batch scanning integration. CNG also demonstrated the recently introduced portal sync to AdvisorVault, SugarSync and Dropbox.

Collaborating Onsite
CNG's Hands-On Training Labs were a big hit as users got to sit down with experts to ask anything they wanted. Attendees' goals seemed to echo Andrew Bailey's advice, "Take home at least one new thing to implement, learn more about at least one module you don't know well."

Collaborate also provided training focused for various users:

• CNG-SAFE Users – Designed for people who are new to CNG-SAFE and CNG-ONLINE
• CNG-SAFE Administrators - Designed for people who manage CNG-SAFE and its implementation
• Capture Tools – Designed for people who want to learn about scanning and data capture tools

Additional training focused on using key modules:

• Synchronizer and Retriever – To access and manage documents in CNG-SAFE
• CNG-Books – For QuickBooks data entry and document filing
• CNG-WEB - Document Management via a browser

Critical to CNG's success is the Feedback Forum. Listening to your customers is something that most companies claim, but because of CNG's manageable size, active user community, open floor policy mixed with a littler southern hospitality, the results are powerful. The CNG product direction is heavily influenced by customer feedback. In 2011, businesses are looking to get more from their document management solutions while they are out of the office and on the go.

Bill Winterberg's presentation, "The iPad in Business," showed how the iPad is changing the way business gets done and its ability to manage documents stored in CNG-SAFE and CNG-ONLINE.

Guest's were also treated to a presentation from former intelligence officer John Nolan who discussed how to both gain and protect their vital information. Author of eight books, including CONFIDENTIAL: Business Secrets – Getting Theirs and Keeping Yours, Nolan gave insight on how to go beyond document management by managing the people in and around an organization that could put sensitive information at risk, including proprietary information or intellectual property.

SOURCE: Cabinet NG