Piles of invoices? No Problem!

desk full of paperPiles of invoices look different than they did a few years ago when paper cuts were a much bigger risk. These days, invoices often arrive via email as PDF files. Spitfire Project Management System includes some features that date back a decade and were originally designed to handle TIFF files from network scanners.  We don’t think about this feature too often, but it can still offer significant workflow benefits today.

Sales recently shared the needs of a prospect who wants to process a pile of around a hundred invoices and supporting documents a day basically twice, making two passes through the pile.  We told the prospect about our solution, which apparently thrilled them enough that they asked if they could start using it “tomorrow.”

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Freeze Rays!

Freeze RayHeat is a problem. If you’ve ever actually tried to use a laptop on your lap for an extended period while it was rendering real time 3D images you have experienced the problem first hand (and first lap). Computers, car engines, battery charging, air conditioning. Hey, it’s global warming: we are surrounded by heat producing technology.

Meanwhile, what seems more science fiction than a freeze ray?  But researchers are making progress with laser cooling!

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Data Deduplication and Single Instance Storage

deduplicationOkay, so this article is for the IT Crowd, or at least those who thought the British comedy was funny.   You see, sales told me that the fact that our system includes automatic and transparent Data Deduplication is so darn dry and boring that they couldn’t imagine including it in a fact sheet anywhere.

Apparently, the feature is so obscure  that even Google Chrome’s spell check doesn’t believe “deduplication” is a word. Maybe that’s why Wikipedia has entries for both Data Deduplication and Single Instance Storage.

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Too Much Information

too much informationI have the distinct pleasure of spending a short time each week with a handful of kids, most often middle school age. I learn a lot from them: for example, thanks in part to text messaging, teens have even more acronyms than the software industry–which is astounding!

Hearing them banter about one of those acronyms “TMI” got me thinking.  TMI strictly means “Too Much Information”, but also carries the connotation of some fact or piece of information that the party didn’t want or need to know.

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Finding the Right Tree Ring in a Forest of Information

Tree DoctorDennis recently blogged about how RFI’s are similar to blood cells, in part because of how important the proper, healthy circulation of information is to the life of every project.

Yet he and I also have threads going about the problems caused by disorganized data.  It occurred to me that these two topics intersect. Yes, it is incredibly important that RFIs circulate freely and correctly.  But it is just as important that you have clear, precise information about when that RFI circulated and to whom.

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