TECHNOLOGy
Digitising Data
Tech Snippet | Forecast
Networked devices in India to grow to 2 bn A report from networking company Cisco says the number of networked devices will grow to two billion in India by 2016, up from one billion in 2011. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast attributes the sharp growth to increasing popularity of high-speed internet services, tablets and smartphones. The report further estimates there will be 18.9 billion network connections globally by 2016—almost 2.5 connection for each person on the planet—up from 10.3 billion in 2011. The Asia-Pacific region will have 46.7 per cent,
behind keeping track of each and every unique document (via simple attributes or metadata), retrieval and search are the end-user facing functions which define how each document stored in the system can be searched for and displayed. Security: Underlying the entire approach is the concept of security and authenticated access to each document. Any mature document management system should have a rights management module that allows an administrator to give access to documents based on type to only certain people or groups of people.
Client-server or Vendorrun Approach An important consideration administrators and decision-makers have to make early in the process is whether to choose a client-server model or a vendorrun approach. With the former, the storage and scanning systems are located within your premises, or at a location managed by you. While it does allow you full control over the data and the flexibility of data capture as your needs evolve, it does bring with it upfront costs of hardware infrastructure and IT staff to manage the system, backups etc. An alternative approach is to use application service providers (ASPs) where the application and data reside on the service provider’s servers, and access is provided either via a web browser or through pro-
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EduTech July 2012
8.7 billion, of the global network connections. The internet traffic in India is expected to grow at rate of 64 per cent between 2011 and 2016. Also, there will be 502 million internet users by 2016 in India, up from 127 million in 2011. It’s learnt that the government has accorded top priority to the internet telephony segment. As per the recently approved National Telecom Policy 2012, the government has relaxed norms for internet telephony and aims to increase penetration of telecom services in the country, 39-70 per cent by 2017 and 100 per cent by the year 2020. “Increasing video consumption, fuelled by adoption of 3G and 4G ...will be the key drivers,” Cisco India and Saarc Senior VP (Service Provider) Sanjay Rohatgi said.
prietary client software. Unlike the client-server model, backups and uninterruptible power supplies are no longer your headache and IT maintenance is almost always part of the package. Costs are low initially (usually just a setup fee), followed by a monthly usage payment based on the number of users. The flip side is that a fast reliable internet connection is a prerequisite, since this affects key success factors such as search and document retrieval speeds.
How They Did It: Case Studies Pepperdine University, USA: This vast 830-acre campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean had much of its content spread over several different repositories, in both paper and digital format, making it difficult for administrators and faculty to access and find content. By using the solution provided by Xythos, Pepperdine has centralised accreditation information, automated faculty review processes and archived institutional content such as student portfolios and published papers. In fact, the laundry list doesn’t end there, and Don Thompson, Associate VP of Planning (IT) says that they plan to use the system to streamline a long list of administrative and academic processes, building collaborative services within each step and web-enabling many of the processes that have relied upon email attachments or physical doc-
ument exchange and storage in the past. Stanford University, USA: Home to 14,000 of the world’s top students, Stanford started their search for a DDM solution with a simple objective—to design a single location with a common interface where university users and IT personnel could share information that required no technical skills to manoeuvre. After a pilot run, Stanford chose Xerox’s DocuShare solution to share and manage thousands of documents, both electronic and paper, across a wide variety of PC, Mac and Unix platforms. City College, Birmingham: As part of the move to a new campus, City College chose to introduce a state-of-the-art document management system from Document Manager, which would allow them to find and share documents in 60 teaching locations, while reducing costs, streamline processes and reduce its carbon footprint. All this was previously managed as paper files and took up 10 teaching rooms full of archives! Lovely Professional University, India: While LPU is yet to fully embark on their DDM systems, Vice Chancellor Dr RS Kanwar states that the planned system will be used to retain digital copies of all MA, MS, MTech, MBA, M Arch and PhD theses, plus IP material such as refereed research papers, conference proceedings, book chapters, patents, etc, in the university library. In addition, all HR documentation will be stored digitally.