BOSS-Referent 2010 – a new level of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) built on the Microsoft SharePoint™ 2010 Platform

BOSS-Referent 2010 has been developed by the order of I.T. Co Group in cooperation of 3 leading companies, each famous in its own domain. BOSS-Referent Company – founder of BOSS-Referent Product line and expert in ECM systems, Microsoft Corporation – leading provider of state-of-art technologies and Aplana Software – expert in software product development.
BOSS-Referent is one of in the leading brands in the market of document and unstructured information management systems. The first DMS under a brand BOSS-Referent has appeared almost 15 years ago, and for today it is used by more than 300 thousand employees of various companies across all Russia.

“The team of founders of BOSS-Referent products has unique experience in a subject domain. We constantly receive a feedback from our clients and keep track of transformation of inquiries in the market. Couple of years ago we have understood that demand in the market of DMS/ECM systems varies. Modern users of ECM-systems make the increasing demands to convenience of interfaces and presence in systems of the built in communicative services. We consider that we managed to realise system providing these requirements of users”. Andrey Grib, CEO of BOSS-Referent Company explains.

Anatoly Gaidai, Technical Director of Aplana Software explained their rationale for extending the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, “Today’s enterprise employee is constantly “switching” between four to five different information systems and the majority of these users access no more than 20% of the functionality of these systems. At operational management level the situation is even worse. Our aim was to develop the concept of a single, universal workplace for any user and this has been realized with our development of BOSS-Referent 2010“.

BOSS-Referent 2010 harnesses both Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 capabilities as an integrated platform and is notable for its own innovative user interface, providing a universal workplace for any type of user.

Anatoly Gaidai, Technical Director of Aplana Software added, “From another viewpoint, when most users are working with documents which they receive from different information systems, they usually read much more than write, so document content is more important than the attributes of the document. We believe that BOSS-Referent 2010 users will be happy with our innovative approach to the “working with document” part of the application in particular. Aplana’s experts have put a wealth of experience in its development using state-of-art technologies. BOSS-Referent 2010 is built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – the latest version, which gave us a whole host of capabilities to create this product to essentially a new technological level”.
BOSS-Referent 2010 represents, first of all, a powerful and expandable ECM platform. Its unique difference is a conceptually new ergonomic interface, which is focused on convenience of work for all types of enterprise users – from ordinary users to senior managers.

“BOSS-Referent 2010 is an embodiment of our and our partners in-depth knowledge of understanding the requirements of all types of enterprise users, first of all. We’ve focused on creating BOSS-Referent 2010 to be user-friendly and convenient to use”, said Anatoly Gaidai.

There are several main features which make BOSS-Referent 2010 so unique and innovative:

1. The concept of a customizable workplace which allows the user to work with information and documents from different information systems in a universal way. Access to data across integrated applications is provided through the “widgets” interface where every application could be represented with one or several widgets. Widget is an entry point to the application and it can represent a subset of application information which is required for a current user or show some KPIs, allowing the user workspace to look like a digital dashboard.
2. The second distinctive feature and advantage realized by Aplana experts is an “animated Pivot” module. It is a simple BI-instrument which allows users to work with lots of information entities in a very intuitive way. Users can filter/sort/analyze information from different integrated applications in a universal way.
3. Another innovation brought to BOSS-Referent 2010 is working with documents. In BOSS-Referent 2010system, the content of the document is presented in the first place, and the attributes are secondary.
4. BOSS-Referent 2010 fully supports a “touch” interface so users can turn pages of the document by fingers, simulating “paper” document reading.
5. Often when a user is working with a document they need to look at related documents. BOSS-Referent 2010 supports “dual documents” mode where a user can read two documents at the same time.
6. There are powerful search capabilities – BOSS-Referent 2010 users can do the search on all integrated applications data simultaneously.

BOSS-Referent 2010 is designed for use in large organizations and perfectly supports document based managerial processes in a territorially distributed structure for up to 30,000 users. This has been proved through exhaustive tests carried out in the Microsoft Technological Centre in Moscow.

BOSS-Referent 2010 is built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010, using most of the functionality and architecture advantages which SharePoint 2010 provides.  For example, BOSS-Referent 2010 greatly simplifies use of the collaborative editing mode when a team of people works on the same document simultaneously.

A particular advantage of BOSS-Referent 2010 is deep integration with other Microsoft products: Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Microsoft Office Communications Server. BOSS-Referent 2010 allows Microsoft Outlook 2010 users to work with the documents directly from Outlook – from notification emails and tasks.

As the modern rhythm of our working life develops with advanced, supporting communication technologies, our demands to access information within corporate systems from any point intensify. BOSS-Referent 2010 will support the information worker with multiple devices, from PC to laptops, to touch-screen devices, phones or PDAs.

Commenting on the development partnership, Alexander Lozhechkin, Director of Department of Strategic Technologies Microsoft in Russia remarked, “We are delighted to see the result of a highly successful collaboration between Aplana Software, BOSS-Referent and I.T. Co Group. Having selected the Microsoft platform, it has enabled them to develop an ECM solution at a completely new level. Using state-of-art Microsoft technologies has empowered Russian developers to create software which is capable of satisfying the ECM requirements of the modern business. It has been a fulfilling experience to work with Aplana Software as a united team on the product. Aplana’s experts demonstrated their high level skills in the development this new product using the latest Microsoft technologies”.