IBM Production Imaging Edition (IBM PIE)

Introduction

We have been introduced with the new IBM Production Imaging Edition, a new License that is added by IBM to be more competitive in the market while selling the powerful imaging capabilities for high end production sites.

According to IBM, PIE is the first and only solution in the market that provides a single product that manages the entire lifecycle of document imaging:

•  It provides the core scanning and imaging capabilities with distributed capture and image recognition in a way that ensures highest rates of ROI.
•  It provides the document routing capabilities and workflow to allow automation of internal business processes
•   It allows universal viewing of 300+ file formats, with the ability of annotations and image redaction
•    Last but not least, it provides a solid and scalable repository to store the organizations unstructured content with key content management offerings and capabilities.

There are 2 main advantages of releasing this product. First, It is a product that includes the newly acquired IBM Datacap Taskmaster, which offers an enterprise / high end and distributed capture solution. In addition, it is the first time that IBM bundles the DAEJA VIEWONE PRO as a product to be packaged and sold as part of its product offfering (within PIE). IBM currently bundles DAEJA VIEWONE Standard edition in Workplace / WorkplaceXT applications that allows viewing and annotating images, so the advantage of the PRO Edition that is bundled with PIE is that it will extend the standard edition offering of DAEJA VIEWONE to add universal file viewing and image redaction capabilities, which used to be acquired separately from VIEWONE for certain customer scenarios and cases.

What does PIE offer?

PIE includes the following product offerings in a single product ID/license:

IBM Datacap Task Master

One of the most important features that comes with the Datacap taskmaster is the remote capture, allowing branches and remote sites to upload and scan images in a distributed and controlled way

It includes the following features:

•           Distributed capture
•           Web Capture
•           Recognition
•           Scanning
•           Indexing

However, it does not include the following:

•           Connector to e-mail and electronic documents
•           Connector to Fax
•           Connectors to 3^rd party ECM repositories
•           RuleRunner enterprise.

IBM FileNet Content Manager

PIE includes the full capabilities of IBM FileNet Content Manager Product as if you are selling the standalone IBM FileNet Content Manager.

IBM FileNet BPM

PIE includes an edition of IBM FileNet Business Process Manager / Case Manager Product, it includes:

•           Process Designer
•           Process Tracker
•           Process Analyzer
•           Process Simulator
•           Microsoft Visio Connector.

However, PIE does not include:

•           Business Process Framework
•           E-Forms.
•           Bundled Cognos NOW!

DAEJA VIEWONE PRO Edition

PIE includes the following additional features of DAEJA View One Standard Edition:

•           Universal Viewing, 300+ file formats.
•           Image Redaction for Images and Textual PDF in ad-hoc mode only (near future: batch)
•           Annotations on PDFs and other file formats
•           Streaming Server, which is so powerful for viewing large multi page tiff images, it has the feature of page pre-fetching so for example, if you are viewing page 500 in a document, it will prefetch pages 501 to 506 ahead of time.

As a high level offering, please see the below diagram:

Who Needs IBM PIE?

IBM PIE will fit customers who would fall into one of these scenarios:

•           Customer who has scanning and document imaging users who may need distributed scanning /web scanning while taking benefit from the advanced recognition and capture capabilities.
•           Customer who are interested in controlling their full document lifecycle that includes scanning, process automation and universal file viewing/redaction
•           Customers who want to take advantage of IBM core ECM offering and need to deal with this as a single license offering rather than dealing with separate products that are offered in PIE as a separate license.

Additional Resources

To learn more about PIE, you may refer to the following resources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdjHOVSuFRw&feature=player_embedded

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/lbd03003usen/LBD03003USEN.PDF

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/lbd03003usen/LBD03003USEN.PDF

Connecting to User Mailbox using Exchange Web Services Managed API

Email Management software nowadays connect to exchange servers and archives e-mails based on some criteria. Have you ever wondered how the software is able to connect to Microsoft Exchange and manage the capture of e-mails?

this article is the introduction to the know-how, we will be exposed to the new Exchange Managed web services API that allows you to do awesome tasks on top of exchange.

let's do it!

Prepare the Environment

-          Install Microsoft Exchange Web Services Managed API from the following Web Site:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c3342fb3-fbcc-4127-becf-872c746840e1

Create a New Visual Basic .Net windows Application Project

-          Open A New Microsoft Visual Basic .Net Windows Project, I am using VS 2010 in this sample

-          Add a reference to “Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices” , browse to the reference file in  “<Install Drive>\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.1”

-          Open a New windows Form, add a button, text boxes as follows:

The 4 text boxes will represent the environment data; it will have the information about the exchange server, the admin credentials that we will use to connect to that exchange server, and the user account mail box that we will read messages from.

Control Label	Text Box Control Name	Usage
Exchange Server Name	txtExchangeServerName	This is going to have the value of the FULL  exchange server name in the following format: <ServerName>.<DomainName>.com
Admin Account Name	txtAdminAccountPassword	This is the administrative user name that will connect to the exchange server, it should have admin privileges on the exchange server,
Admin Account Password	txtAdminAccountPassword	The password of the admin account
User / Mailbox Account	txtAccountName	This is the mailbox account that we will fetch emails from

o   Exchange Server Name text Box: txtExchangeServerName.

o    Text Box: txtExchangeAdminName

o   Admin Account Password: txtAdminAccountPassword

o   User / Mailbox Account: txtAccountName

-          Add a Grid control to the form, the grid control will show the e-mails of the selected mailbox.

-          Go to source code and import the following classes

	Usage
Imports Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data	Will be used to reference the following objects: -          Exchange Service -          Folder -          SearchFilter -          ItemView -          FindItemsResults(Of Item) -          EmailMessage -          WellKnownFolderName -          LogicalOperator -          EmailMessageSchema
Imports System.Net	Will be used to reference the following Objects: -          NetworkCredential

Connect to mailbox and fetch emails

In this section, I will demonstrate the code to connect to a mailbox and fetch the emails.

Open source control, open the buttun1_click event,  then write the following code to instantiate an abject for the exchange service, this object will take care of establishing the connection to the exchange server:

Dim oService As ExchangeService = New ExchangeService(ExchangeVersion.Exchange2010)

It is to that I am using exchange server 2010 in my sample. Should you need to connect to 2007, you will have to change the parameter ExchangeVersion.Exchange2010 to the 2007 option

Then, create a variable to hold the URI address, pass the variable to the exchange service object:

Dim strServerURI As String = "https://" & txtExchangeServerName.Text & "/ews/exchange.asmx"

oService.Url = New Uri(strServerURI)

The URI address is going to be as this format: https://rsvr1.rdom.com/ews/exchange.asmx where rsvr1.rdom.com is the full name of the exchange server. In order to double check that it is the correct format, take the URL and insert it in the browser, if it returns XML WSDL information, it means it is working and the connectivity is OK, if it does not return valid data, then there is definitely a problem with the server or with the URL itself.

We need now to pass the admin credential and the domain name information; this information will be used when connecting to the exchange server

'---pass the Admin credential and domain information for admin connectivity

Dim strDomainName As String = Split(txtExchangeServerName.Text, ".")(1)

oService.Credentials = New NetworkCredential _

(txtExchangeAdminUserName.Text, txtExchangeAdminPassword.Text, strDomainName)

Now you need to connect to the user mailbox:

'---conenct to the user mailbox

Dim strMailboxUser As String = txtAccountName.Text

oService.ImpersonatedUserId = New ImpersonatedUserId(ConnectingIdType.SmtpAddress, strMailboxUser)

Then you need to select which folder you need to access, in our example, we will access the user “Inbox” folder:

Now comes the trick of the day, if you run the code until above point, you will be receiving the following error:

This happens when you are connecting to exchange in a secured socket layer connectivity, I have spent some time looking for a solution to this issue, until I knew that you will need to override the way that handles the secured connectivity, we will be telling the environment to accept my connection to the exchange server. In order to do this, I have created a class that will take care of this functionality:

Imports System.Net

Imports System.Net.Security

Imports System.Security

Imports System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates

Public Class TrustAllCertificatePolicy

Public Shared Sub OverrideCertificateValidation()

        ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback = New RemoteCertificateValidationCallback(AddressOf RemoteCertValidate)

    End Sub

Private Shared Function RemoteCertValidate(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal cert As X509Certificate, ByVal chain As X509Chain, ByVal [error] As System.Net.Security.SslPolicyErrors) As Boolean

        Return True

End Function

End Class

Then in the code, put the following line before the code that connects to the user inbox, so t will be as follows:

TrustAllCertificatePolicy.OverrideCertificateValidation()

This would solve the problem, and now let us continue with the email fetching.

To get e-mails, you will need to establish a search filter, search filters is a good way of sending multiple criteria to exchange server to get the requested e-mails, in our case here, we need to get the read and unread e-mails (all e-mails)

We will pass the search filters as array of filters, as follows:

  Dim arrSearchFilter(1) As SearchFilter

  arrSearchFilter(0) = New SearchFilter.IsEqualTo(EmailMessageSchema.IsRead, True)

  arrSearchFilter(1) = New SearchFilter.IsEqualTo(EmailMessageSchema.IsRead, False)

Now execute the search folder on the user inbox

Dim oSearchFilter As SearchFilter = Nothing

oSearchFilter = New SearchFilter.SearchFilterCollection(LogicalOperator.Or, arrSearchFilter)

The rest of the code is to create a DataTable with columns, and bind the results to it and display it in grid.

            Dim oView As ItemView = New ItemView(20)

            '---Fire the query for the unread items

            oResults = oService.FindItems(WellKnownFolderName.Inbox, oSearchFilter, oView)

            Dim oMessage As EmailMessage = Nothing

            oMessageCollection = New DataTable

            Dim oColumn As New DataColumn

            oColumn.ColumnName = "ID"

            oColumn.AutoIncrement = True

            oMessageCollection.Columns.Add(oColumn)

            oColumn = New DataColumn

            oColumn.ColumnName = "Subject"

            oMessageCollection.Columns.Add(oColumn)

            oColumn = New DataColumn

            oColumn.ColumnName = "From"

            oMessageCollection.Columns.Add(oColumn)

            oColumn = New DataColumn

            oColumn.ColumnName = "Date Received"

            oMessageCollection.Columns.Add(oColumn)

            Dim oRow As DataRow

            For Each oMessage In oResults

                oRow = oMessageCollection.NewRow

                oRow("Subject") = oMessage.Subject

                oRow("From") = oMessage.From.Name

                oRow("Date Received") = oMessage.DateTimeReceived

                oMessageCollection.Rows.Add(oRow)

                oRow = Nothing

            Next

            '---Loop through the items and do whatever is required.

            DataGridView1.DataSource = oMessageCollection

            DataGridView1.DataSource = oMessageCollection

How to update Garmin device with new map image files

Have you ever been in Dubai and experience driving a car with an out of dateGarmin Device map?!

This article will guide you through updating your Garmin device with the newest file maps. It is to note that the article does not guide you through where to get the maps from; you may buy them (I would highly recommend that) or get them from “a friend” (which I am sure you will do :))

• Plug your Garmin Device to the computer by using a USB connetcion.
• Download “MapUpload” application from http://www.mapwel.eu/down.htm
• Download the Garmin map Image files that matches your region.
• Launch “MapUpload” application.
• In the right of the screen, locate the “Image Map Files” grid/table, click on any row of the “IMG Map Files” Grid and select the folder that contains the map image files, select all the image files in the folder.
• Click “Upload to GPS”, then you are done :)

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