Thank you to all who visited our booth at the IASA Northeast Regional Conference last week. The reception was quite good as we were demonstrating both Ratchet-X for ImageRight and our ACORD forms integration plug-in. Folks had lots of questions across a number of fronts though there seemed to be a particular interest in Ratchet-X uses in the areas of corporate and government compliance. As I’ve written about extensively on this blog and in other places, Ratchet-X is a wonderful addition to any organization’s compliance program. Ratchet-X can be used in the following ways:


- enforce new regulations and policies not built into your application
- create helpful dynamic links to external sources of information
- dramatically expand your ability to track user/application interactions for the purposes of auditing and corrective actions


If you are interested in discussing how Ratchet-X can assist with your compliance program, give us a call. Further, fell free to view the following video which touches on the compliance use case.

Ratchet-X For ImageRight Plug-In Video

Ratchet-X for ImageRight was released at the Vertafore/ImageRight User Conference back in August. We finally got around to creating a demo video of the plug-in and have posted as Ratchet-X Video Series video. If you’re interested in viewing the demo video, click here.

Ratchet-X for ImageRight is compatible with all version 3.5 and higher of ImageRight and is available from Vertafore. You can contact us or Vertafore for more details.

ImageRight User Conference Follow-up

Thank you to all who visited the Ratchet-X booth at the ImageRight User Group Conference. The tremendous response we received at the conference further confirms our belief that Ratchet-X and document management are beautiful match.

We announced at the conference the official release of Ratchet-X for ImageRight. If you’re an ImageRight user and have been deferring on integrating more of your applications because of the integration costs, I recommend you give us a call and check out the new release. Ratchet-X for ImageRight is compatible ImageRight versions 3.5 and above.

Special thanks to George Weihs for performing a yeoman’s job and pulling double duty in the booth.

Ratchet-X and ETL

We recently exhibited Ratchet-X at Microsoft’s TechEd 2009 show in Los Angeles California. Thank you to all who visited our booth and made the show such a big success for us. While there was no shortage of ideas as to how Ratchet-X could be used within the organizations of those who took the time to receive a demo, there was one repeated use case that stood out. Let’s just say that despite all efforts the industry has made to create better integrated systems, ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), is alive and well. We heard a number of stories about how organizations still continue to struggle with creating and maintaining reliable ETL processes.

No doubt, modern application development and deployment technologies coupled with “smart” infrastructure are enabling organizations to integrate more-and-more systems in real time. However, despite the advances, ETL is still a reality of life in organizations of all sizes. So the question asked often asked of us at the show was; “Where does Ratchet-X fit within the ETL process?” Glad you asked.

Let me first say that while Ratchet-X does extract, transform and load data between systems, it is not a traditional ETL tool. When I think about ETL, I think of scheduled batch jobs that process and move data between queues and systems. Generally, ETL processes are executed during non-prime time usage or maintenance hours for the purpose synching data across systems. While the term ETL can be used to describe other related processes, I think this is what most folks mean when they refer to ETL.

So, if Ratchet-X extracts, transforms and loads data, why isn’t it an ETL tool? It’s mostly a matter of perspective. Whereas most ETL processes are scheduled to run in batch, work with large data sets and have little end-user interaction, Ratchet-X is an on demand data processing platform that processes a single record set at a time and is often guided by the end-user.

Most of our customers use Ratchet-X to add new features to existing applications without changing those applications in any way. These new features usually involve:

• Acquiring data from an external source (e.g. web services, web site, electronic form, database, API, etc).
• Sending application screen data to an external source.
• Processing application screen data for the purposes of either transforming it in some way or kicking off a down stream process.

In most cases, Ratchet-X is processing one or more application screen’s worth of data that collectively constitutes a single record set (i.e. a composite customer record, an insurance policy, a shipping manifest, etc.). Ratchet-X is not usually used to process thousands of these record sets at a time. Further, Ratchet-X is almost always used under the watchful eye of the end-user. In reality, Ratchet-X is an “assistive” technology that allows an end-user to acquire, push or process data to and from the systems they use without having to rekey data and reducing errors. This doesn’t sound like ETL to me.

So, uh, where is it that Ratchet-X fits into the ETL process? Oh yeah. No ETL process is perfect. In fact most ETL processes have an error handling stage where exceptions and records that fail validation are kicked out to an exceptions queue. Once in the queue, the user then must manually review and rekey the corrected information into the target system or error handling interface. This is precisely where Ratchet-X can be very useful. For example, we have customers that set up Ratchet-X’s task list as the exception handling queue so users can easily review the data, make whatever corrections are necessary and immediately paste the corrected record into the target application.

So while Ratchet-X is not an ETL tool per se, it can serve as an important part of the error handling stage of most ETL implementations. If you have any questions or comments regarding how Ratchet-X can be used to supplement your ETL process, please drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

If you'd like to see a video regarding how Ratchet-X can be used as part of your ETL efforts, click here.

SOA Dead...Again?

The Death of SOA…again? How many times have I read this headline? I thought it died back in 2006 when it was mortally wounded and replaced by Web 2.0…which then, according to the pundits, itself perished in Spring 2008. It’s so hard to keep this stuff straight. The good news is you don’t really have to.

While the media is replete with proclamations about the state of technology movements and buzzwords, discussions such as these are merely academic. Why is this? It has a lot to do with the media’s lack of nuance. To those who opine on such matters, attention spans are short so often something is either in or out, big or small, paramount or irrelevant. Fortunately, that’s not the way the real world works.

I agree with Burton Analyst Anne Thomas Manes’ summation that services is where it’s at. I’ve always held that belief. I was highly suspicious when discussions of web services gave way to SOA because the conversation transitioned from a compact and tangible concept to a much larger and nebulous concept. Read achievable versus hard to achieve.

When companies turned their attention to the broader idea of SOA, the appeal of project-based implementations and small wins went out the window. SOA became a religion that organizations had to strategically adopt from the start otherwise its benefits were not to be had. I strongly disagree. While most organizations would love to strategically embrace SOA from day one and experience “spectacular gains”, in most cases it’s not a practical approach. Small implementations, lessons learned, quick wins and replication is a much more sensible path. Over time, as success builds upon success, services ultimately become the way business functions are exposed by an organization. Along with it come the registries, management and scaling layers required for broader success. Dare I say, these services and the methodologies used to design, develop and deploy them ultimately become strategic? I'll buy that.

So if we’re bidding the term SOA a fond adieu, so be it. What’s in a name? But let’s go easy on the “SOA is Dead” and “…great failed experiment” language. The more these kinds of terms are thrown around, the more they stick with decision makers and are used against those fighting the good fight to implement services.