A meeting of the user group was held on March 17, 2016 at the Mazars office in central Amsterdam.
User Presentation by Mazars
CIO Frank Keesen and Ilsa Belterman of Mazars presented on their successful implementation of MacroView DMF. As part of the implementation Mazars integrated with their Oracle based CRM system, so that as a new Customer record is created, a corresponding Site Collection is automatically provisioned in SharePoint and visible via MacroView DMF. The implementation uses Citrix, which has simplified deployment of MacroView DMF to staff in 10 Mazars offices around the Netherlands. Frank noted that they had invested in Flash Drives to support their SharePoint environment and the resulting good performance was demonstrated at the meeting.
Suggestions from 2015 Meeting
MacroView Managing Director Noel Williams provided an update on the progress that had been made on suggestions made at the User Group Meeting in 2015. These suggestions had resulted in a number of enhancements to MacroView DMF including:
- Improved support for uploading and opening large documents (e.g. AutoCAD documents)
- Separate buttons for Insert Attachment and Insert as Link
- MacroView AOI available in Microsoft Excel and support for minor versions
- Indicator in file list that file has unique permissions
- Open With command for improved working with Visio, Project and other types of files
- Smart filing of tagged email attachments dragged to drop zone
- Warning when user tries to save certain types of email e.g. emails that have a security lock
- Improved Dutch translations
In relation to improved support for uploading and opening large documents Noel mentioned how MacroView DMF v8.2 would use a new .NET technique, which allowed uploading up to the Maximum File Size (default 250MB in SharePoint 2013) and also dramatically reduced the memory overheads associated with uploading and opening large files. He noted that this would be particularly beneficial in Citrix environments.
Noel demonstrated the right-click, Open With command which is now a standard inclusion in MacroView DMF. He showed how Open With streamlined working with a Visio file, such that changes were saved directly into SharePoint, removing the need to upload temporary files.
He pointed out that the same technique was relevant to Project files, AutoCAD drawings, graphic images and other non-Office documents.
Noel also mentioned that customers wanting to upload a large number of files to SharePoint should do so in MacroView DMF Explorer. This would take advantage of 64-bit hardware and allow the bulk upload to proceed in the background, so that you could carry on with other tasks while the bulk upload completed.
MacroView DMF Support for Office 365
Noel reported that improved support for Office 365 had been a major area of focus for MacroView over the previous 12 months. The result was that MacroView DMF (and MacroView Message) now enabled document and email management solutions in Office 365 SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business that had impressive functionality and an intuitive user experience. He referred to a recent blog post and YouTube video.
Adding Document Generation to Your Document Management Solution
Noel noted that the ability to create new documents and to have those new documents saved and profiled in the SharePoint DM store was an important requirement for many organizations, including several attending the user group meeting. He briefly demonstrated a custom right-click command called Create Document. This displayed a menu of Office templates that were available to the user. When a template was selected the user was prompted for metadata so that the resulting new document was saved in the area of SharePoint that the user had right-clicked. He also showed a sample MacroView Letter template, which displayed a custom form and performed the save and metadata capture without any additional prompting.
Question and Answer Session
At the end of the meeting there was a vibrant Question and Answer session, led by Ilsa and Frank who presented a series of issues and questions that had arisen from use of MacroView DMF at Mazars.
