Diary of a Techie

Have you ever searched for technology or software that your firm can use to enhance your staff’s team work and coordination? My short answer would be for you to invest in Windows Small Business Server 2003.

The Business background

I am lucky to be involved with not only with Bitstop Network Services Inc (www.bnshosting.net), but also with Farmout Central Intouch Incorporated. Farmout (www.farmout.ph) is a Business process outsourcing provider located in Dagupan City, Pangasinan, Philippines. We do contact center work like Telemarketing, customer care, order entry , data encoding and transcription services.

Quite a number of Farmout’s client are in the corporate and medical conference transcription service. These principals need to provide Farmout with securely (think HIPAA) upload audio files and Farmout needs to turn these into Microsoft Word formatted documents within a specified time period at a specified accuracy level.

The problem here is that our teams are spread into three or more different locations/facilities.

Our principals are in the US. Our transcriptionists are split into 2 or 3 teams in different locations. The editors and QA (quality assurance) teams are in another location. My team supervisor is also in another facility. We are all geographically dispersed.

The pain point here is COORDINATION among the various team members.

How do we get everyone well coordinated? How do you know if a new file has come in and is ready to be transcribed? How do we assign the work to specific agents? How do we know the status of jobs assigned to agents? When the agents are finished, how is this communicated to the editors? When do we know when the editors are finished so that the work of final QA can start? And finally, how do we let the principals know that the work is complete and uploaded?

If the work was done in one place, it would be simple matter of just ‘telling’ the other members of the team about the status of each assigned work. Unfortunately, being in separate facilities, coordination of the workflow is a big challenge and is essential to our success.

An added challenge was the ease of use and the learning curve concerns. It must easy to use and browser based. This enables our staff to quickly ‘learn the ropes’.

The Business Solution

Our trade secret and solution to this problem? We used Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 (SBS). Inside SBS is a service or an application called Windows Sharepoint Services. (WSS). The WSS application show here allows us to do a lot of things. (It comes free with Windows SBS!)

We can use WSS to post group or team announcements. All of these are presented inside a browser!

We can create a calendar of events so that team members are aware of timelines and deadlines.

We use the ‘Link’ to create URL links to important reference sites.

We use WSS document libraries as a repository of huge audio files ( from 50mb to 150mb depending on the codec used). Finally, we use WSS for its TASK list. We also enabled quota on them to prevent abuse.

The Upload multiple files allows both farmout and our principal to quickly interface with their computers windows explorer and to just tick off the files they want to upload. The default limit is 50mb, but we have to expand this to 150mb to accommodate the larger audio files.

The uploaded word documents are searchable in the search fields!

We modified the generic task list that came with WSS to add more columns. We use these added columns to track among others, the length of the audio (which is used for billing), the name of the transcriptionist, editor and final QA (for auditing and incentive computations).

The tasklist already comes with a status update expressed as a percentage. Key values include “Not Started”, “10% finished”, “50% finished”, etc. that tells the entire team the status of any particular work assigned.

Three added ‘cool’ features that come with WSS are the ‘Alert’ ,’Versions’ and ‘Checkout’. The ‘Alert’ feature allows team members to receive notification emails when a particular task, or folder is updated or modified in any way.

The ‘Versions’ feature, allow us to maintain a history of several versions of each file. In case one of our staff overwrites a file, we can always revert back to a prior version.

The checkout/checkin allows any individual team member to lock in the file. This prevents anyone from doing any further modifications to a file, until after the person that locked the file, checks the file back in.

The business Workflow

The process starts with our principals in the US uploading the huge audio files into the document library. Security is done via SSL layer with Server Certificates and IP based restrictions.

The WSS document library called ‘UPLOADED Audio” is the repository (file sharing) folder. Once the principals are finished with the uploads, the WSS will send a notification email to us. Our team supervisors are ‘subscribed to the alert’ for this feature to work.

Once the email alerts our supervisors to the new file to be transcribed, a task assignment will then be created in the task list. Each agent who has been assigned a task will also receive the ‘alert’ email.

The agent then goes to the document library to download the audio file and begins the transcribing job assigned to them. At certain points along the way, the agent will go to the task list and update the status by incrementing the % finished status. This alerts the editors to the pace of the work.

Once the work is completed, the agents will update the status and set it to 100% finished. The editors can go in to the task list and sort the long list of job assignments according to the status field. The 100% finished files will ‘float’ to the top of the list, and they can now do their editing.

Once the edit is finished, a final QA is done on the file. The final file is uploaded into a separate document library called ‘Finished Work’. The principal has subscribed to an alert in this document library. So once the file is uploaded, the principal is automatically notified of completion.

The Quality Control Process

The accuracy rating of each transcriptionist is measured by and reported by the editors in the tasklist. Each task will have a column named “Accuracy Bonus” It contains either a yes or no. At the end of each pay period, agents receive a bonus depending on the number of Accuracy Bonus points given to them by the editors.

All of this is done from within WSS!

What’s New about SBS?

Previous versions of SBS allowed up to 25 users only for each server. This has now been increased to 75. You can use Active Directory to further enhance user management and security features. Recent advancements in both the software (code enhancements) and hardware (Dual Core) have made the SBS-WSS more responsive than ever before.

A new pricing model have been introduced as well to lower the barrier to entry.

Bitstop’s SPLA (Service Provider Licensing Agreement) has been renewed (Thanks to Microsoft Asia Pac), and we are allowed to ‘lease’ out Microsoft software. Firms do not have to buy the software outright. Bitstop offers the use of the software on a very low monthly fee based on every 5 users. We packaged this to include the server hardware, and the hosting – so that firms talk to only one party. This greatly speeds up support issues and enables quick provisioning.

Best of all, the license are calculated on a per month basis. So if you have 20 users this month, you only get the 20 user license for this month. If you have 5 users next month, you only get the 5 user license for next month.

In addition to the WSS application in SBS, Firms can also have exchange email boxes. The exchange mailbox is ‘mobile-access’ friendly. I was able to test it out with an O2 Zync unit on loan from Haldane (o2 Philippine Distributor) and was able to check my email on it via wifi. The O2 unit also has GPRS and 3G.

To learn more about windows sharepoint services, try out https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=118020

Filed under: Computing