Tu Nguyen always believed in the promise of document management. After winning the Microsoft 2003 Imagine Cup programming competition, a lot changed for him. Inspired while working in his parents' Vietnamese restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska, Nguyen developed an application designed to bridge the language gap between English-speaking waiters and Vietnamese-speaking chefs. His solution ran on Pocket PC devices, enabling the restaurant's staff to communicate more effectively by translating food orders into each person's native language. Waiters entered orders into devices that transmitted data to a local server. The data was then translated from English into the chef's native language and sent to a printer in the restaurant's kitchen. By automating the ordering process, the application eliminated the dual-entry process and inconsistency of paper tickets, saving the staff time and the restaurant money. And while that experience may be a far cry from the company Nguyen is with today, DOCCENTER, it inspired Nguyen to want to start his own company — and to build it on the Microsoft platform. He started as an intern at DOCCENTER, and not long after winning the Microsoft award, he convinced the company to expand its vision, build a product on the Microsoft platform, and make him vice president of information technology.
DOCCENTER provides a complete solution for document management on demand. Its flagship product, EDDS Vault (Electronic Document and Digital Storage) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that frees companies from the headaches of a paper-based storage solution and enables them to collaborate with trusted associates, manage compliance requirements, and know that their files are being backed up. Just recently, the company became a member of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program.
Here is our conversation with Tu Nguyen, Vice President of Information Technology at DOCCENTER.
Microsoft Startup Zone: So, having won the Imagine Cup, you had experience with Microsoft technology. Talk to us about the decision to build the company’s SaaS solution on the Microsoft platform?
Tu Nguyen: While at the University of Nebraska, and getting ready to apply for my internship, I realized that I needed something to really make me stand out from the rest. Getting A’s in math wasn’t enough. So I focused on this new Microsoft .NET technology that had just come out. My first application was for my parents’ restaurant—the application I designed won the Microsoft 2003 Imagine Cup. My version of the IPOD, for Intelligent Pocket Order Delivery System, was created with a simple UI that allowed waiters to take an order, and then once they got the order, it could be translated into Vietnamese in the kitchen. With that simple application, I was able to use the Microsoft .NET Framework, Compact Framework, SQL Server, Web Services, and then the whole .NET C# environment. After learning all about the technology, I realized the potential of what .NET could do versus other platforms—where I’d still be learning how to do things.
So, when I joined DOCCENTER, we were already using third party software, and some open source. I suggested to the president that we build our own product, and focus on the Microsoft platform because it was so well documented, and had a lot of community support around it as well.
We chose .NET for our current technology called EDDS Vault because it enables us to focus on what we want to do, and not worry about the whole plumbing of the technology itself. We’re also using SQL Server 2005, and the Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 environment. And we have a team that’s focused on Silverlight 2.0 technology. We used it to build our front-end capture so we could create one single platform that could be used for either the desktop or a Web environment — without worrying about browser-based support. We are really a big fan of Silverlight.
MSUZ: What Microsoft technology has been most critical to your success?
Nguyen: . NET is our primary critical technology that really helps our product in development. It really helped us to develop our product faster and get to market faster. But I can't say the same with the Silverlight yet, because it's very new. We still have a big learning curve. And I think, as the whole, we still have a lot of things that we wish were available in Silverlight — I hope that technology will get as good as the whole .NET and the Visual Studio environment.”
MSUZ: Are there technologies that you're going to look at integrating or supporting in the future?
Nguyen: Yes, we are now investigating how we create a mash-up between SharePoint 2007 with our front-end capture. We did our research to find that there are a lot of companies solely embracing SharePoint as an Internet content management solution, but when they started looking at it in the form of document management solutions, SharePoint has limitations in terms of how an office will scan hundreds of thousands of documents into SharePoint effectively. So, we’re looking at how we're going to integrate our capture with SharePoint in a seamless solution.
Also with SharePoint when it comes to document management in terms of searching, record management, and retention, there are some limitations there as well. For instance, if I’ve already taken time entering indexes in the front-end−entering the indexes for each invoice or document−I need the ability to quickly find them. I want to use the indexes I have already created; I don’t want to go into a full text type of search, which is what SharePoint requires and is a limitation we see. We also have a team actually doing a proof-of-concept on how we can do integration with that, and why our product brings value-add to the SharePoint platform.
Second, with all the cloud-based services available on the Web today, and because our business is going to go more to online cloud storage with our document management capability, we want to leverage the Windows Live SkyDrive technology when they make it available—more like the Amazon S3, the API for storing and retrieving data on the Web.
And since Microsoft just released an SQL database service in the cloud, we realized that all of this really brings value to our system. We want to focus on our core, which is to deliver productivity and application and collaboration tools to the Web user, and don't want to bog down on infrastructure. The more we can outsource this with partners like Microsoft, trusted by the industry, the better. We have all this redundancy and infrastructure, and are now ready to grow to a million users, thousands of terabytes, but the reality is people are not going to trust us in terms of that since we’re just getting started. But if we have SkyDrive behind our name and Microsoft SQL data service, I think we can gain more acceptance in that area.
MSUZ: So where are you in terms of product launch?
Nguyen: We’re getting ready to launch our SaaS model sometime in mid September (2008). We have customers using our application from 1,600 users to small firms with just five to 10 users. And our customers span a range of industries from healthcare to financial services.
MSUZ: From a technical point of view is there anything that Microsoft could do that would really help you out more technically?
Nguyen: Yes, on the technology side, we know we’re able to use Visual Studio, but would like to see more on UI testing tools, some type of automation macro type of tool that our testers don’t have to know how to write script, they can just click the UI and have the automation.
MSUZ: The above Visual Studio issue was resolved and announced at TechEd last week.
Tu Nguyen’s Background
As Vice President of Information Technology at DOCCENTER, Tu Nguyen helps emerging to mid-market businesses efficiently manage and protect their digital assets. Since 2007, he has led the team in development of its SaaS Web 2.0 product, EDDS Vault (Electronic Document and Digital Storage). In 2006, he was recognized by the Midlands Business Journal as one of Omaha’s top 40 executives under 40 years of age. In 2003, he was the inaugural winner of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup for his Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) software application that took restaurant orders in English and converted them into Vietnamese for his family’s restaurant.
For more information, visit DOCCENTER online.
