| 1.1 Portfolio
28 Document Portfolio | |
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| 1.1.28 Document Portfolio: | | The owner and copyright holder. Each bespoke application service has its own Owner, data controller and copyright holder. The copyright holder year and company name is shown on every web page - this copyright continues and applies to every business document. | | In this document, the term "ASP" shall mean the Application Service Provider. |
| Application Service Provider: | | The ASP does NOT claim any ownership in any business document or web page and while the ASP may facilitate improvements all such improvements are for and on behalf of the Owner. The ASP is not in a position to validate or test if a business document or web page is complete and correct, only that is matches the documented improvement request. |
| Business Document Design: | | Because a company will have many different and varied set of printers, it is a business requirement to simplify business document design down to a common standard that should be compatible with most if not all printers. HTML is the language of the Internet so clever DOC and PDF printing techniques that were applicable in the good old days will not be good enough for survival into the future. Every business document should be designed as a set of distinct pages that can be individually printed or reprinted. Good business document design will avoid page overflow and design in a common header and footer to each page to give a business document a unique corporate style and image. |
| Placeholder | | A business document has placeholders inserted where stored data is to be inserted. A placeholder such as CUS45 will insert the customer name. A placeholder such as CUS21DATE will insert the date that the customer data was first authored. |
| Ownership: | | The Owner may author each business document in whatever languages are needed. The Owner may change their business documents as and when needed. The Owner may view and copy; review and revise; validate and test their business documents at any time. From any web page the Owner may select "File" and "Save" to download a copy of the web page HTML source code to their local computer. |
| Help and Guidance: | | The ASP may be in a position to help the Owner to maintain business documents by working under the direction of, for and on behalf of the owner. For example, HTML and CSS mark-up skills may be used to format a valid presentation theme to documents. Any deliverable created by the ASP for the owner is validated and tested by the owner. The ASP does not own and is not responsible for any document content, but is responsible that business documents cannot be deleted or corrupted. | | The ASP will use its best endevours to help the owner to prove title and ownership in their business documents. This may include holding frozen archve copies in escrow with validated publication and archive dates. |
| Colour: | | Each user and each printer has a unique ability to enable/disable the use of colour to match local business requirement. It is NOT the role of the business document designer to make decisions about the use of colour printing for another company. | | With a modern colour laser a company may find it is cheaper to print using colour toner than expensive black toner. In any event, it is a decision of the user to select colour or mono printing with and without background colours. |
| Document Content | | The Owner is responsible to provide a sample of each business document. The document sample must be in HTML or be capable of being converted to HTML. | | The business document is edited with placeholders where stored data is to be inserted. The document is then stored in the template document folder for the applicable office. Each office may have their own unique business documents in their own language and terminology. |
| Development | | The business document facility has been engineered to be free of programming; however knowledge of HTML is a requirement when editing placeholders. Program defects are not possible and no programming takes place. Where the HTML placeholder editing is not correct, then the business document may not look nice or may not display the content as expected. Business documents may be edited while the application service is operational and the next time the business document is requested, the new version is instanlty shown. |
| Copyright: | | The Owner and copyright holder may maintain a copy of all business document changes to prove they own title. It is recommended that the Owner and copyright holder has a copy of each and every release of any business document to prove title over the life cycle of each business document. The Owner and copyright holder may choose to maintain an escrow copy of their business documents. |
| Export: | | Any approved party may export a copy of any business document to their local computer at any time and for any reason. The ASP shall assist any approved party to export any business document to their own local computer. Periodically, the ASP may provide a copy (encrypted on disk media) of all business documents to the owner to verify the owners copyright to the business documents. |
| Internet Standards: | | Copies of business documents need to be held for many years and that can only be done with confidence where the file format is an International standard that will survive the next ten years. HTML is the language of the Internet and the only International standard that can be certain to survive for the next 20 years - more than a billion web pages are in HTML. PDF is no longer fit for purpose; and as an example the cover note in HTML formal is 10 KB and in PDF format is 212 KB - it is no longer cost effective to hold PDF files when HTML files are 20 times cheaper. PDF was designed in the days when security was not an issue, but in the last 5 years, Adobe Reader has suffered more vulnerabilities than all other software - it is not fit for purpose in a secure environment. | | PNG is a very safe file format because text has been reduced to pixels that can be hard and expensive to manipulate into different text. A Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file image of a business document can be certain to survive the next 20 years, can be certain to be free of malware and does not need any pripriatary software to view the document. JPG remains more optimized for photographic images with low contrasts where compression loss is not significant, but JPG images should not be repeatedly edited because they will loose clarity. TIFF is good for black and white faxes, but has become so complex that it is hard find what is compatible with what. |
| Business Documents | | A Business Document is any popup page of data that may be printed, saved or emailed. A Business Document can contain fixed text in any language and any stored data. Every Business Document is an HTML web pages that can have any degree of colour, formating and style. |
| Business Document Management: | | Business documents are just another variety of web page that matches business requirements in terms of fonts, themes and layout. Every business document is created and presented as an HTML web pages that may be saved, downloaded or emailed. Most human languages in the world are supported by employing UTF-8 character set encoding. |
| Placeholders: | | A business document is created by saving a sample document as an HTML web page. Variable data is edited into a placeholder that shows where data from the database is to be inserted. | | Placeholders enable one or more rows of data to be presented and for rows to be hidden when certain values are zero, blank or null - Blank-When-Zero is a supported technique. Internal calculations and totals can be derived automatically as any normal report generator. |
| Privileged User Procedure: | | PCI-DSS regulation demands that privileged users are subject to special change management procedures to mitigate against fraud and errors. A principal is that several different people with assigned roles must cooperate in a fixed procedure to effect any operational change. | | 1. The Change Manager will approve a improvement request and will specify the components that may be changed by making a copy available in a development environment. | | 2. The Project Manager will schedule an Information Engineer to make the approved changes in the development environment. | | 3. The scheduled Information Engineer will make the approved changes in the development environment. | | 4. The Validation and Test Manager will verify approved changes in the development environment. | | 5. The Release and Deployment Manager will copy the specified components from the development environment to each production environment. | | 6. The Configuration Manager will document the specified components and update all meta data. |
| Reference: | | It would be wrong to markup a business document with its first operational date so an encoding method is used. The year, month and day are each reduced to a single alphabetic character. Year 12 is shown as "L", month 10 is shown as "J" and day 17 is shown as "Q". "LJQ" on a document means it was first operational on 17 Oct 2012. It is easy to identify the earlier edition with "LCT" as its operational start date. |
| Editions: | | Every business document has a first and last date when it may be used. When a change is to be applied to an existing document, that document is cloned as a new document that may be change with a first date that is some years into the future. | | While the new edition is being tested against a future date, the existing document continues to be used without any change. When the new edition has been verified, it is enabled by changing its first date to tomorrow and the current document edition has its last date changed to today. When the business document is requested, the document edition that is applicable for that date is selected and used. | | CRM business data never needs to be concerned with a specific document edition - it only needs its inception and/or created date that is built into all business data. |
| Document Folder: | | When a business document is created, a copy of that business document is stored in the report folder where it will be held for at least seven years. Any business in the report folder may be selected for email or download by authorized people. | | Because an operational business document can never be changed and must have a valid first and last date, any business document can be recreated for any historical date. Fraud is totally excluded as nobody has the ability to change an operations business document or to change what edition of a business document should be used for any date. Compliance audits have verified these procedures as fit for purpose. |
| Fall-back: | | In the event that a changed business document is not as expected, the prior edition of the business document can have its last date extended to make it operational and the start date of the new edition can be set into the future. The effect is that within a new moments, a prior edition of a business document can be reinstated. These benefits can only be achieved by not holding business document edition numbers in any business data. | | While it is normal that a business document change will take place on a specific date, when needed, a new business document can be implemented at any time without any impact on current live users. When the new edition has been verified, it is enabled by changing its first date to tomorrow and the current document edition has its last date changed to today. When the business document is requested, the document edition that is applicable for that date is selected and used. |
| Placeholders: | | A business document is created by saving a sample document as an HTML web page. Variable data is edited into a placeholder that shows where data from the database is to be inserted. | | Placeholders enable one or more rows of data to be presented and for rows to be hidden when certain values are zero, blank or null - Blank-When-Zero is a supported technique. Internal calculations and totals can be derived automatically as any normal report generator. |
| Change Management: | | Once an edition of a business document is assigned a current date, that business document is locked and cannot be changed in any way. A clone of a business document can be created and that clone can be changed and tested, but once it is assigned operational status, it cannot be changed. | | Business documents have roles that must match the permissions for the person requesting the business document. Depending on the state of a record, different documents may be assigned to be used by the function access manager. |
| Change Environment: | | Business documents in a production environment are never changed and procedures are in place to ensure that no operational business document can be changed. Business documents will contain style guides and images that are cached for up to 6 months and so cannot be dynamically changed. | | Where a new image or style guide is created it must be assigned a unique name. Where an existing image or style guide is changed, it must be assigned to a new folder. | | Dynamic changes to business documents may be made in a development environment by authorized Information Engineers, but this does not apply to images or style guides that are cached. |
| Project Management: | | Business documents are just a special kind of web page that have been subject to virtually the same update procedures for more than ten years. Change control can be applied at any time of the day or night without any impact on active users and with very few dependencies. A large number of trivial improvements are always more successful than delays leading up to a massive change with disruptive consequences. |
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