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Adam’s March 2020 Meeting Summary

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Agenda

  • An exercise in distributed database software for use by the legal profession – Quinjo CaseMaker™ Tim
  • Google Sheets Rest API. With Holiday Photos – Pete
  • Nugget: Snagit (screen grabs + video grabs): Adam
  • Nugget: VMWare – Brian

Adam’s Summary

News

Dev Group Meeting Notes March 2020

Tim spoke about Distributed Database Software for the legal profession.

Tim has built a large database application for the management of the extremely complex data requirements of legal firms in law cases.

The system processes legal documents (PDFs, Scanned documents, Word files) acting as a repository so that all documents relating to all the many, complex stages of a case can be held together. Staff can mark and make notes on documents, index and create “scripts” for court in which particular document pages can be recalled in a timely effective way.

The code behind the scenes is impressive. The Google Vision api (https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr) is used to decode PDFs and JPGs so that users can word-search documents even when the document is a scanned copy.

Tim has done a lot of work to allow multi-user multi-site updating via a briefcase update model. Behind the scenes he has used an innovative data-storage model. Rather than using an RDBMS model he has used a more “graph-database-like” ID-Value model.

More detailed sessions in which Tim delves further into the code behind his system would be really interesting in the future.

Two nuggets followed: I spoke briefly about Snagit, a useful tool for image-grabbing (https://www.techsmith.com/store/snagit).

Brian spoke briefly about VMWare, particularly VMWare Workstation (https://store.vmware.com/…/ThemeID.292…/productID.5223188000), which he uses to manage virtual machines. Useful as quick clear over-views into both these tools.

Peter then gave the second long talk of the day about the Google sheet API (https://developers.google.com/docs/api), using C# to dynamically create sheets, post and retrieve data from them. This was a gnarly session fighting with an on-line API, but showed that it is a powerful tool. As many organisations use Google Docs it was valuable to learn how to interact with them programatically.

We then did not retire to the pub for beer!

It was notable for me that presentations were actually very clear and easy to follow remotely. Zoho did a great job (with a few small glitches) of relaying HD screens making it easy to follow details of presentations, read the code etc.