LOW-COST DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT: WHEN 'LITE' IS RIGHT
Transform Magazine
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 1, 2004 - IBM Workplace, Microsoft SharePoint and Oracle Collaboration Suite look like the future of messaging and collaboration, but can they also handle your document management needs? Here's what you get for less than $100 per seat.
Low-Cost DM: Users Know When It's Right
It's no surprise that companies using low-cost, Web-based alternatives for electronic document management tend to have distributed enterprises, basic management needs or both.
Online electronics retailer PeachDirect learned all about the need for document management in 2002 when the then six-month-old startup faced a near document disaster.
"We are a very mobile workforce and our managers were keeping most of the company's Word, Excel and Access files on their individual laptops," says PeachDirect's Mark Cox, director of technology. "We used FTP and e-mail to send information back and forth. Most of the time, people didn't back up to the server until we had two users lose their laptops. We spent days rebuilding some pretty important company information from old e-mails, and we immediately began our search for a document management solution."
PeachDirect was running much of its business on an Oracle-hosted eBusiness Suite solution, so it added Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) for document control. More than 35 employees now use OCS to manage and route Microsoft Office documents among their two California offices, mobile employees and a call center in India.
The distributed deployment at construction giant Barton Marlow was a bit more demanding. "The project was driven by ISO compliance, but we also had to deal with the problems we had moving information among teams at 11 offices in six different states," says Phil Go, chief information officer.
Responsible for design, logistics and construction management on major projects such as universities, corporate headquarters and hospitals as well as stadiums for the Chicago Bears, New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens, the company needs to manage hundreds of thousands of detailed technical documents in accordance with international engineering standards.
The company had been using Outlook folders for sharing documents, but transfer times and search limitations created bottlenecks. The firm deployed Oracle Tutor to create structured, ISO-compliant documents. The resulting HTML files as well as other documents are indexed, stored and distributed among 1,500 employees through Xerox DocuShare (see "Two More DM Dishes," page 20).
"The system is great for remote connections," Go says. "Between our offices and construction sites, we can have as many as 60 locations on our WAN at any given time, and our information is always where it's needed, when it's needed."
At the University of Memphis, document management needs are minimal, but there are three satellite campuses and a small percentage of the 20,000 students who do their learning from home. Xythos WebFile Server is the infrastructure behind UM Drive, a virtual network drive that debuted last year and is currently being rolled out to the entire community of 25,000 users.
"We needed to give students, faculty and administrators access to their assignments, class work and business documents anytime, anywhere so they wouldn't have to carry around floppies, zip disks or create a mess of e-mail attachments," says Sandy Schaeffer, director of the Advanced Learning Center. "Now teachers can push out their assignments and anybody can post and access their files."
Users log into UM Drive with their campus ID numbers, which are mapped to LDAP. Each user automatically receives 100 MB of personal file space, and they can open selected files and folders to public access. Teachers, administrators and other authorized users can create public spaces where researchers, teams of grad students and faculty can update documents collaboratively, with check-in, check-out and version control, if necessary.
Schaeffer says costs are as little as $5 per seat given the massive rollout, and administration is minimal for the busy 100-person IT staff. Several of the colleges within the university are sharing documents such as syllabi online, eliminating print and distribution costs. In addition, the 1,000-plus PCs ordered each year no longer include zip drives, saving the university as much as $100,000, he says.
"We weren't really looking for cost savings," Schaeffer points out. "This was really an effort to modernize and create a 21st-century environment for students and faculty."
- Steven Hill and Doug Henschen
Two More Lite DM Dishes: DocuShare and WebFile Server
With only a quick glance at the menu, you might mistake them for the same dish. Indeed, Xerox DocuShare and Xythos WebFile Server have similar ingredients, evolving from Web-based file sharing and basic document management systems to extended suites with many of the same a la carte side dishes as enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Rest assured, these products cater to slightly different tastes.
Both DocuShare and WebFile Server generated most of their initial sales from cost-conscious educational and government agencies. Both Java-based systems run on a range of servers and databases, and both rely on the WebDAV standard for interoperability with desktop applications. Both systems have the essentials needed to support high-volume document imaging, and both have recently added records management and workflow components. (Even the workflow components are both based on DralaSoft workflow software.)
Xerox developed DocuShare internally in the mid 1990s, and early users included many smaller organizations that purchased the software from copier dealers. Xerox has steadily introduced enterprise-minded improvements, including support for LDAP and relational databases, built-in Verity search and ECM-like workflow and team collaboration add-ons. Recent DocuShare deployments have sprung up in large organizations, including Merrill Lynch.
Xerox plans to ship a records management module this fall. Based on IBM's Department of Defense 5015.2-certified DB2 Records Manager, the DocuShare Records Manager is an optional module intended for users facing compliance issues required by HIPAA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
In contrast to Xerox, Xythos has focused exclusively on large-scale deployments. Described as a Web distribution tool, the earliest release of the company's WebFile Server offered only basic document management functionality. Xythos has since added four significant management applications. WebFile Document Manager supports e-mail, file-sharing security, version management and system auditing. WebFile Classification Manager lets users control document attributes, enter class information, establish document hierarchies, and classify records and documents together through a common interface. WebFile Records Manager tracks physical and electronic records, establishing and enforcing document life-cycle retention schedules and multilevel access control and providing integrated search of physical and electronic documents. WebFile Scan Client supports automated batch scanning, filing, barcode indexing and image redaction (blackout).
Architecturally, the WebFile Server repository is built right on top of a server's native file system. This approach reduces database costs and offers a range of options for storage methods and locations. Xythos licensing starts at $50 per user, about half the price of comparable DocuShare deployments.
Addressing the problem of bandwidth-robbing e-mail attachments, Xythos' Intellitach feature lets users e-mail Web links to files to collaborators rather than attaching the documents themselves.
Neither DocuShare nor WebFile Server offer all the collaborative features offered by the mainstream collaborative DM platforms, but they do offer integrated imaging, workflow and records management features not available from Oracle or Microsoft.
- Steven Hill and Doug Henschen