Document Management Systems

Invitation for Disaster

We sent our EDU RFI to more than 15 DM vendors (see complete RFI and responses). We required support for XML to customize and facilitate Web publishing and tight integration with an RM (records management) component. We also looked for a system that could treat e-mail and attachments as documents and records. For ease of use, we required an interface for standard PC clients as well as Web browsers.

Vendors to Watch click to enlarge

We received completed RFIs from five vendors: Entopia, Hummingbird, Liberty Information Management Solutions, Stellent and Tower Software. Among other vendors in this arena, Optika never got the chance to respond: Its records-management and imaging products were acquired by Stellent shortly after the RFI was sent out--just one development in a DM market shake-up (see "Market Maneuvers,"). IBM said it was too busy integrating the acquisition of Green Pasture Software into its content-management business to participate, while iManage and Interwoven could not be distracted from their merger. The same was true for OpenText, which recently merged with IXOS to become a stronger ECM (enterprise content management) player.

FileNet's new release of P8 was not ready in time for our tests. Mobius Management Systems declined to participate, saying its ViewDirect Total Content Management is a full-blown ECM system that includes Web content management and business-process management in addition to DM. Docucorp, Documentum (now part of EMC), MDY Advanced Technologies and Saperion didn't respond to our invitation.

We judged products based on vendors' answers to our RFI. Key points included feature sets available to manage a document's life cycle and the quality of RM components. RM criteria included the ability to map and enforce an enterprise record-retention policy, identify documents as records and apply discrete rules for access and control. We assessed each product's ability to help EDU comply with SOX by maintaining control structures that facilitate audit verifications and guard against the destruction of records. It's hard to guess what sound an RFI response makes when it hits a table, because we received all our submissions over e-mail. But if our vendor responses did make a sound, it would be the crack of a bat hitting a home run. Each had solutions for managing electronic documents to enable faster underwriting and reduce the cost of doing business in hard copies. All the participants had answers for SOX compliance, and all but Entopia and Liberty IMS checked in with Department of Defense 5015.2 compliance (see "Bellwether for RM: DoD 5015.2,").