Systems In Context -- Look Beyond the Label

With so many 'document management' suppliers, how do you begin your search for a solution? Like a prospective employer, you need to look at your job description and then compare it against the vendor's product resume and installation history.

By Doug Henschen
August 1998

Confused about the document management marketplace? You're not alone. Converging functionality, blurring of categories and all-things-to-all-people marketing messages have prospective buyers searching long and hard for truth and light. Suppliers throw around adjectives like "complete," "turnkey," "seamless," "open," "end-to-end," "integrated," "scalable," "enterprise-wide" and "easy-to-use" like so many brochures at an industry trade show.

How do you search for a solution when more than 30 companies put themselves in the document management category? It begins with an assessment of your own needs and ends with a good, long look at, and test of, the product. Along the way, you can save time by scrutinizing the supplier as deeply as their system offerings. How long have they been around? Do they focus primarily on imaged or electronic documents? Most importantly, what does their installed base tell you about the fit with your needs? To demonstrate the value of this approach, we'll take a brief look at two suppliers from near opposite ends of the document management spectrum.

Document Management Goes Mainstream

Analysts will tell you that document management is a maturing market. After spending years as a highly specialized, high-priced solution for the largest of corporations, document management is now reaching a broader base of companies with a wider range of needs.

"Most users are not buying systems to do the sort of specialized, fussy tasks that characterized the market two or three years ago," observes Bill Zoellick, director of document software strategy services at Cap Ventures (Norwell, MA 781-871-9000). "Most people are now buying them for the general-purpose needs of a number of departments."

"It's not that the specialized applications have gone away," says Zoellick, "it's that increased computing power and, more specifically, the advent of Intranet technologies have democratized the market. Systems have become more general purpose, and falling prices have enabled document management suppliers to go after a wider market of mid-sized companies."

Most studies put document management sales growth at 20 percent plus per year, but according to Cap Ventures, growth is hottest among companies with $100 million to $1 billion in sales. Sales are flatter among larger firms with more specialized needs, while companies under $50 million in sales are generally turning to systems focused on Web management and collaboration.

The new breed of middle-market buyers are more interested in deploying the technology across multiple departments. They're also more interested in combining other pieces of the puzzle, like imaging, workflow and COLD. Chasing after what is expected to be a $9-billion-plus EDM market by 2002, according to a study released in May by AIIM (Silver Spring, MD 301-587-8202), vendors are developing products intended to do it all, and to do it across the enterprise.

"The blurring of document management, imaging, workflow and COLD, makes it harder to distinguish whether a product fits a specific application," says Bob Smallwood, a New Orleans-based partner of the Imerge Consulting Group (504-525-4500). "Generally you will find that vendors do one or two things very well while they'll touch on one or two others in the technology set."

(Editor's note: In this issue, Doculabs takes a look eight of the most popular document management systems, but the article is purposely limited to those systems designed first and foremost to handle electronic documents, with sophisticated library management features such as check-in/check-out, version control and document histories. The "document management" label is also routinely used by imaging vendors with systems designed primarily to capture, store and retrieve paper documents. In the July issue, Imaging took a peek at many of the latest offerings from enterprise imaging system vendors in an article entitled "Blended Solutions Bring Imaging to the Enterprise".)

How do you figure out just where a company's strengths lie? Smallwood suggests a combination of internal review, product analysis and, equally important, a close look at the vendor's past work.

"A vendor's installed base is going to be a lot more relevant and indicative of what their strengths are than a demo and what a salesman has to say," he points out.

With this approach in mind, let's look at two vendors from near opposite ends of the document management spectrum.

High-end Vendor Eyes The Middle Market

Formtek (Palo Alto, CA 650-842-3000) is not new to document management, nor is it widely known. The 15-year-old company has its roots in the defense industry, and its systems were developed for large-scale manufacturing, utility and aerospace businesses. The company has a core expertise in dealing with engineering drawings and related technical documents, and it has been richly developed on both the imaging and electronic document side of the management equation.

The company's core product, Orion, is a three-tiered client/server system said to offer multi-platform support, modular functionality and GUI independence. Orion is built on an Oracle 8 database and complies with common object/broker architecture using TCP/IP communications. The Unix-based version introduced in 1996 was joined this spring by Orion 4.2, an NT offering introduced at AIIM '98.

Formtek, a unit of Lockheed Martin, has routinely handled enterprise-wide installations with several thousand users online. Orion 4.2 is aimed more at (no surprise) the corporate mainstream -- mid-sized engineering firms and departments using NT only. It will also let existing Unix clients add low-cost NT servers. Orion is licensed on a per-user basis, with prices ranging from $300 to $700 per named user in large organizations with more than 100 users.

Orion is typically integrated with any number of manufacturing and engineering-related systems, according to Chris Gregory, Formtek's director of marketing. "None of these systems ever go in without talking to something else," Gregory says. "We're frequently integrating with the engineering release area, and our systems are very complimentary to PDM [product data management] systems."

As an example, Orion was installed at Volvo in 1996. It supports more than 5,000 users in the company's truck manufacturing operations in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in several North American offices. Integrated with SAP, several CAD systems and on in-house product document management (PDM) system, Orion replaced 500,000 aperture cards and brought all manufacturing, product support and maintenance documents into a unified computing environment.

The Orion suite combines applications for document management and ad hoc and structured workflow together with image management products for viewing, editing, redlining, conversion and plotting. The system supports multiple document types, multi-page documents, folders, compound objects and markups. There are provisions for revision and release control as well as audit trails and conversion of documents to other formats.

At the heart of the system is an object management and control layer built on top of Oracle. Data objects such as text files, spreadsheets, graphics, video clips, audio and 3D models can be identified with real-world identifiers such as part numbers. Multiple indexes can be created to let different departments and groups develop their own data about each object. Engineering, for example, might refer to a part number via a product code, while sales and marketing might refer to the same part number via a customer name. Object classes let you automatically assign naming conventions, index sets and index forms when a new object is checked into the system.

Orion's Web Gateway is a built-in module that lets users search for objects, obtain lists of objects that match search criteria and access objects for viewing, printing/plotting or downloading via standard browsers. Users can choose between file formats (e.g., PDF, raster, native file format) and customize forms and content.

One would expect robust security from Formtek given that it supports aerospace projects such as the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F22 fighter (with more than 1,000 users across three locations) and NASA's space station. Gregory says that while many EDM products build security around the owner/group/world levels of access in the underlying operating system, Orion lets administrators and authorized users assign security to individual objects, groups of objects and lifecycle states. User level and group level security offers up to 50 different assignable data privileges, including check in, check out, print, export, annotate, redline, etc. Below the user administration level, encryption ensures security during data transmission while secure protocols are used to foil hackers.

While this may all sound like Pentagon paranoia, Gregory points out that plenty of commercial clients are every bit as interested in security. "In the automotive arena, car design information is very tightly guarded," he says. "Believe it or not, toy manufacturers are equally sensitive about their designs. In the financial arena, many transactions call for this level of security."

While Formtek has historically catered to the top 200 aerospace, utility and manufacturing companies, it's using its NT release of Orion to bring its technology down to the broader, solutions-oriented market that Cap Ventures identified.

Broad-based Vendor Goes Upstream

In contrast to Formtek, Westbrook Technologies (Branford, CT 203-483-6666) is a very broad-based vendor with roots squarely in image document management. As such, Westbrooks' out-of-the-box solutions don't provide the library services, such as check-in/check-out and audit trails, of a true EDM system, though those functions can be customized.

Westbrook's 16-bit FileMagic system has been installed as a standalone or departmental/ workgroup solution at more than 12,000 companies. Last year the company introduced Fortis, a 32-bit, ODBC-compliant client/server solution starting at $2,995. Fortis answered demand from Westbrook's larger customers for an open, Windows/ NT-based corporate-wide solution.

According to Steve Luster, vice president of marketing at Westbrook, Fortis is a platform- and hardware-independent solution that's used for a wide range of applications, from accounts payable and litigation support to patient records and research and development.

"Our products are sold entirely through resellers, and they don't want to be tied down in terms of choices," Luster says. "The reseller can mix and match to the user's platform and needs."

Choices include Windows, NT or Novell client platforms; SQL Server, SQL Base, Oracle or other approved ODBC databases; RAID, MO, CD or magnetic storage.

Since its introduction at AIIM '97, Fortis has been installed at 80 client firms. Among them are Tuthill, a manufacturer that converted from Westbrook's FileMagic product in order to track purchase orders, invoices and other accounting records. The company is running 60 seats over a WAN tied to three domestic divisions. The system will ultimately serve 18 offices. Tuthill is using a Fortis multi-user Centura SQLBase and is storing more than 500,000 images.

Among Westbrook's largest installations is AIG Life. There, Fortis replaced a 500-seat File Magic system serving five departments. The new installation is handling transaction-related documents from underwriting to insurance policies.

Fortis provides capture, indexing, retrieval, editing, annotation and distribution of paper and electronic documents. Input can include color, grayscale or black-and-white scanned images; word processing, spreadsheet or database files; digital faxes, graphics, photos, and HTML files. Following Windows conventions, documents are stored in a user-defined hierarchy of folders containing sub folders and/or document types.

Retrieval options include browse, search, fixed and variable queries, full-text queries, fuzzy logic searches, highlighting of hits or a combination of approaches. Documents are then launched and edited in their native application. You can also integrate documents and data with Lotus and Microsoft business applications using OLE and DDE protocols.

Fortis' annotation options include highlights, "sticky notes," customized stamps, voice comments, video clips and documents within documents using OLE. A separate PowerWeb server offering extends Fortis' retrieval and viewing capabilities to intranets, extranets and the Internet. Documents can be redestributed, but you don't get all the functions of the LAN system.

Luster says Fortis will easily scale beyond 1,000 users across multiple departments. Nonetheless, Westbrook is clearly approaching "enterprise wide document management" from a different background than Formtek, which has a 10,000-concurrent-user, full-function installation serving multiple departments at Tokyo Gas & Electric. Of course, plenty of companies would be quite comfortable growing into a 1,000-user system, and they might not be interested in the security- and engineering-oriented features

Scope Out the Alternatives

As even a cursory glance at the document management market will demonstrate, there's a lot of latitude in the label "document management" and in descriptors like "enterprise wide." Here are a few simple suggestions to help you narrow down your search.

Define your needs. Are you primarily handling electronic documents (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, faxes, etc.) that require document management capabilities such as versioning control, rendition support, authoring and assembly? Or are you primarily dealing with paper documents that will require a robust imaging system? How many employees and locations will be using the system and through what type of client? What type and volume of content do you handle?

Explore related technologies. Vendors have tended to favor one of two directions. Some provide integrated suites that combine imaging, document management, workflow and COLD. Others favor a component approach, and they let you choose the components of your choice. The positive side of the integrated approach is that all the pieces work together as closely as possible. The downside is that these components may not work with your existing systems or as well as best of breed offerings.

Buy with the future in mind. Make sure the system you choose will support the highest volume of business and level of growth you might expect over the next five years. If you're eventually going to need several components of document technology, you may want to choose an integrated solution. If you're not sure or if you have reservations about system capabilities, keep your options open by choosing a component-type vendor. (Fortis flies the component flag, while Formtek says it takes a "middle approach" that favors its own solutions while offering compatibility and integration with other products.)

Look at a vendor's installed base. How long have they been in business? How many systems do they have installed? Is the product consistently used in certain industries or applications? Are there installations that closely match your own environment? What is their largest installation?

Check references and other contacts. Don't just call the vendor's list of client contacts. Contact other people within the client organization to see if they offer different perspectives. You should also try to find installations that the vendor hasn't put on their list. Competitors and trade association contacts might provide some leads.