Imaging & Document Solutions - Words from the Editor: I&DS Transforms for the Future

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I&DS Transforms for the Future

Readers take note. This is the last issue of the magazine you now know as Imaging & Document Solutions. Next month we relaunch as Transform Magazine. It's the next step in the evolution of a focused publication designed to help you use content and collaboration technologies to reinvent the way you do business.

Together with the Internet, content and collaboration technologies offer strategic advantage, eliminating old problems and presenting new opportunities you could have scarcely imagined just a few years ago. Content management systems, for example, bring order and scalability to your intranets and Web sites. Enterprise information portals are integrating your applications with legacy repositories and external content; this supports collaboration with co-workers, business partners and customers. XML helps you reuse content, automate transactions, maximize purchasing efficiency and tap emerging online markets.

Tools such as imaging, document management and report management are equally relevant content and collaboration technologies. Many of you are deploying these tools in new ways to support e-business initiatives. Web-enabled document archives support collaboration and customer service, and this content is also enabling enterprisewide applications such as ERP and CRM.

Transform will serve as a business-critical resource on all these technologies, giving you in-depth information on the products and services that transform ...

paper-based processes into electronic processes and content
personal knowledge into shared corporate knowledge
legacy repositories into online shareable information resources
unstructured information into reusable XML objects
customer service headaches into customer self-service, automated response and electronic conflict resolution
business into collaborative e-business.

Today's mix of mission-critical information extends beyond business documents to include email, presentations, audio, video, and, most particularly, Web site content. As any steady reader of this publication knows, we have embraced a wider range of technologies to help you manage, deliver and share information. In fact, our first cover story on content management—a technology currently in the limelight—was published in December 1998.

The name Transform better reflects a broader mix of technologies that can help you gain strategic advantage - thus our new tag line: "Reinventing Business With Content and Collaboration Technologies."

Our evolution has been many months in the making, and we have relied on extensive reader research to identify the types of coverage you most appreciate. Transform will provide practical, in-depth reviews, illustrative case studies and interpretive trend stories aimed at illuminating emerging trends, categories and products.

By staying focused on your ongoing need to seize competitive advantage, Transform will transcend ever-evolving categories of technology so you can more effectively manage information and collaborate with customers and business partners.

—Doug Henschen, Editor-in-Chief