Document Management Software Articles

KnowledgeTree  (news, site) is joining Open Tech and taking their document management software to thousands of resellers worldwide.

Open Tech is a new channel created by Tech Data, an IT products distributor. It is designed to support open source ISVs, like KnowledgeTree, by helping them market and sell their solutions to a worldwide market.

KnowledgeTree sees this an opportunity to reach out to resellers who spend their time with customers — SMBs, enterprises, government — who want to use open source solutions.

“Interest in open source will continue to grow as resellers and end users become more aware of open source solutions like KnowledgeTree’s document management software,” said Tech Data Vice President, Software Product Marketing Stacy Nethercoat. “Through Open Tech, Tech Data will work closely with KnowledgeTree to educate resellers and enable them to profitably deliver these solutions to their customers.”

Are the days coming — or are they already here — when we don't have to think of open source separate from proprietary? Do we really need to differentiate between the two? Or can a solution be sold simply on the merits of its functionality alone? Maybe it's too late in the day to have this discussion — what do you think?

Last week we saw a considerable amount of movement in the document management software industry, not the least of which was the closure of the Xerox –ACS deal. The wheeling-and-dealing continues this week with the acquisition of AmberPoint by Oracle while AIIM and Gartner get back into gear with some research published recently.

The acquisition by Xerox (news, site) of business process outsourcing giant ACS has been given final approval after a majority of shareholders from both companies gave the go-ahead.

Another acquisition in the electronic medical records (EMR) market, with the buy-out of document imaging and management services Bowman Enterprises by document life cycle solutions provider Diversified Information Technologies.

The financial details of the deal weren't released but last year Diversified's revenue was in the region of US$ 40 million, while Bowman's was close to US$ 6.5.The Bowman management team will be joining Diversified although how it will affect the rest of the company was not explained.

This is the second such acquisition by Diversified in the recent times. In October last year it acquired Active Data Services, a document imaging, print and electronic presentment provider headquartered in Raleigh, NC.

Diversified CEO Scott Byers said that the buy-out was part of the company’s plans to extend its footprint in the EMR market where he sees considerable potential for expansion. This indicates that we might be seeing similar moves from the Pennsylvania-based company.

Founded in 1982, Diversified provides document management software for complete document and information lifecycle, including records management solutions for physical and electronic records storage.

Currently targeting Fortune 1000 companies in the financial, insurance, health care and government sectors it has grown to 18 U.S. and three international locations.

Extending its information management and enterprise content management capabilities once again, IBM (news, site)  has just announced the acquisition of Initiate Systems, a provider of data integrity software for information sharing among healthcare and government organizations.

February and we just can’t seem to get away from the dual obsessions of hosted solutions and security. Particularly telling in the SMB sector, it looks like these are two areas we are going to be hearing a lot about over the course of the year.

With the release of SharePoint 2010 (news, site) getting closer, people are getting either a) excited, b) nervous or c) all of the above. Whatever your mindset, here are 5 changes coming with SharePoint 2010 which you should take note of.

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

DigiTech (news, site) and Fujitsu got together to bring, as they say, the simplest possible solution for those small to medium companies trying to wrangle paper documents.

It’s no secret that the new managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 (news, site) will be a welcomed addition to the product. What may not be apparent is exactly how this service will benefit your end-users. It will. Here's how.

The topic of digital asset management (DAM) is increasingly coming to the foreground as we information age types make greater use of video, images and audio. The use of digital assets on our websites opens the door to a larger, more engaged audience. But it also causes some trouble, if the related systems are not managed well.

Are you struggling with a DAM system, or in the process of selecting and implementing one? Tell us what your most pressing challenge currently is.

The latest version of Active Innovation’s document management software comes with a number of upgrades most of which are focused on improving the workflow module and related tasks. These improvements make it more responsive than previous versions (v7.2 and v7.5) and optimize it for higher traffic volumes.

Open source Enterprise CMS and Document Management vendor Nuxeo (news, site) is extending the value of its Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance service with a new product named Nuxeo Studio.

Stratify, a California-based division of Iron Mountain (news, site) has acquired Legal Imaging Technologies to beef up its eDiscovery capabilities.

We continue our weekly SMB Tech Rollup this time with the news that many SMBs are getting worried about IT security, but are happily embracing the cloud.

In addition, Microsoft and Intuit are getting together in the cloud, HP and Cisco could be helping SMBs with new pricing arrangements, and Spigit is focusing on better collaboration tools.

Most of us apply various forms of metadata when we create or manage content. This metadata helps make our brilliant creations findable. But text-based content has life easy — search engines can also accurately index it. So findability is not so big of a challenge for text assets and parsable documents.

But the content we manage is not all text-based or parsable. We use a lot of opaque assets like video, audio and images. Indexing technologies cannot (yet) effectively crawl these items directly — they must rely on the explicit application of metadata in order to derive the semantics and context which make the assets findable.

Choosing a great DAM solution is fine, but it's not going to solve all your findability and reuse problems. Thoughtful taxonomy development and the practical application of metadata is critical for such success. Towards this end, Earley & Associates are holding a free webinar — part of their Digital Asset Management Jumpstart Series — this Thursday.

Running on January 28 at 2pm ET the Practical Asset Reuse – The Role of Taxonomy and Metadata webinar will walk you through the ins and outs of taxonomies and metadata for digital assets. Stephanie Lemieux, Taxonomy Practice Lead at Earley and Associates and Diane Burley, Industry Specialist working with Nstein Technologies are two of the speakers in this session.

If making DAM work better is a priority in your organization, then head on over and register now.

Following a relatively quiet Christmas in terms of announcements and releases, Version One (news, site)  has popped up again. This time  — with the news that it is going to dramatically expand its footprint in the African market.

This follows the announcement in December that the company was moving into the Canadian market and the opening of an office in Florida in the middle of last year. What appears to be going on now is that the UK company won’t be happy with less than full global domination of the document management software industry.

Version One has outlined some of its goals in Africa, but have fallen short of announcing that they will be opening an office there any time soon. The company says that its increased presence is the result of growing demand amongst African companies for paperless office products, including document management software and imaging systems that integrate into accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

As it stands, Version One’s products integrate into a range of accounting and ERP systems from companies like Softline, Oracle, Infor, COA Solutions and Microsoft.

Plans include growing its reseller channel, increased marketing of products and investing in software integrations like Sage ERP X3, Softline’s ERP system for SMBs.

Version One already has a number of partners in Africa including Softline and Times 3 Technologies,  which resell its products as ‘bolt-ons’ to accounting and ERP systems.

Only half way through January and already the global document management space is throwing up some interesting, breaking news. This week, we have news on another DoD certification, a case management project, BPM upgrade and data security improvements.

Sometimes it really is the small things that count. Not that Adeptol’s new Enterprise Edition v4.4 document viewer is small, but the California based company’s latest version can load documents of up to 0.5 GB in one second — one of its many small features that will please.

Apache Chemistry (we introduced you to some time ago) is progressing under the watchful eye of Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo (news, site) and other contributors. The latest news — updated Nuxeo Chemistry bindings to allow for better support for CMIS.