Document Management Roll-up: Google Wins Gov Email Contract, Laserfiche and Salesforce Team-up

By David Roe (@druadh20) Dec 7, 2010

This week, document management has been dominated by email software and document capture. Gmail is being picked up by one of the US Government’s important agencies, Laserfiche and salesforce.com integrate financial software, Lexmark and Perceptive announce their first release since the May buy-out and Linux Box releases open source free email management.

Gmail Wins GSA Contract

It’s not really news that Microsoft and Google have been battling it out for the very lucrative public sector email contracts. This week, Google scored a significant victory by securing the contract from the General Services Administration. The agency dropped IBM's Lotus Notes and announced Google as their new email provider.

Leaving aside the fact that this will be the first agency to move en masse to the cloud, the GSA is also significant in that the GSA oversees the provision of goods and services to other government’s agencies.

Obama and his administration have always maintained that they would be moving to the cloud to save money. If Google can get this right for the GSA, then the thinking must surely be that other agencies are going to follow suit.

However, it’s unlikely Microsoft is just going to kick-back and dream of the Outlook glory days. Microsoft was looking for FISMA certification for its Business Productivity Online Suite — soon to be Office365 — but once that gets through, it’ll be back to business as usual. There’s a lot more road to run here.

The Pay-Back On Document Capture

Over the past few months we have been taking regular soundings of the document capture market and where it was going. Many of you agreed that it was an area that has been overlooked in all the hype surrounding the launch of SharePoint 2010.

New research published by AIIM however, reveals that it would be a very foolish enterprise that neglected to develop and implement a document capture strategy. The report, which forms part of AIIM’s (news, site) illuminating Industry Watch series, is entitled Capture and Business Process: Drivers and experiences of content-driven processes. Findings indicate that document capture provides a very high ROI no matter where it is implemented. This is particularly true where document capture and business processes are joined together. Many enterprises appear to have grasped that, even though many have not.

The research indicates that the strongest driver for scanning and capture is improved searchability and knowledge sharing across enterprises, followed by productivity improvements and reduced office costs. You can download the full report here if you register with AIIM.

Laserfiche and Salesforce Team-Up

Also this week, Laserfiche (news, site) announced the availability of a pre-packaged integration with salesforce.com (news, site), designed specifically for Registered Investment Advisors or companies that manage the assets of high-value investment house.