Document Mgt Roll-up: Adobe Sued After EchoSign Buy, Ibml's Upgraded Doc Capture

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jul 20, 2011

It’s been busy this week in document management. Adobe bought EchoSign and is being sued over alleged patent infringements by the latter, there was a considerable amount of movement on the document standards front, eFileCabinet is heading for the cloud, docuSTAR releases Eclipse v2.0, while ibml also upgraded with the new release of its capture suite.

Adobe Buys EchoSign, Gets Sued

There’s never a dull moment in document management, summertime as it may be. Adobe (news, site) this week announced that it was buying acquired EchoSign (news, site), a company specializing in electronic signature technology.

With it, Adobe adds functionality to its document handling software, offering the possibility of signing off on documents without ever having to print them out.

Together, our aim is to make electronic signatures the standard way for people to sign documents and automate contracting," Jason Lemkin, EchoSign's CEO, and Kevin Lynch, general manager of Adobe's Acrobat business, said.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, given Adobe’s interest in PDFs and everything like that. Adobe said that it says it plans to integrate EchoSign's services into SendNow, FormsCentral and CreatePDF.

However, all is not well. No sooner had Adobe inked the deal than Los Angeles-based RPost announced it is suing for patent infringements, saying EchoSign infringes RPost's patented technology with its services.

RPost wants a permanent injunction against services from both companies, as well as damages against the infringing products.

DLM Launches MoReq2010 Technical Committee

If you missed it during the week, the European Commission sponsored Document Lifecycle Management (DLM) Forum launched the MoReq2010 Technical Committee to address the new European record management (RM) specification and an XML schema for interoperability between RM systems.

In addition, the British Standards Institute (BSI) also announced that its standard for enterprise content management best practices was available for public comment.

As well as the technical committee, the DLM has also published the MoReq2010 Export XML Schema. The schema allows interoperability between records management systems in much the same way that the content management interoperability standard (CMIS) allows interoperability between content management systems. Interested in more?

EFileCabinet Heads for the Cloud

Meanwhile, eFileCabinet (news, site) is taking to the cloud this time with a partnership with InsynQ, which provides application hosting and cloud solutions. Together they aim to deliver a cloud-based solution for document management on a subscription basis.

This partnership allows businesses to subscribe to a turnkey package to host their applications, manage and back up their documents and store their data for one monthly rate.

EFileCabinet's electronic document management software increases the value of working with hosted applications by adding the ability to store, secure and manage documents while decreasing the amount of paper used.

In April this year, eFileCabinet announced its integration with Intuit's QuickBooks, one of the most widely used small business accounting software packages. The integration provides users with a more efficient way to link their QuickBooks records with documents stored in eFileCabinet.