Goodbye Paper Filing, Hello Boosted Productivity

By Irina Guseva | Published Mar 31, 2009

Xerox Corporation (news, site) expressed its commitment to greener and more efficient alternatives to paper-driven work processes (be it in the U.S. or APAC) with two new enterprise CMS offerings: Virtual Filing System and DocuShare 6.5.

Virtual Filing System

Xerox’s DocuShare Virtual Filing System includes several offerings in one package:

Document storage assessment
Scanning technology
Software and set up
User training

All of the above is used to turn paper documents into digital content. Once that happens, the documents can be searched by name, category and type.

“The sheer volume of documents circulated on a daily basis is forcing businesses to reassess their enterprise content management needs,” said David Smith, vice president, DocuShare Business Unit, Xerox Corporation.

For organizations with large volumes of paper files, the DocuShare Virtual Filing System can potentially be a one stop ECM shop, if the solution is the right fit to the organization from the document management perspective.

DocuShare Virtual Filing System will be sold in North America through Xerox direct sales starting in June 2009. Entry level price is US$ 50K.

Improvements in DocuShare 6.5

Xerox also announced the updated DocuShare 6.5, which is now part of the Virtual Filing System package. The main improvements revolve around performance and scalability enhancements. The previous version — DocuShare 6.0 and DocuShare CPX — came out in early 2007.

While it took the company a long time to get to this point release, they say this was due their focus to unify the entire platform.

The company reports that DocuShare 6.5 can store more than 50 million documents and perform search queries within seconds (thanks to the update to Autonomy’s IDOL technology). As other content management vendors are getting the IDOL power as well, it was crucial for Xerox to up its offering with upgrading from Verity K2.

Other enhancements include architectural changes, event software system replacement to eliminate redundancy, VM capabilities and a new set of internal rules to distribute load.

The permissions model was extended as well to provide more granular permissions settings and to include read/write permissions on content and metadata.

A new EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) connector has also been introduced to provide the ability for users to connect to centralized servers from EAP device like multifunction device scanners and authenticate directly into DocuShare.

DocuShare 6.5 is currently available on Windows platforms through Xerox direct sales and resellers in North America. Worldwide availability is planned for June 2009.

Greener IT practices are strategic this year, and Xerox is right on time with their boosted enterprise CMS and document management solutions.