Vendors

There are a large number of capable vendors who supply products for document management and workflow applications. These companies are well represented in the industry publications, shows, and AIIM product directories, and are too numerous to attempt to include here.

We will, however, include selected offerings for which we have had an opportunity to understand their role in building object-oriented solutions for enterprise problems, or otherwise believe they merit attention because of their pervasiveness or technical innovation.

The presence of particular vendor's listings does not necessarily mean they are the best solution for a particular business problem, and conversely, missing products cannot be judged by their absence to be in any way less capable than those that have been included. Selecting products is indeed a challenging task, and requires understanding of the problem to be solved, the business and technical environment, information from many vendors, and talent and effort to fit the pieces together into a viable solution.

Document Management and Workflow Suites

There has been a substantial consolidation in the industry combining imaging, document management, workflow, COLD, and groupware products into suites, which will better integrate and further blur the distinctions between these products.

These suites are of particular interest to this site because they are often integrated with existing business systems for large organizations. Object technology represents the best available solution to bridge all of these together. Over time, organizations will be concurrently using multiple components of individual suites, and integrating multiple suites together.

 

Eastman Software, a Kodak company, has well-known products previously from Wang Software and Sigma Imaging Systems.

 

FileNet has added new products by acquisition to its existing family of imaging and workflow offerings. Their expanded product line brands include FileNet, Greenbar, Saros, and Watermark.

 

 

IBM's EDMSuite has combined new offerings from its Lotus subsidiary, to its enterprise COLD, and imaging and repository products. EDMSuite includes ImagePlus (VisualInfo), OnDemand, Lotus Domino.Doc, and FlowMark.

Document Technology

Adobe Systems, Inc.

Adobe continues to produce well-received products using its Portable Document Format (PDF) technology. Their Exchange and Capture products have potential to integrate scanned images and OCR text into a single container document which can be served up in a corporate office from the Web. A number of the full text search companies have announced specific support for this technology.

Full Text Retrieval Technologies

The wide-spread availability of full text retrieval from the Web has greatly increased expectations of having this same capability available in enterprise document management systems. Object-oriented document programming and design will require more than support for blobs and relational attributes, and must increasingly account for multiple indexing and search engines. Here are the major vendors for enterprise and web retrieval using full text and natural language techniques.

CLARITECH Corp.

 

Excalibur Technologies Corporation

 

Fulcrum Technologies, Inc.

 

Oracle Corp.

Oracle ConText option for Oracle Universal Server

 

Verity, Inc.

[Home] [What's New] [Contents] [Links] [Services]

[Previous - Mailing Lists] [Next - Other Internet Resources]

Copyright © 1997-2000 by Gary M. Gershon. All rights reserved.

Last Changed: 08/19/00

Comments to: Gary Gershon (Gershon@Celsus.Net)