IBM, Novell, Saros and Xerox to Merge DEN and Shamrock Document Management
Initiatives

New Document Management Alliance to deliver full interoperability among all
document management applications, services and repositories

The AIIM Conference, San Francisco, Calif:, APRIL 10, 1995--The corporate
founders of the two leading document management initiatives, Document
Enabled Networking (DEN) and the Shamrock Document Management Coalition,
today announced that they will merge their technologies and operations to
form a single, independent organization called the Document Management
Alliance, the DEN/Shamrock Convergence.
The Document Management Alliance (DMA) will be organized as a task force
under AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) with the
mission of delivering industry specifications to provide universal
interoperability among all document management applications, services and
repositories. Executives of the founding companies--IBM Corp., Novell,
Inc., Saros Corp. and Xerox Corp.--declared their intention to provide the
DMA specification to other document management vendors, developers,
resellers and corporate users in July, 1995.

The merger represents the culmination of several months of effort by the
four companies in response to user and vendor requests to ensure
interoperability of products developed around the DEN and Shamrock
specifications. This merger will further promote interoperability among
document management software products, thereby enhancing customer choice
and satisfaction.

Ann Palermo, Vice President at International Data Corporation, said, "The
joining of DEN and Shamrock will be welcome news to the industry. The
alliance addresses a fundamental business need to integrate different
document management systems in a solution that spans applications across
the enterprise. The founding companies should be congratulated for forging
a unified coalition."

Jamie Popkin, Research Director of Office Information Systems at Gartner
Group, said, "The DMA convergence will give a big boost to companies
planning an integrated document and output management architecture. DMA
will support rapid increases in the transparency of access to distributed
information, personalization of information content and the richness of
information objects to be managed and distributed."

"Just as SQL fueled the relational database market some years ago, DMA
marks a crucial point in the maturation of the electronic document
management market," said Linda Myers-Tierney, consultant, WorkGroup
Applications, at International Data Corporation. "DMA has already been a
lightning rod for attracting the cooperation of competing vendors. It
holds great potential to boost buyer confidence, resulting in potentially
explosive electronic document management sales growth."

IBM and Saros introduced Shamrock in February 1994, and Xerox and Novell
introduced DEN in May 1994. The two groups share similar goals and
together represent over 35 member companies who have been actively
involved in the development of DEN and Shamrock. Membership in DMA is open
and will be extended to the current DEN and Shamrock members as well as
other vendors, developers and user organizations interested in joining.
The companies will work actively with other platform providers to ensure
that the DMA middleware is effectively supported on their respective
platforms.

DMA will take advantage of the extensive development work already done by
DEN and Shamrock, and member companies will be actively involved in
further definition of the merged specification. By supporting the DMA
standard, companies can deliver products and services that provide their
customers with significant gains in productivity by allowing them to find,
capture, use and share documents over networks with increased ease and
speed.

The DMA Specification

As the merged architecture of Shamrock and DEN, DMA will define an
enterprise-wide document management specification for library services as
well as a middleware layer specification to allow access and search for
documents between different document management systems, flat file
repositories, file servers and potentially any other defined document
management service. (more)
IBM. Novell. Saros and Xerox to Merge DEN and Shamrock. page 3 of 3

To accomplish this, the DMA technical specification will define three core
elements:

* A common interface for integration of the access and search methods of
individual library services.

* A uniform applications programmer interface (API) for accessing and
searching across diverse document management services.

* An object-based data model for standardizing access to enterprise library
services. The model will allow for modular integration of library services
where vendors could support either specific components or implement the
complete model.

The DMA specification is flexible in providing access to an individual
enterprise library service or to a diverse set of multiple library
services. Services and applications operating across DMA will provide
users with transparent, reliable and uniform access to information in
electronic documents, regardless of where they are stored or the form in
which they exist. Users will be able to find and use documents created in
most common office applications by simply searching for document
attributes or content.

DMA's object-based architecture will allow organizations to protect their
investments in existing documents and to maintain their freedom of choice
in using various application programs to create new documents. It will
also enable users to easily integrate new documents in most popular
document formats and migrate them to future applications. In addition,
DMA's extensive scalability will enable expansion from small workgroups to
large enterprise environments.

AIIM task forces are convened to address specific issues that arise in the
course of progress of document management technologies. They are designed
to achieve rapid resolutions that meet the needs of information users and
providers alike. Sue Wolk, president of AIIM, stated, "AIIM is dedicated
to serving the document management industry. We see real benefits to be
gained for everyone when the industry comes together to develop
interoperability specifications, and we intend to encourage wide
participation in the DMA task force."

Through the end of 1995, a representative of each of the four founding
companies will serve as co-chairs of the DMA Advisory Council, with equal
voting rights. A representative from the XSoft division of Xerox will
initially hold the position of administrative chair of DMA. A technical
subcommittee under the direction of the DMA Advisory Council will be
chartered to drive the completion of the specification. A representative
of Saros will be responsible for the administrative duties associated with
this subcommittee. At the end of the year, a new administrative chair and
technical subcommittee administrator will be elected.

Companies may become members of the Document Management Alliance for an
annual fee of $2,500, which also includes an individual membership in
AIIM. Parties interested in DMA membership should contact Judy Kilpatrick
of AIIM at 301-587-8202, ext. 607.

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