Document Management Alliance

Background Information
April 1995

Media Contacts:
Maria Amundson, A&R Partners, 415-363-0982
Beth Kitchener, Brodeur & Partners, 617-622-2848
-----------------------------------------------------------------
                             DMA
                  Document Management Alliance

                     Background Information

This background paper describes. the need for universal interoperability
among all document management applications, services and repositories and
provides information about the Document Management Alliance (DMA), formed
by the merger of two leading document management initiatives, Document
Enabled Networking (DEN) and the Shamrock Document Management Coalition.
The objective of this paper is to clarify the critical document management
issues facing information system managers and developers and to outline
how DMA proposes to address these issues.

The Challenge

A company's intellectual assets - the knowledge and expertise of its people
and the information and data they have compiled - are its most valuable
resources. Intellectual assets encompass everything a company knows about
itself, its products and services, its customers, and the business
environment in which it exists.

Typically this information is stored in documents. Whereas years ago
documents were pieces of paper, today a document can be anything from a
computer file (or several interconnected files) to a video clip. With the
advances in storage, scanning and optical character recognition
technologies, that document has the potential to exist indefinitely. It
will not only be used as originally intended, but parts of it may be
re-used many times, cut and pasted with parts of other documents to make
new ones.

The proliferation of electronic documents over the past 10 years has
created a significant document management challenge for organizations of
all sizes. According to International Data Corporation, in 1985, the
number of documents in the world was doubling every five years. By 1994,
they were doubling every nine months. It is also estimated that 1015
percent of an organization's revenues are spent creating, managing and
distributing documents and that 60 percent of people's time is spent
working with documents. Further, an estimated 80 percent of these
documents are stored on local hard drives, not on LAN file servers, and
are therefore inaccessible to the organization unless they are recreated
on paper.

Technological advances in local- and wide-area network technology have
created an unprecedented ability to access and share information across an
enterprise network. This sets the stage for seemingly limitless
improvements in both individual and group productivity. Information
technology groups within organizations have created and implemented
enterprise applications that transcend traditional desktop applications by
spanning workgroups departments, and entire organizations. These
applications include document management, electronic publishing, document
imaging, and vertical business process applications.

With the growth of electronic media, document management services will be
the key to maintaining a competitive advantage. Add to that the emergence
of the "virtual corporation" coupled with the surge in LANs, WANs, and
global networks, and the daunting challenge arises: that of managing of
critical documents effectively across the enterprise.

The Need For Document Management Systems

In the digital world, information can be organized very flexibly, in many
different formats and with intelligent interconnections. The computer is
required as an intermediary for creating, accessing, presenting,
manipulating and distributing electronic data as a document. In simple
cases, the recorded information for a document is encoded in a single
computer file. However, electronic documents are rapidly becoming more
powerful and complex. Several data files may be required, or many software
packages may be involved. A single document's files may contain very
different kinds of recorded information: text, charts, voice and video
clips, process steps, fonts and more.

What Document Management Systems Contribute

Document Management Systems (DMSs) were created to help manage the
explosion of computer-accessible documents. Their purpose is to help
organizations better protect and manage documents while also giving people
easier access to the information stored in those documents.

DMSs provide an extensive range of services, such as storing, tracking,
versioning, indexing and searching for documents. They also provide a
reliable "audit trail" of a document's use and changes. Consider the
benefit of using DMSs:

* A consistent set of services that span workgroups and applications can
significantly improve customer service. With better on-line information
access across networks, customer concerns can be quickly documented,
tracked, addressed and resolved.

* Quality assurance and cost control are positively affected when employees
can make better, more timely decisions based on the most up-to-date
information.

* Productivity and teamwork are improved as information becomes available
on demand.

* Overhead costs are reduced when capitol equipment is used in lieu of
clerical labor, and storage requirements for paper documents are
minimized.

Document management plays a critical role in achieving these and many other
benefits. The need for DMSs has naturally spawned a variety of solutions.
Unfortunately, it is common today to find within the organization several
DMS solutions that can't communicate with each other, creating separate
"islands of information". It is essential that an organization devise a
document management strategy as an information architecture rather than as
just another application.

The Shamrock and DEN Initiatives

In early 1994, two groups of vendors and customers started out separately
to define industry specifications for document management services,
thereby ensuring interoperability across the enterprise. These two groups
were the Shamrock Document Management Coalition, founded by IBM Corp. and
Saros Corp., and Document Enabled Networking (DEN), founded by Novell Inc.
and Xerox Corp. Together, the two groups represented over 35 member
companies who were actively involved in the development of DEN and
Shamrock.

The Shamrock Document Management Coalition, a consortium of vendors and
users, published a draft Enterprise Library Services (ELS) specification
in June 1994 for open review and trial use. ELS, an interactive set of
middleware services, enabled universal access to repositories and uniform
security and administration across workgroups and departments throughout
the enterprise. It was the group's first deliverable in their effort to
provide an enterprise document management (EDM) framework to ensure
interoperability and consistency between document repositories managed by
different DMSs across different platforms. It was also designed to bridge
the file-centric PC operating systems of today with the object-oriented
operating systems of tomorrow.

The DEN specification was for an open software framework on which
developers could build scalable document management services and
applications that interoperated across different document repositories.
The goal of DEN was to provide users with transparent, reliable and
uniform access to information in electronic documents, regardless of their
location or file type. The DEN framework included client module API and
document database SPI specifications; client-server middleware software
modules for translating API and SPI calls, thus ensuring that any
DEN-enabled front end could access any DEN-enabled back end and vice
versa; and a software development kit.

The DMA Specification

The merger of Document Enabled Networking and the Shamrock Document
Management Coalition has already significantly strengthened and
accelerated the efforts toward their shared goal: to deliver industry
specifications that will provide universal interoperability among all
document management applications, services, and repositories. The Document
Management Alliance (DMA), formed by the merger of the two groups, will be
organized as a task force under AIIM (the Association for Information and
Image Management). DMA will be an open organization, working actively with
customers, document management service vendors and platform providers to
ensure that the DMA middleware is supported.

DMA will integrate the extensive development work already done by DEN and
Shamrock. With the merged architecture of Shamrock and DEN, DMA will
define an enterprise-wide document management specification for
middleware, library services, object-based repositories and potentially
any other defined document management service.

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 application 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 universal access to information in electronic documents. Users
will be able to find and use documents created in most common office
applications by simply searching for document attributes or contents.

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.

The DMA specification includes a C Language API defined in a
vendor-independent manner. The objective of the specification is to meet
the following user requirements:

* To implement applications that access enterprise library services
(version control, security, scalability, etc.) using a common,
non-proprietary interface;

* To allow access to a single DMS from multiple desktop applications;

* To allow a single desktop application to access multiple DMSs in a
consistent manner;

* To facilitate the interface of DMSs with pre-existing legacy systems,
desktop applications. electronic mail systems and workflow systems.

DMA Benefits to Customers and Vendors

As a task force of AIIM, the Document Management Alliance brings to bear a
large end-user membership in working together to solve the challenges of
enterprise document management. This customer-driven orientation of DMA
ensures that this initiative will move in a direction that is
business-focused and commercially sound.

Based on a flexible, open design, DMA-based products will be implemented to
support diverse user interfaces, desktop applications, workstations,
network operating systems and servers, and remain part of the corporate
information infrastructure. The open design will also allow easy
integration of new technologies. This flexibility facilitates quick and
easy adoption of DMA-based enterprise solutions by end users, because they
continue working with the applications with which they are already
familiar.

DMA will provide a framework for document management applications and
services to deliver capabilities such as the following:

Query Service. Allows simple transparent access from every desktop to
information anywhere on the network. Single searches can extend across
multiple repositories throughout the enterprise. Employees empowered with
better information and faster answers improve customer satisfaction.
Teamwork is also improved by providing automatic access to the
knowledge-base of the entire organization.

Library Services. This includes check-in and check-out, version control and
access control to deliver the most accurate and up-to-date information to
authorized users. The library services reduce the risk of acting on
outdated documents.

Multi-Level Security. Access control lists are allowed for each
document/object in the system. This ensures that users see only files they
are authorized to see. Neither the original file nor any of its versions
can be corrupted or damaged. This security allows companies to substitute
capital equipment for costly clerical labor and paper-document storage.

Designed for flexibility and extensibility, the DMA specification will
accommodate different applications ranging from ad-hoc office systems to
high-end mission-critical document management solutions. It will enable
workgroups and departments to select from a variety of existing and
emerging software components that not only address their specific needs,
but also fit into an overall enterprise architecture.

The DMA specification will also allow system integrators and end-users to
easily customize specific DMA-based solutions to meet specific
requirements.

The DMA framework can also extend to include high-level APIs, called
high-level interfaces (HLIs), which provide application- or event-specific
interfaces between the DMA interfaces and other application domains. For
example, the work of the Open Document Management API (ODMA) group may
play a role as an HLI for desktop applications. The ODMA is a simple API
for interfacing desktop applications to document management systems and
other groupware systems. In addition, HLIs could be identified for
workflow, document interchange or emerging profiles for international
standards such as ISO 10166 Document Filing and Retrieval (DFR).

The development of the DMA specification involves multiple vendors,
products and platforms. In order for vendors to deliver integrated
solutions to customers, there must be consensus on a common document
management model. Just as the database market gained momentum with the
advent of SQL, the document management market will experience rapid growth
by vendors adhering to a common framework that will still allow for
product differentiation. DMA provides such a vendor-independent interface
to multiple document management services and repositories. The DMA
specification carries great potential for helping companies to meet their
enterprise document management challenges and improve overall productivity
through an entirely new level of access to information.

 ============================================================
 From the  'New Product News'  Electronic News Service on....
 AOL (Keyword = New Products) & Delphi (GO COMPUTING PRODUCT)
 ============================================================
 This information was processed from data provided by the 
 company or author mentioned. For additional details, please 
 contact them directly at the address/phone number indicated.
 All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
 ============================================================
 All submissions for this service should be addressed to:
 BAKER ENTERPRISES,  20 Ferro Dr,  Sewell, NJ  08080  U.S.A.
 Email: RBakerPC (AOL/Delphi), rbakerpc@delphi.com (Internet)
 ============================================================
