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

Business Wire, April 10, 1995

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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 lightening 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. 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.