CD-R chiving to the rescue

Emedia Professional, June, 1998 by Mark Fritz

Among the leading products in the document management field are PC Docs' DOCS OPEN, OpenText's Livelink, Interleaf's RDM (Relational Document Manager), Highland Software's OnBase, and products from Optika Imaging Systems, Saros, Personal Library Software, METAFILE, Electronic Book Technologies, Intergraph, Documentum, Paper Clip Imaging Software, Filenet, and LaserFiche. Additionally, many of the big iron companies like IBM, Data General, and Wang have document management products, as do scanner vendors like Minolta and Xerox. Unfortunately, many of these products are mainframe and enterprise products intended for use by large corporations and are priced accordingly.

BIG TOOLS FOR LITTLE GUYS

In its marketing literature, IMR distinguishes mid-sized companies from the Fortune 1000 by referring to them as the "Less Fortunate 100,000." Consequently, its popular Alchemy product is aimed at "mid-tier businesses that are looking for vertically integrated data storage and retrieval solutions, but are unwilling to pay for the overhead costs associated with enterprise systems like Filenet or Optika."

Terry McNicholas, President of Record Imaging, Inc., a Boardman, Ohio-based document management service bureau, says his company's focus on "small-big companies and big-small companies" has resulted in more business than he can handle. McNicholas' tool of choice is the $3,600 DocuWare system from ALOS Micrographics. In comparison, enterprise-wide document management tools retail for as much as $50,000. Of course, McNicholas admits, some projects are just too big and complex for the lower-level tools, and when you're bidding on a $50 million contract with a multinational conglomerate, $50,000 is minimal. "With big projects," he explains, "you usually need to do things like connect to enterprise-wide corporate databases, which requires programming. It's the custom programming that makes these products cost so much; you're not buying a product, but a complete service package."

Luckily for the small guys, there are a number of indexing and archiving products priced below $10,000. Search and retrieval engines like ZyLAB International's ZyIndex could be included in this category, as could electronic book publishing tools like dataDisc's QuickSearch and Folio's VIEWS product line. But it pays to specialize, and there are a handful of products that are clearly more document management- and archiving-focused than others. A few even provide built-in CD burning and premastering capabilities for simple, efficient archiving.

I'D LIKE TO BUY A SYNONYM: ARCHIVING REDEFINED

One of the best ways to ease information management is to get rid of some of it, or rather, get it out of the way for awhile. Like a cluttered desk, a network clogged with unnecessary information impedes organizational efficiency, which translates to a diminished bottom line.

Clogged companies can find relief and gain efficiency by offloading their less-used, less-mission-critical information from the mainstream into an easily accessed archive. In most cases, businesses turn to archiving because their supply of information is constantly outstripping the capacity of their storage media, which typically consists of server hard drives or RAID systems. Though some companies are reluctant to archive their data because it seems so final, modern archiving is far superior to the old method: namely, hauling files to a back room or off-site storage locker, where they are never seen again.