When Only Document Management Will Do

As enterprise applications continue to morph into broader and more complex platforms, it can be difficult to find a solution that focuses on a specific need.

Take document management: For many years, document management applications concentrated on—not surprisingly—managing documents. These applications made it possible for companies to handle how documents were stored and moved around, to enhance sharing and collaboration around documents, and to provide workflows for business process documents.

However, many vendors have moved away from simply providing document management, building or acquiring applications that will allow them to become more of an enterprise content management vendor. Or they have tried to beef up human process management and collaboration tools to play in the business process management space. Or they have done all these things and more.

In the right circumstances, these solutions can be powerful, providing comprehensive capabilities for managing content everywhere it resides or is created in a company. But for companies that want document management—and only document management—these platforms are overkill, and using just the document management portion of a broader platform can lead to a solution that feels incomplete.

Luckily, there are still products out there that fit in the traditional category of document management, and these products provide a good number of options and amount of flexibility to meet specific company needs.

eWEEK Labs recently evaluated two classic document management solutions that provide businesses with robust tools for storing, accessing and tracking documents. Ricoh Corp.s DocumentMall 8.3.2 hosted service lets a company quickly get up and running with a capable document management solution—without the need to invest in the internal infrastructure required to run such a solution. Xythos Software Inc.s Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite 5.0 is a powerful, flexible and easily managed application that gives corporations everything theyll need to manage how and when documents are stored and accessed, as well as what processes are associated with the documents.

Ricohs DocumentMall is a good fit for businesses that need to quickly deploy a document management solution and arent concerned about storing documents outside company networks. DocumentMall is also a good fit for organizations that dont need very complex workflows or storage integrations.

Xythos product provides everything one would expect from an enterprise-class document management application and is worth a look for any business that is concerned mainly with issues relating to document management and not enterprise content management.

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