Xerox gets serious about ECM

By Jessica Twentyman

Imaging giant Xerox has made it clear that it has serious ambitions in the enterprise content management (ECM) market with the announcement of two new products in late March 2006: a new upgrade to Docushare (version 5.0) and the launch of a new product, Docushare CPX.

In recent years, Xerox has made inroads selling DocuShare to organisations that already own Xerox hardware products, such as printers and scanners, and want to enhance their document output infrastructure with basic content services, such as version control, check-in, check-out, document security and auditing – at a fraction of the price of large-scale ECM implementations.

That makes it a good option for small and mid-size companies looking for lower-cost ECM, says Gartner analyst Karen Shegda. A 20-user, entry-level implementation of Docushare 5.0, she points out, costs $4,500.

Docushare CPX, meanwhile, is designed to enable employees to share content, collaborate and automate critical work processes such as processing mortgage applications. It builds on the core capabilities of Docushare 5.0 with four new software components: Content-Centric Collaboration; Content Process Automation; Content Assimilation and Reuse; and Advanced Content and Records. A 100-seat implementation of Docushare CPX starts at $45,000.

“Docushare CPX does provide enough functional enhancements, such as improved content processing, server-side e-mail management and bundled records management, to make it worthwhile for enterprises to consider an upgrade from the base DocuShare product,” says Shegda of Gartner. However, Docushare CPX still “falls short of a full ECM suite”, she adds, due to its minimal web content management capabilities.

Other key features include support for ‘social collaboration’ – for example, wikis and blogs – which are handled as content objects by DocuShare, and real-time collaboration, which is handled through integration with WebEx, the online conferencing service. Also included in Docushare CPX are XML renditioning and component management.

This is an important but necessary move for Xerox, says Shegda. “The window of opportunity in basic content services is quickly closing with the advent of Oracle Content Services 10g and Microsoft’s impending release of Office 2007 and the next version of SharePoint. Xerox had to begin differentiating itself and to provide value-added capabilities,” she says.

“DocuShare CPX is the right move, but it remains to be seen whether it will be enough. Although DocuShare has a broad installed base, Xerox overall has had a mediocre track record in software and is facing competition from well-entrenched ECM vendors that are also focusing on solutions as a core differentiator,” she concludes.