Xerox Corp and Novell Inc – which last year announced the Document-Enabled Networking initiative to bring document management facilities to NetWare (CI No 2,525) – have decided to throw in their lot with the Shamrock Document Management Coalition of IBM Corp and Saros Corp. Since both initiatives hope to challenge Lotus Development Corp’s dominance of the document management market with Notes, the companies have decided that they will stand more of a chance if they band together. Indeed, the new project, dubbed the Document Management Alliance, intends to try to attract as many other members as possible to create a de facto standard specification for document management: the work is to be carried out through an Association for Information and Image Management working group, and other manufacturers will be invited to join for an annual fee of $2,500, which includes an individual membership of the association. The companies intend to circulate the Document Management Alliance specification to document management vendors, developers, resellers and corporate users in July. They plan also to define an enterprise-wide document management specification for library services, and a middleware layer specification enabling users to access and search for documents between different management systems, flat file repositories, and file servers. To this end, three core elements will be defined, say the firms: a common interface for integrating the access and search methods of individual library services; a consistent application programming interface, written in C, for accessing and searching across diverse management services; and an object-based data model for standardising access to enterprise library services.
