The web might be reducing the volume of paper that companies must deal with, but according to various reports as much as 30% of a knowledge worker’s time is still spent looking up information. So it’s about time the document management industry started getting serious about making it easier for organizations to manage and display information stored in different systems from different vendors. Yesterday at its annual conference in New York, the Association for Information and Image Management International (AIIM) demonstrated an implementation of a specification it says will make it easier for organizations to control their electronic document stores and for employees to access and share documents regardless of file format or location. The specification will enable users to deploy multi-vendor search and retrieval tools and is claimed to provide a framework for document creation, editing, version control, check-in/check-out and security. Eastman Software, FileNet, Interleaf, Saros and Xerox were amongst the companies demonstrating interoperability with the Document Management Alliance specification which is supported by some 60 vendors, including users such as Boeing, British Airways, General Motors and the US Department of Justice. AIIM says it’s also agreed a set of extensions to its Open Document Management APIs to support intranets. ODMA sponsors include Documentum, DEC, FileNet, NovaSoft, Novell and Oracle. The likes of Microsoft, Corel and IBM/Lotus are already shipping ODMA-compliant applications. á
