Doculabs, Inc., is a privately owned information and technology consulting firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm provides expertise in enterprise social collaboration and content management, developing strategic plans and roadmaps to help its clients make use of these technologies to create competitive advantage. Doculabs also provides assistance in records management and information governance to facilitate compliance, reduce risk, and reduce the costs of e-discovery for its clients.
Doculabs was founded in 1993 by James K. Watson, Jr. and Paul Burian, both formerly of Xerox Corporation; and Richard Medina, formerly of Information Resources, Inc. The firm's mission was based on three principles: a specialization in content-based applications, analysis grounded by benchmark data, and objectivity. These principles remain the foundation of Doculabs' business and continue to differentiate the firm in the technology consulting services market.
Doculabs is a small business consulting firm providing services to help organization digitize,
optimize, and automate their processes, documents and records. Doculabs offers consulting
services to support initiatives for moving to paperless, moving to electronic health records, and
streamlining and optimizing processes. Our services help lower costs and increase transparency,
while improving inter-agency and inter-departmental communications.
Our engagements focus on helping clients leverage their existing ECM investments on a broader
enterprise basis through objective analysis and in-depth market knowledge.
This approach is based on our fundamental belief that in order to protect a client’s long-term
interest, technology advisors should not be implementers.
Includes comprehensive Program framework with necessary conditions
for Program success.
– The components are Governance and Operations, Information Organization, Process
Design and Implementation, Architecture and Technology, and Change Management
2. Includes both the Compliance strategy to be fulfilled (the what) and
specific operational and technical activities and tasks to execute the
strategy (the how).
3. Includes Legal, Records Management, State Archive, IT Shared Services
Group, and Department Management in the Program strategy
1. Processes for Discovery, for FOIA request processing, and for ESI types with
particular requirements
2. Evaluate your Discovery Process against the industry standard EDRM (Electronic
Discovery Reference Model – see EDRM.org).
– The EDRM includes the following stages: Identification, Collection, Preservation, Processing,
Review, Analysis, Production, and Presentation.
3. The Information and Records Lifecycle Management Process defines the
upstream and downstream ESI lifecycle stages
– It includes: Ingestion, Indexing (Declaration and Classification), Access and Distribution, Retention,
and Disposition.
4. Design discovery and FOIA request processes for ESI with special requirements
– E.g., email, transaction data, IMs, externally created information
Records of communications related to the rep’s business made through social media sites must be archived (though the rules are tech-neutral)
Seven Steps to a Highly Successful Center of Excellence, by Jeetu Patel and Linda Andrews for AIIM Infonomics, January/February 2010
New Impetus for Going Paperless, by Richard Medina and Linda Andrews for AIIM Infonomics, May 2009
Capture Capabilities Benchmarking Results: Doculabs’ Research on Industry Best Practices, By James Watson, Jr., for AIIM Infonomics, March/April 2009
Industry Benchmarking Results: Compliance and E-discovery Readiness, by James Watson, Jr., for AIIM Infonomics, March/April 2009
Doculabs’ Perspective on the Growing Market for Mobility, by Jeetu Patel and Linda Andrews, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide 2009
ECM and BPM: The Prerequisites for Outsourcing Initiatives, By Jeetu Patel, Gautam Desai, and Joe Shepley, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide, 2009
ECM in 2009: Addressing New Challenges with ECM and BPM, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide, 2009
The Role of Metrics in Change Management Initiatives, by David DeLuna, Gautam Desai, and Linda Andrews, for www.document media.com
ECM and E-discovery: Why Content Management is Critical to Litigation Discovery, by James Watson, Jr., for Tech Decisions, November 2008
Lessons Learned in Records Management, by Richard Medina and Linda Andrews, for edoc, March 2008
ECM in 2006: Leveraging Existing Investments James Watson, Jr. PhD
The goals of these tests was to measure the ability of each Web service framework to serialize and de-serialize data, using varying data set sizes, along with database transactions that both read and insert data. The mix of request types matches the types of transactions that might be seen in a typical Web-based application. The benchmark required that each framework used Oracle for the back-end database.
Each of the benchmark implementations was built using the same application model with the application split into three tiers. The first tier comprised a set of data access classes used to encapsulate all the data access logic. The second tier comprised a set of business tier classes where any business validation or processing would occur. Due to the simplicity of the benchmark, the business logic classes were quite simple and only needed to call into the data access classes. None of the business logic classes were allowed to reference any vendor-specific database libraries; they could only use the data access classes created as part of the application. The third tier comprised a Web services façade to hide the implementation details of the business-logic tier from the consumers of the Web services. The goal of this n-tiered approach was to provide an application that would be flexible to future changes in application design and requirements.
Enterprise content management (ECM) technology offers many business benefits, allowing users to share content and collaborate more effectively as part of their daily work processes. But for many organizations, ECM software products have proven to be too complex, time-consuming, and costly to deploy and maintain. There is a clear need for a straightforward content management solution that can provide organizations, large or small, both a faster return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. The Xerox DocuShare solution has evolved to meet these business needs.
Xerox commissioned Doculabs to conduct a formal assessment of DocuShare 4.0, released in October 2004. Overall, Doculabs was impressed with DocuShare’s range of features. It is clear that Xerox has made major improvements to the architecture and functional capabilities of the product since the previous version, allowing the product to meet the requirements of most ECM initiatives. DocuShare is easy to deploy and easy to use for line-of-business users, and its J2EE architecture will appeal to IT buyers. The net result is a solution that makes great sense – particularly for organizations that seek to roll out content and document management initially to departments or workgroups, with a longer-term strategy to extend the solution to the enterprise.
DocuShare is a web-based enterprise content management system that allows users to capture, manage, store, retrieve, and update content in many file formats, and to automate production workflows associated with these documents. With DocuShare 4.0, Xerox provides a straightforward solution that addresses the issues detailed above. DocuShare provides the breadth of document management and collaboration functionality that most organizations require, in a cost-effective package that is both easy to deploy and easy for users to learn.
Doculabs has followed the DocuShare product through several iterations, and we continue to be impressed with Xerox’s commitment to enhancing and improving the capabilities of the product. As a result, DocuShare now offers major new modules that add significant ECM functionality, including archive management, records management, and e-mail management; in addition, a high-availability module ensures that larger number of users can be serviced. All content types are supported by easy-to-use library services, workflow, search, and security features. DocuShare’s affordable price tag and its low total cost of ownership make it easy to purchase and cost-justify.
DocuShare 4.0 is a web-based enterprise management solution designed to facilitate sharing and collaboration in the enterprise. It also can satisfy many ECM requirements, such as providing a robust security and accountability model, auditing and logging features, flexible metadata management, records management, and complex content routing, the latter of which is essential for business processes that involve document imaging. With the release of version 4.0, DocuShare can now manage e-mail content, support archives stored on disk arrays and storage area network (SAN) systems, among other notable improvements since the previous product release.
DocuShare is designed to provide broad functionality in a package that is easy to deploy and use, contributing to rapid return on investment. DocuShare provides a wide range of content management and collaboration capabilities out of the box. Any optional components that a company wants to purchase – such as the High Availability Option – are already installed and can be activated by entering a license key. In contrast, conventional ECM solution suites require additional installation and configuration processes to add new capabilities.
The core product is the DocuShare content management application. It provides version control, check-in/check-out, document-level security, and document routing and workflow. It also provides security features: SSL-encrypted sessions, global user permissions, and integration with enterprise authentication protocols such as LDAP and ADS. DocuShare is designed to be a community-maintained system in which users not only add content and update versions, but can also change permissions and assign ownership to others, without IT involvement. DocuShare integrates with desktop applications through Microsoft Windows OLE/ODMA as well as WebDAV for Mac, UNIX, and Windows 2000 and XP.
As mentioned previously, Xerox also provides a number of add-on modules that are designed to work with DocuShare and extend its functionality across the entire content lifecycle. These add-on modules include:
DocuShare Enterprise Workflow – a set of Java-based tools that provide robust, flexible design, deployment, and monitoring of document-centric processes, including document routing
DocuShare Interact – a web-based system that provides collaborative functionality for team-based work environments, enabling users to create task-specific interactive web pages for collaboration
DocuShare Outlook Client – provides integration with Microsoft Outlook for integrated management of e-mail and attachments in DocuShare, as well as providing access to all DocuShare content
Benefits
Widely-accepted document imaging and document management benefits Many of the business benefits provided by DocuShare fall into the category of conventional wisdom – measurable savings that organizations will profit from immediately. These benefits include paper reduction, reduced outsourcing of paper and record storage, reduced IT system management costs, reduced expenditures for courier and postal delivery, and instant access to documents that previously took hours or days to find and retrieve.
Improved control over documents and content Without document management, users invariably store documents in a variety of locations, including hard drives, file servers, e-mail inboxes, and file cabinets. By deploying DocuShare, organizations can help their users readily find the information they need to do their jobs, ensure that they are retrieving the current or approved versions of documents, and eliminate extraneous or redundant copies of documents.
Improved efficiency through document routing and workflow In most organizations, successfully completing work depends on repeatable processes. Even in companies where the final product appears to be highly customized, usually a number of processes are ripe for automation (such as review-and-approval cycles). With many ECM systems, creation of these workflows requires an advanced user who has been trained on the system or even a programmer to construct these automated processes. DocuShare not only allows each user to easily send documents and content through a workflow to one or many people, but also provides flexible notification options so that the originator can be kept up to date on all work in progress. This “view” of work processes usually improves management’s ability to identify potential trouble spots and to better distribute work within the organization.
Enhanced employee communication and collaboration In some organizations, the work processes are inherently collaborative in nature, but travel schedules or geographic distribution of users makes effective collaboration difficult. Through its Interact module, DocuShare provides a range of collaboration capabilities that make the information-sharing process far less tedious. Bulletins, threaded discussions, calendars, agendas, documents, and project timelines can be centrally maintained by a group of individuals, each contributing his or her part to the project using a simple browser interface.
Quick time to benefit and low total cost of ownership Given its inherent usability, training costs for DocuShare are low; in just a few days, organizations can begin realizing benefits from the system in the departments or application where it is deployed. In addition, the system is easier to maintain than many competing document management and ECM products, reducing the impact on IT groups and allowing more effective use of limited IT resources. Finally, DocuShare is available at a price point that is considerably below that of many other document management products and most full ECM products, and it includes attractive pricing options such as unlimited guest access and bundles that include support for the first year. From a cost-to-capabilities perspective, DocuShare is in a class by itself, offering organizations of all sizes the opportunity to manage their content with a minimum of long-term risk.
Doculabs was founded in 1993 by James K. Watson, Jr. and Paul Burian, both formerly of Xerox Corporation; and Richard Medina, formerly of Information Resources, Inc. The firm's mission was based on three principles: a specialization in content-based applications, analysis grounded by benchmark data, and objectivity. These principles remain the foundation of Doculabs' business and continue to differentiate the firm in the technology consulting services market.
Doculabs is a small business consulting firm providing services to help organization digitize,
optimize, and automate their processes, documents and records. Doculabs offers consulting
services to support initiatives for moving to paperless, moving to electronic health records, and
streamlining and optimizing processes. Our services help lower costs and increase transparency,
while improving inter-agency and inter-departmental communications.
Our engagements focus on helping clients leverage their existing ECM investments on a broader
enterprise basis through objective analysis and in-depth market knowledge.
This approach is based on our fundamental belief that in order to protect a client’s long-term
interest, technology advisors should not be implementers.
Includes comprehensive Program framework with necessary conditions
for Program success.
– The components are Governance and Operations, Information Organization, Process
Design and Implementation, Architecture and Technology, and Change Management
2. Includes both the Compliance strategy to be fulfilled (the what) and
specific operational and technical activities and tasks to execute the
strategy (the how).
3. Includes Legal, Records Management, State Archive, IT Shared Services
Group, and Department Management in the Program strategy
1. Processes for Discovery, for FOIA request processing, and for ESI types with
particular requirements
2. Evaluate your Discovery Process against the industry standard EDRM (Electronic
Discovery Reference Model – see EDRM.org).
– The EDRM includes the following stages: Identification, Collection, Preservation, Processing,
Review, Analysis, Production, and Presentation.
3. The Information and Records Lifecycle Management Process defines the
upstream and downstream ESI lifecycle stages
– It includes: Ingestion, Indexing (Declaration and Classification), Access and Distribution, Retention,
and Disposition.
4. Design discovery and FOIA request processes for ESI with special requirements
– E.g., email, transaction data, IMs, externally created information
Records of communications related to the rep’s business made through social media sites must be archived (though the rules are tech-neutral)
Seven Steps to a Highly Successful Center of Excellence, by Jeetu Patel and Linda Andrews for AIIM Infonomics, January/February 2010
New Impetus for Going Paperless, by Richard Medina and Linda Andrews for AIIM Infonomics, May 2009
Capture Capabilities Benchmarking Results: Doculabs’ Research on Industry Best Practices, By James Watson, Jr., for AIIM Infonomics, March/April 2009
Industry Benchmarking Results: Compliance and E-discovery Readiness, by James Watson, Jr., for AIIM Infonomics, March/April 2009
Doculabs’ Perspective on the Growing Market for Mobility, by Jeetu Patel and Linda Andrews, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide 2009
ECM and BPM: The Prerequisites for Outsourcing Initiatives, By Jeetu Patel, Gautam Desai, and Joe Shepley, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide, 2009
ECM in 2009: Addressing New Challenges with ECM and BPM, for AIIM Buyers’ Guide, 2009
The Role of Metrics in Change Management Initiatives, by David DeLuna, Gautam Desai, and Linda Andrews, for www.document media.com
ECM and E-discovery: Why Content Management is Critical to Litigation Discovery, by James Watson, Jr., for Tech Decisions, November 2008
Lessons Learned in Records Management, by Richard Medina and Linda Andrews, for edoc, March 2008
ECM in 2006: Leveraging Existing Investments James Watson, Jr. PhD
The goals of these tests was to measure the ability of each Web service framework to serialize and de-serialize data, using varying data set sizes, along with database transactions that both read and insert data. The mix of request types matches the types of transactions that might be seen in a typical Web-based application. The benchmark required that each framework used Oracle for the back-end database.
Each of the benchmark implementations was built using the same application model with the application split into three tiers. The first tier comprised a set of data access classes used to encapsulate all the data access logic. The second tier comprised a set of business tier classes where any business validation or processing would occur. Due to the simplicity of the benchmark, the business logic classes were quite simple and only needed to call into the data access classes. None of the business logic classes were allowed to reference any vendor-specific database libraries; they could only use the data access classes created as part of the application. The third tier comprised a Web services façade to hide the implementation details of the business-logic tier from the consumers of the Web services. The goal of this n-tiered approach was to provide an application that would be flexible to future changes in application design and requirements.
Enterprise content management (ECM) technology offers many business benefits, allowing users to share content and collaborate more effectively as part of their daily work processes. But for many organizations, ECM software products have proven to be too complex, time-consuming, and costly to deploy and maintain. There is a clear need for a straightforward content management solution that can provide organizations, large or small, both a faster return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. The Xerox DocuShare solution has evolved to meet these business needs.
Xerox commissioned Doculabs to conduct a formal assessment of DocuShare 4.0, released in October 2004. Overall, Doculabs was impressed with DocuShare’s range of features. It is clear that Xerox has made major improvements to the architecture and functional capabilities of the product since the previous version, allowing the product to meet the requirements of most ECM initiatives. DocuShare is easy to deploy and easy to use for line-of-business users, and its J2EE architecture will appeal to IT buyers. The net result is a solution that makes great sense – particularly for organizations that seek to roll out content and document management initially to departments or workgroups, with a longer-term strategy to extend the solution to the enterprise.
DocuShare is a web-based enterprise content management system that allows users to capture, manage, store, retrieve, and update content in many file formats, and to automate production workflows associated with these documents. With DocuShare 4.0, Xerox provides a straightforward solution that addresses the issues detailed above. DocuShare provides the breadth of document management and collaboration functionality that most organizations require, in a cost-effective package that is both easy to deploy and easy for users to learn.
Doculabs has followed the DocuShare product through several iterations, and we continue to be impressed with Xerox’s commitment to enhancing and improving the capabilities of the product. As a result, DocuShare now offers major new modules that add significant ECM functionality, including archive management, records management, and e-mail management; in addition, a high-availability module ensures that larger number of users can be serviced. All content types are supported by easy-to-use library services, workflow, search, and security features. DocuShare’s affordable price tag and its low total cost of ownership make it easy to purchase and cost-justify.
DocuShare 4.0 is a web-based enterprise management solution designed to facilitate sharing and collaboration in the enterprise. It also can satisfy many ECM requirements, such as providing a robust security and accountability model, auditing and logging features, flexible metadata management, records management, and complex content routing, the latter of which is essential for business processes that involve document imaging. With the release of version 4.0, DocuShare can now manage e-mail content, support archives stored on disk arrays and storage area network (SAN) systems, among other notable improvements since the previous product release.
DocuShare is designed to provide broad functionality in a package that is easy to deploy and use, contributing to rapid return on investment. DocuShare provides a wide range of content management and collaboration capabilities out of the box. Any optional components that a company wants to purchase – such as the High Availability Option – are already installed and can be activated by entering a license key. In contrast, conventional ECM solution suites require additional installation and configuration processes to add new capabilities.
The core product is the DocuShare content management application. It provides version control, check-in/check-out, document-level security, and document routing and workflow. It also provides security features: SSL-encrypted sessions, global user permissions, and integration with enterprise authentication protocols such as LDAP and ADS. DocuShare is designed to be a community-maintained system in which users not only add content and update versions, but can also change permissions and assign ownership to others, without IT involvement. DocuShare integrates with desktop applications through Microsoft Windows OLE/ODMA as well as WebDAV for Mac, UNIX, and Windows 2000 and XP.
As mentioned previously, Xerox also provides a number of add-on modules that are designed to work with DocuShare and extend its functionality across the entire content lifecycle. These add-on modules include:
DocuShare Enterprise Workflow – a set of Java-based tools that provide robust, flexible design, deployment, and monitoring of document-centric processes, including document routing
DocuShare Interact – a web-based system that provides collaborative functionality for team-based work environments, enabling users to create task-specific interactive web pages for collaboration
DocuShare Outlook Client – provides integration with Microsoft Outlook for integrated management of e-mail and attachments in DocuShare, as well as providing access to all DocuShare content
Benefits
Widely-accepted document imaging and document management benefits Many of the business benefits provided by DocuShare fall into the category of conventional wisdom – measurable savings that organizations will profit from immediately. These benefits include paper reduction, reduced outsourcing of paper and record storage, reduced IT system management costs, reduced expenditures for courier and postal delivery, and instant access to documents that previously took hours or days to find and retrieve.
Improved control over documents and content Without document management, users invariably store documents in a variety of locations, including hard drives, file servers, e-mail inboxes, and file cabinets. By deploying DocuShare, organizations can help their users readily find the information they need to do their jobs, ensure that they are retrieving the current or approved versions of documents, and eliminate extraneous or redundant copies of documents.
Improved efficiency through document routing and workflow In most organizations, successfully completing work depends on repeatable processes. Even in companies where the final product appears to be highly customized, usually a number of processes are ripe for automation (such as review-and-approval cycles). With many ECM systems, creation of these workflows requires an advanced user who has been trained on the system or even a programmer to construct these automated processes. DocuShare not only allows each user to easily send documents and content through a workflow to one or many people, but also provides flexible notification options so that the originator can be kept up to date on all work in progress. This “view” of work processes usually improves management’s ability to identify potential trouble spots and to better distribute work within the organization.
Enhanced employee communication and collaboration In some organizations, the work processes are inherently collaborative in nature, but travel schedules or geographic distribution of users makes effective collaboration difficult. Through its Interact module, DocuShare provides a range of collaboration capabilities that make the information-sharing process far less tedious. Bulletins, threaded discussions, calendars, agendas, documents, and project timelines can be centrally maintained by a group of individuals, each contributing his or her part to the project using a simple browser interface.
Quick time to benefit and low total cost of ownership Given its inherent usability, training costs for DocuShare are low; in just a few days, organizations can begin realizing benefits from the system in the departments or application where it is deployed. In addition, the system is easier to maintain than many competing document management and ECM products, reducing the impact on IT groups and allowing more effective use of limited IT resources. Finally, DocuShare is available at a price point that is considerably below that of many other document management products and most full ECM products, and it includes attractive pricing options such as unlimited guest access and bundles that include support for the first year. From a cost-to-capabilities perspective, DocuShare is in a class by itself, offering organizations of all sizes the opportunity to manage their content with a minimum of long-term risk.
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