The Case on Online Document Management

Alex Charfen was in a bind. He was minutes away from addressing a roomful of real estate agents and his laptop wouldn't start, and the PowerPoint slides he had prepared for the presentation were locked inside. "I was standing in front of 75 people who had paid $500 apiece to be there," said the principal of the Distressed Property Institute (DPI). "What was I going to do--call tech support to come in and fix my computer?"

That wasn't an option. The six-employee start-up, which trains real estate agents to help financially troubled homeowners fend off foreclosure, doesn't have a dedicated computer specialist on staff. And in any case, figuring out why the computer failed would take more time than Charfen had. Thinking on his feet, he borrowed a laptop from one of the attendees. Five minutes later he was back in business, teaching real estate agents how to get lenders behind bad mortgages to settle for "short sales," where proceeds from a property sale don't cover the balance of the loan.

Charfen's PowerPoint presentation was stored on the Web in a document management site called Xythos on Demand. "All I had to do was sign in and get it," he said. He is, of course, pleased Xythos helped him avert a crisis, but that wasn't what he had in mind when he opened his account a couple of years ago. "I was tired of e-mailing business documents back and forth to co-workers," he said. "We had a hundred different versions of files on e-mail. Some were Mac; some were PC." It was time-consuming to comb through messages, folders and attachments to find what he was looking for.


That wasn't the only drawback of using e-mail to manage documents. The approach simply doesn't work for very large files, said Charfen, noting that some DPI presentations run 200 MB--too big to attach to an e-mail message. Now, for $40 to $60 a month, DPI keeps its key business documents on Xythos on Demand. "We have advertising PDFs, fliers for the different courses, live files we are editing, and all of our PowerPoint presentations," said Charfen.

Xythos on Demand and its competitors operate at the small- and midsize-business level of the market, said Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR - news - people ) analyst Craig Le Clair. "They are about managing business content--primarily, the output of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) [Office] applications."

 

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Business Benefits

For DPI, Xythos isn't just a convenience. It's actually central to how the company does business. In fact, DPI, launched in January 2008, has never operated without it. (Charfen first opened his Xythos account while running his previous real estate company.) Xythos on Demand serves DPI in four key ways:

Acts as a central repository for a virtual operation. Like many small start-ups, DPI has no official headquarters. Employees work out of their homes in Florida, Texas and Washington state, and Charfen expects to soon add staff in California. DPI needed a central place to store key information assets without having to rely on e-mail, and Xythos serves that role, he said.

Keeps DPI on message. The central repository ensures that all DPI sales and marketing documents, such as proposals and fliers used to advertise courses, share the same consistent messaging, regardless of which employee sends them to which prospects and customers. Without that central source, employees tend to add their own touches to marketing documents, said Charfen. And over time, consistent messaging is lost.

Eliminates the cost of software licenses and servers. DPI didn't consider hosting its own document management system in-house. "It didn't make sense," Charfen said. Those systems are typically more expensive and sophisticated than DPI needed.

"Xythos costs us $400 to $600 a year. I can't maintain a server with backup and redundancy at that price," he said. Opting for online document management also eliminated the labor-intensive tasks around managing computers, freeing Charfen from having to wear his IT hat. "As principal of a small company, I am also the IT guy."

Presents a professional image. DPI supplies a number of different documents to the real estate agents who attend its courses. Many, such as manuals and the forms banks require distressed homeowners to file, are handed out at the events themselves. But electronic distribution, via Xythos tickets, is a key channel for follow-up after the course.

"Sometimes we send a couple of new forms or a list of best practices for dealing with a particular mortgage company," said Charfen. Xythos allows DPI to do that while also maintaining a professional image. Free online file-sharing sites offer a similar service, but the links they forward to file recipients are typically accompanied by advertising, he said. "We don't like that image that presents. It doesn't look professional."

Xythos on Demand has paid off for DPI in a big way. Without access to Charfen's presentation on the Web, DPI might have lost tens of thousands of dollars, refunding the course fee to a roomful of disappointed real estate agents. And then there's the damage to DPI's reputation. Even if Xythos hadn't helped Charfen out a bad situation, the monthly Xythos expenditure would have paid for itself. "We are a small business, and everything we do is cost-driven," he said. "DPI looks for payback around every expenditure, and it was there."