Xerox DocuShare 4.0 Content-management S/w 

Xerox DocuShare lets you capture, manage and publish content either from electronic documents (like Office files) or from your scanner/MFD. DocuShare also lets you collaborate using online discussions, and share appointments and event information using calendars. It features a good search engine that lets you search document/file metadata among different asset collections. While this solution is aimed primarily at the enterprise, we suspect its light-weight and ease of deployment and configuration should make it attractive for emerging businesses as well.It is very fast, and once you get the hang of using it, very easy to use. DocuShare is available for Windows, UNIX and Linux platforms. 

Setup experience



In order to use DocuShare, you need one each of several things. Specifically, these are: Apache, IIS or Tomcat web application server; MSDE/SQL Server, Oracle or PostgreSQL for a database; Python scripting and Sun JRE 2.0. Luckily, the setup CD includes Apache, Tomcat, MSDE, PostgreSQL and the Sun JRE system. The installer also tests which of these are installed and intelligently modifies the screens and installs what is needed.

On our review server, we had Windows Server 2003 installed without IIS. So, DocuShare was installed with Tomcat, MSDE and the JRE. What we found a little disconcerting after the installation was that we did not get anything to continue with-no shortcuts, no helpful configuration wizards, no Web page opening to proceed with initial configuration, nothing! Our initial attempts to locate something of what we had just installed involved checking the installation folder and checking the programs group. Finally, we resorted to looking in the manual and we found the URL deep inside that document. If you do install it over Apache or IIS, note that DocuShare will create a port 8080 re-direct to the bundled Tomcat server and so you will not see any helpful shortcuts there either. The URL in the end was this: http://127.0.0.1:8080/docushare. We respectfully urge Xerox to install a few shortcuts to the server's desktop or the program's group to enable administrators to locate the site easily. A problem with this Web interface is that even after you have logged in, the homepage still displays the login box. 

Installing the clients



We had noticed from the text on the product packaging and that in the release notes and other documentation that the product had installable clients for Windows and Outlook besides an application that linked to Xerox PaperPort. Where were these files? We scanned the installation folder and found it deep inside Tomcat's residence. Finally, we managed to figure out that you had to open Help>Downloads from the Web interface to get to them.

Create routing slips in DocuShare to move the documents among different workers, with escalation in case of inaction Detailed task report provides step-wise status information, along with the ability to terminate tasks at any time

Anyway, once you have located these files, installing them is a snap and this time atleast, you get shortcuts and system-tray icons to use. If you have Office 2000 or above, Word, Excel and Outlook will get new items added to their menus to integrate them with

DocuShare.

Document sharing



It provides a rights-managed and version-controlled method of accessing and using files. But was it all it had? The manual for instance, spoke of workflows and tasks and discussions and calendars and more. A lot of this can be created, used and viewed using a 'My DocuShare Places' icon that is placed on your desktop. This icon lets you browse mapped DocuShare servers and shares and use their resources. Some of the items here we could only view and not modify- for instance on our setup, we could not make a new post on a discussion, although we could view something already posted.

Office integration



We tested DocuShare's integration with both Office 2000 and 2003 versions. Adding documents to the DocuShare store and editing them are seamless tasks and is as simple as normal open and save actions-only you will have to use the File>DocuShare menu instead of the normal ones. DocuShare can scan documents for external assets and upload them at check-in. But this option needs to be checked on each time, useful if you're checking in the same document several times and don't want to create multiple copies of these assets on the server.

What's new?



The equivalent of the various 'My' pages doing the rounds on Web portals and welcome pages of applications, the 'What's new' page of DocuShare (only on the Web UI) lets the user get quickly upto speed with what's been happening online since a preset date and time. For instance, if you've been away on tour and would like to know what's happened in the meantime, you could use this to see a quick snapshot of document movements, discussions, calendar events and so on. We found this feature quite useful. To change the date filter you need to use the 'Refine Query' button.

The Windows client lets the user perform a variety of tasks on documents and provides versioning and property information DocuShare integrates with MS Office 2000 or above and provides seamless check-in. It can also upload embedded assets

Calendar and Discussions



DocuShare provides threaded discussions and online shareable calendars. But there is no way to add new entries to either of this from the client applications. For instance, it would have been nice if the calendar could be used from within Outlook in someway, since DocuShare already provides an Outlook client. For both of these, in this version atleast, you would need to visit the Web UI.

Tasks



We found this word everywhere on the interface, except in the manual and were for sometime mystified as to how we could assign someone a task. Finally, we managed to figure out that this was nothing but document routing slips (see Collaborate with MS Word Routing Slips, Aug 2005). To this DocuShare adds escalation and multiple routing steps. For instance, we could specify that an article be routed first to one user for two days and if not responded to by then, DocuShare would auto-escalate it to another user. We can have as many steps as we want, looping it back and forth or even canceling the flow. The Web UI also provides a detailed report on where a particular task has reached. This provides very limited workflow functionality and for a more comprehensive workflow solution one needs to look at other full-fledged offerings.

Bottom Line: The software is user friendly, but upto a limit as noted above. But at Rs 4 lakh for 10 users, we do not find it justifying the price of convenience of integrating several already available (and some free) solutions instead of using

DocuShare.

Sujay V Sarma