(Editor’s note: This is the first in an ongoing series of articles that will appear in The Week in Imaging over the next few months that looks at document management in the real world from the perspective of document management providers, dealers, and end users. The purpose is to erase some of the confusion that exists about document management as a solution, gauge dealer and end-user perceptions about document management, and get a handle on user expectations and misconceptions when it comes to document management solutions.)
Bruce Malyon
The more things change, the more things change. You can apply my recently coined words of wisdom to what’s going on in the world of document management. There’s an evolution happening even though the days of scan, store, and index aren’t going away at all. What that means is that there’s plenty more opportunities for resellers, and with those opportunities come the requisite challenges.
Recently I spoke with Bruce Malyon, president of MaxxVault, a document management and workflow company, known for its MaxxDocs, MaxxCloud, and MaxxVault Enterprise document management solutions, about some of the changes taking place in the industry the effect they’re going to have on this business segment in the immediate future.
The concept of document management seems to be changing at a rapid pace as new and emerging solutions respond to the influx of data coming in via e-mail as well as keeping up with the mobile workforce and their reliance on mobile devices. The latter has also ramped up interest in digital signatures.
Even though these changes are occurring as you read this, most companies and organizations still of document management as the traditional scan, index, and retrieve. They’re not really thinking e-mail, digital signatures, and mobility. That’s going to change and Malyon isn’t shy about touting how MaxxVault intends to ride the crest of that wave.
“When you start showing them all the various ways of capturing information, whether you’re capturing it directly from word or your e-mail or online forms and digital signatures, that opens their eyes,” he says.
Watch out for e-signatures. “Whether you have your own solution or you have to make sure you partner with the market leaders in that space, you need an answer for that,” states Malyon. “You need a complete e-signature offering whether it works on a Windows client, a Web client, a tablet or iPhone. That’s a big piece because with all this information that’s becoming more mobile, people just want to hit an ‘approve’ or ‘reject’ button to do a workflow and they want it to be digitally signed. That’s going to be a big part of the market. Workflow is definitely expanding beyond a single application and that’s one of the things we’re focused on and other industry market leaders are focused on that as well. The key is to make it simple.”
Dealing with e-mail is a serious issue that more businesses will focus on in the future. “Every company has e-mail challenges,” says Malyon. “Information is coming in via e-mail whether you like it or not and it’s not being kept as a permanent record. People don’t know how to manage it and they have to start thinking e-mail and mobile. Mobile changes the whole game on how you design a platform.”
Malyon knows what he’s talking about having been in the software business for years. “Years ago before MaxxVault, in our previous life you can come up with a new software version and that version of software would stay relevant for two years. It can’t stay relevant for two years anymore. You’re lucky if you get six months before someone else leapfrogs you and comes up with some ‘Wow’ factor in the mobile arena. So the ability to take that MFP device, hit that scan button, and not scan locally but scan it directly to the cloud, that’s where you need to be. The print function, I don’t want to print to a local printer anymore or a print to go to a network drive and go to the cloud, I want to print and have it go directly to the cloud. Those are all things that document management packages need to be striving for in 2013 and beyond.”
That’s food for thought for sure. Over the next few months I’m going to check in with some of the other leading document management companies to get their take on document management in the real world and how their solutions are evolving as well.
