Like database, E-mail, and telephony vendors, suppliers of document management systems are now turning to published interfaces as a way of opening up their clients and services. This reduces the cost of developing for multiple platforms and broadens the applicability of their offerings.
Two industry-led efforts could ease cross-application and cross-platform communication. ODMA (Open Document Management API), supported by Borland, Documentum, Interleaf, Novell, Oracle, PC DOCS, SoftSolutions, Sybase, WordPerfect, and XSoft, among others, is meant to standardize desktop access to document management clients. ``ODMA lets applications talk to document managers without having to hard-wire them together and rewrite every time there's a change,'' says Scott Kadlec, president o
f PC DOCS.
Now a Win16-based API, but intended eventually for Win32, Motif, and the Mac, ODMA lets applications such as word processors or spreadsheets call through a DLL to a local document manager, which in turn talks directly or through a middleware layer to document stores. With ODMA, ``your word processing application's Open menu launches a dialogue to the document management system,'' says Scott Wells, product line manager for NetWare applications services at Novell.
ODMA and Novell/Xerox Document-Enabled Networking serve similar but slightly different needs, and they don't really compete. ODMA lets desktop programs access a document front end, whereas the DEN API gives them programmatic access to middleware services, including connections to DEN-compliant back ends. It's not clear how closely the two APIs will track one another. Given Novell's participation in both efforts, however, it's possible that ODMA calls may become a subset of the DEN API, so that an application could transparentl
y call a local document management client, or if none is present, go through the DEN coordination layer.
The other standards effort, the Shamrock Document Management Coalition, is in some ways much more ambitious. Spearheaded by Saros and IBM, Shamrock aims to provide a layer for accessing multiple document management engines, or servers, through a common set of services and calls. Built on technology from Saros, Shamrock hides differences in document repositories, providing a uniform set of security, administration, and data-access tools. In its potential to open up formerly proprietary document engines, Shamrock is reminiscent of SQL. Eventually, it will also define ways for document engines to interoperate (especially important for server-based document assembly) and to access legacy engines.
The Shamrock group includes big names, including Adobe, EDS, Frame Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Verity, ViewStar, and Wang, as well as ODMA members, Documentum, Interleaf, PC DOCS, Sybase, and
XSoft. But observers are less sure of its prospects because it is so closely tied to Saros. ``The idea is good, because there needs to be a way for these different systems to talk to each other,'' says Heidi Dix, an analyst at Forrester Research. ``But talking to vendors, some say this is driven by Saros, which has the technology already and isn't being incredibly open.''
Alvin Tedjamulia, executive vice president of SoftSolutions, offers a more technical critique. ``Shamrock tries to define a single view across multiple object repositories,'' he says. ``[Its] Enterprise Library Services defines an object model and query model, and says this is how objects ought to look. It requires all the individual document-collection engines to retool their front ends to be accessible via a common view.''
In this regard, the battle between the DEN SPI (Service Provider Interface) and the Shamrock ELS may turn out to be like the E-mail standards fight between Microsoft's MAPI SPI and the VIM (Vendor-Independ
ent Messaging) model from Lotus. At the back end, Lotus required mail-service providers to bolt a VIM front end to their engines, whereas MAPI compliance required writing through an interface. Quips A. J. Dennis, strategic planner for WordPerfect: ``VIM isn't even on the radar screen anymore.'' Nevertheless, to keep up with Shamrock, Novell and Xerox plan to add support for legacy back ends and searches across multiple document stores through DEN middleware.
As with all standards efforts, what users really care about in the end is easy yet secure access to data across multiple platforms. ``What users want is the ability to file and find documents, revise them, etc., in a more standard way,'' says Bruce Silver, vice president of BIS Strategic Decisions. ``ODMA will let multiple apps deal with the same document system, and Shamrock will provide tools to access multiple corporate repositories.'' But, he adds on a skeptical note: ``Nobody is very confident that these things are really going to work.''
Illustration: The Emerging Document Management System Architecture
The document management infrastructure of the future uses a layered architecture now common in other client/server systems. Desktop applications will talk to other clients and/or to middleware services (e.g., DEN or Microsoft's Extended MAPI DLL), which in turn will communicate with back-end services. Some of these connections will be through open APIs and others through proprietary or hard-wired links, but the result will be a diversity of choices.
Standards Efforts Aim to Ease Interoperability
