Comments on: Document Manager Roundup

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:08:38 +0000

Sanjay,

I will take a look. Can you use this form to provide more information?

Best regards
-Ismael

By: Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:13:47 +0000

Good roundup. If you're considering Blinksale and Freshbooks for managing invoices for the next conference, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the new SimplifyThis.com beta. It plays in the same space, but takes a real dashboard approach compared with the others.

By: mad dog in the fog

mad dog in the fog — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:58:52 +0000

[…] Document Manager Roundup […]

By: IT|Redux

IT|Redux — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:18:44 +0000

[…] 1. DocuSign (303 votes out of 532) [Roundup] […]

By: Jason M. Lemkin

Jason M. Lemkin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:57:23 +0000

Sceptic,

Your point is an interesting one. When we started EchoSign, we would not have viewed ourselves as a Document Management solution, and today don’t primarily present ourselves as one.

Having said that, it has turned out to be the case much more than expected, at least in the functional sense of the term. The reality is at the SMB level, today, Outlook/email/public folders/etc. is probably the primary Document Management system. At the VSB level, it’s probably the only one.

Services like EchoSign create a narrow but highly relevant (and therefore valuable) DMS. In our case, for sales contracts. While not a true DMS in the traditional sense, but because it’s 100% automated, it becomes the practical day-to-day DMS for our end users regarding the documents they really care about.

We do offer a limited Archive capability to add to the document management portion of EchoSign, and while it is the least popular of our core four functions (Sign; Approve; Manage; Archive), and certainly offers only a very basic level of functionality, it has enough use to confirm that a decent subset of our base does use us for document management in a business sense, albeit to augment a very transaction-focused document workflow system.

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:00:32 +0000

Sceptic,

As mentioned in the article, the applications we reviewed fall into two separate categories. The workflow-oriented one you are referring to should not be considered as a file manager indeed. Nevertheless, I still believe that it can be considered as some form of document management. That being said, terminology is a difficult exercise, and I would rather focus on the functionality side of things.

Best regards
-Ismael

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:58:06 +0000

Ted,

Thanks for the correction. I updated the post accordingly.

Best regards
-Ismael

By: Ted Johnson

Ted Johnson — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:35:27 +0000

Just FYI, DocuSign does not require the installation of any ActiveX control as mentioned above. DocuSign is also the only solution listed which provides comprehensive transaction control, and support for UCC RA9 eVaulting, required for management of many financial instruments such as notes or leases. DocuSIgn is really aimed more at providing end-to-end e-contracting process management for companies who require signatures as a standard course of business operations.

By: Sceptic

Sceptic — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:11:12 +0000

Isn’t categorizing document signing services like EchoSign and DocuSign “document managers” a bit of a stretch? If the only criteria to qualify is that the service should cover some part of the document lifecycle, then every tagging/online storage/file backup/e-mail service out there can also justifiably claim to be a document manager.