Document Management Roll-up: Kodak SharePoint Capture, Lexmark's New Strategy

It may have been Labor Day week, but still a few interesting items to note in the document management world. Kodak has just announced the release of a capture solution built on SharePoint, OpenText targets Tempo Express at legal industry, Lexmark points to a new hardware strategy and the Document Foundation joins OASIS.

Kodak’s SharePoint Capture

If anyone thought Kodak was just going to roll over and die, they were wrong. Financial difficulties aside, and selling of patents aside, Kodak is still working away. This week’s document capture release demonstrates that.

The new software, which comes with what Kodak describes as a radically simplified interface, is built using SharePoint 2010, which is going to make it attractive for all those companies that have installed SharePoint, and we know how many companies that actually is.

With Kodak’s Info Activate Solution, which is an enterprise-wide distributed system, users will be able to digitize documents and start business processes at the same time. This means that by the time you have your document in the system, the process of treating that document is already underway.

The real kicker here, though, is the SharePoint element. Because it has built Info Activate on top of SharePoint, users will also be able to use SharePoint technologies including content libraries, business connectivity services, dashboards as well as all the modules and third-party products that can be integrated into SharePoint.

The bottom line here is that with it, enterprises are being offered a new solution that can take documents into SharePoint directly and easily and start processes within SharePoint automatically. It also requires little or no training to use.

While Info Activate Solution functions inside SharePoint 2010 for tight integration, it can also provide file output for enterprises that are using other enterprise CMS platforms too, and can produce documents in pretty much any format you can think of. The new solution is available now.

OpenText’s Legal Tempo Express

Though it may have been a holiday weekend, OpenText was busy during the week. If you missed it earlier, it has released OpenText Tempo Express specifically for the legal industry.

It enables enterprises to set up a private solution of sharing and syncing content form inside the company with third-parties outside the firewall, all done through the cloud.

Tempo has been around for a while with the general release last November. That release centered on making document sharing quicker and mobile, with users also able to synchronize data across all computers and data. In March, that release was bolstered by a Tempo Express Edition. Interested in more on this?

Lexmark’s New Hardware Strategy?

If you’ve been following the MFP space at all over the past few weeks, you couldn’t but be aware that Lexmark has announced a massive shake-up that will see 1,700 jobs going worldwide as it exits the inkjet space to focus on what it considers more profitable technologies.

The announcement was greeted with some shock from a number of places, particularly Perceptive, which was acquired by the printing giant in May 2010 for US$ 280 million as Lexmark published its ambitions in the enterprise CMS and document management space.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Day Has Arrived When Kodak Exits Film

Imagine a day when Apple stops selling computers or Dunkin’ Donuts no longer offers those sweets with holes in the middle. Such a day has arrived for Kodak, which has decided to get out of the film business entirely.

On Thursday, Kodak announced it was offering for sale its traditional print-film business, as well as several other business units, to raise cash. The other businesses offer kiosks that provide prints of digital photos, industrial-grade commercial scanners used for mass processing of forms, and photos taken of roller coaster riders in the midst of their ups and downs. 

Kodak will continue its focus in the printer industry and confirmed that it will continue to build its enterprise services.

Patent Trove

The decision to sell those businesses comes as Kodak has been trying to unload its vault of more than a thousand patents, which it had estimated to be worth as much as US$ 2.6 billion. But, so far, no sales have resulted. In fact, several of the largest potential competitors — including Apple and Google — have reportedly formed a group to jointly buy some of the patents, rather than drive the prices up by bidding against each other.

The Wall Street Journal has said that, as a result of the joint bidding, prices for the patent treasure trove are in the range of US$ 250 million.

Even as it tries to sell off its patents, the company is trying to assert rights to some of them. This week, for instance, Apple decided it would appeal a bankruptcy judge’s ruling that backed Kodak, when the latter company sued Apple for asserting claims involving 10 of Kodak’s patents. The judge had ruled in favor of Kodak over two of the patents.

First Digital Camera

The 131-year-old company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January, because the film business, with which its name was all but synonymous, had crashed while digital imaging soared.

Interestingly — or, perhaps, tragically — Kodak actually invented the first digital camera in 1975, but then focused its digital imaging technology on high-end markets, rather than on consumer and regular professional markets.

The company also pushed into other, non-camera digital imaging areas, such as the release of the Photo CD in 1991 and a line of digital scanners. In 2001, it released an EasyShare line of consumer digital cameras, but, by that time, competition was fierce in the market.

In 2007, it sold its healthy medical imaging business for US$ 2.35 billion, in order to focus on consumers. By 2008, the digital camera market itself was declining, as the camera phone became popular. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com