2009 Review of Document Storage Systems

From the June 2009 Issue

Just like the white snow melting into green grass, our perennial review of
document storage and document management solutions has become a key milestone
in the transition from winter to spring and summer. What a great time of year!
This also means we have completed yet another year of development efforts by
the vendor community. The solutions they develop to help you take your accounting
and tax practice “digital,” have become even more effective. So
our mission in this review and the companion review of document management systems
to be featured in the The CPA Technology Advisor in July, is to help you gain
a better perspective of what many of the leading vendors have to offer and some
of the enhancements they have made while you were busy laboring through another
productive tax season.

In these reviews we continue to face the challenge of trying to appropriately
categorize the solutions into comparable groups. That is much easier said than
done because there are so many good solutions and the depth and breadth of functionality
varies considerably. However, we have made our best attempt to provide meaningful
comparisons by separating the reviews between document “storage”
systems and document “management” systems. I’ll be the first
to admit that the line that separates them is much grayer than it is black and
white. So we’ll start by attempting to explain the differences between
the two categories.

When we talk about document storage systems, think of these as software applications
that are designed with the primary focus on managing the way you organize the
storage of your electronic documents, as well as other application files from
MS Office, Acrobat, etc. These systems are generally limited in their scope
of features, which makes them very affordable for the small firm or sole practitioner,
and better yet, quite easy to deploy and use.

In the July 2009 issue, we will review the more robust document management
solutions that are designed to fulfill the needs of the entire firm.
Document Management systems not only organize the storage of electronic documents
and files; they also provide extended functionality to integrate with tax and
accounting applications, and perhaps provide a portal component, workflow automation,
document retention and more. We’ll provide an in-depth discussion of the
features and functions of these systems next month. For now, our focus is on
the more simplistic document storage tools.

Since these document storage systems tend to differ considerably in the nature
of their functionality, we have rated them on four relatively broad attributes:
user interface, file organization/management, integration with other software
applications, and overall value based on the depth of functionality and pricing.
We have almost a dozen products in this review, so let’s get started.

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