Novell To Ship Products Based On DMA Standards

Commits support for new Document Management Alliance

San Francisco, Calif.-- April 11, 1995 --Novell, Inc. today demonstrated its commitment to the new Document Management Alliance (DMA) by announcing it will ship both network and document management products based on DMA standards and specifications. Novell is playing an active role in DMA to provide customers using NetWare and SoftSolutions (Novell's document management system) with a robust networking infrastructure for enterprise-wide document management.

The newly formed DMA, announced today at the AIIM Conference, is an organized task force under the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM). The mission of DMA is to deliver industry specifications which will provide universal interoperability among all document management applications, services and repositories. DMA members declared their intentions to provide the DMA specifications to other document management vendors, developers, resellers and corporate users by July 1995.

"The end-user community has made it clear that document management is an area of critical importance," said Alvin Tedjamulia, vice president of technology, Novell Applications Group. "Novell has been actively involved in the development of the Document Enabled Networking (DEN) specification and will continue with support the new DMA alliance. Our NetWare and SoftSolutions customers will benefit from gains in productivity by being able to find, capture, use and share documents over NetWare with increased ease and speed."

DMA will define an enterprise-wide document management specification for library services, as well as a middleware-layer specification, allowing users to access and search for documents between SoftSolutions and other document management systems and flat file repositories, network operating systems, file servers, and potentially any other defined document management service.

As a comprehensive document management system, SoftSolutions functions across multiple platforms, operating systems and networks to meet organizations' unique document management needs. SoftSolutions features both document profile and full-text searching so users can quickly locate and retrieve the information they need, even across a wide-area network. Support of DMA specifications will allow SoftSolutions to extend its searching capabilities to documents controlled by competitive document management systems and other information repositories.

DMA is the result of a convergence of the DEN and Shamrock Document Management Coalition initiatives, both of which were developing separate document management standards. IBM Corp. and Saros Corp. introduced Shamrock in February 1994, and Novell, Inc. and Xerox Corp. introduced DEN in May 1994. The two groups share similar goals and together represent over 35 member companies who have been actively involved in the development of DEN and Shamrock.