Put to the Test: Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 6.0Put to the Test: Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 6.0

As a provider of enterprise content management (ECM) functionality, Xythos clearly stands apart. For starters, the company focuses on "basic content services" and does not claim to compete against the likes of IBM, EMC or Open Text in terms of functionality and breadth. Secondly, Xythos offers an unashamedly conventional approach to document management based on Web-based access to file folders.

Xythos has provided Web-based file management and basic document management software since 1999, and its original WebFile Server product remains at the core of both the Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite (EDMS) and the WebFile Development Suite. EDMS 6.0, the product reviewed here, offers a highly scalable, yet low-cost alternative for document and records management, but it's not ECM and it's no longer the only low-cost alternative.

Content Management With a Difference

From a technical and architectural perspective, EDMS 6.0 runs on the principal of managing metadata in a database, with the actual content stored in file servers. This is not new or different, but the focus on partitioning content into small "document stores" and managing a large number of these stores with load balancers and Web servers is a departure from the ECM mold. In short, Xythos provides a Web-based version of traditional document/file management. Systems are easy to scale and relatively inexpensive to maintain.

A second key feature of Xythos' technical architecture is its focus on single file instancing. In practical terms, this means that only one copy of a file is stored on the system, no matter how many times or places it's referenced. This can deliver measurable benefits in terms of reduced storage and duplicate content.

EDMS 6.0 lets you structure complex filing systems for documents. In comparison with bigger, broader ECM suites, it's a limited product, but what it does, it does well. Of particular note is the records management facility, which does pretty much everything a major system would do for records management - in some cases a little more. Take, for example, the extensive reporting and auditing capabilities, and the API supporting JSR 170, the Java standard for content repository integration.

Workflow capabilities are pretty basic in EDMS 6.0, adequate for most review-and-publish routing, but of limited value in an environment that requires anything more complex. It's routing capability, hardly qualifying as workflow and well short of anything that could be described as business process management (BPM). In many usage scenarios routing is perfectly adequate for most users, so know your needs before you dismiss or choose this low-cost alternative.

Different Isn't Always Best

So why would a customer want to use Xythos, in preference to one of the broader, better-known ECM systems? The bottom line, as usual, is cost; Xythos' Enterprise Document Management Suite is much less expensive than bigger and broader competitive suites, averaging $50 per seat in a typical 2,500-seat deployment (hundreds less than most ECM suites). This in itself is appealing. However, the market is changing quickly, and products from Microsoft and Oracle also focus on delivering low-cost ECM to large numbers of users.

Even if EDMS is no longer the only low-cost alternative to a full-blow ECM suite, it's still highly competitive in education, healthcare, research and government (and in similar environments), where Xythos has deep application development experience. These markets demand solid conventional document management functionality. The irony is that in 1999, Xythos set out to offer something very different from the document management products available at the time. Today, its Web-based approach is conventional indeed.

Xythos has historically come into its own when content enabling Windows desktop applications. EDMS exploits the WebDAV (Web-based distributed authoring and versioning) protocol to enable users to access and manage documents and files within everyday applications such as Microsoft Office. This remains a strength, but with the release of Microsoft SharePoint Services 2007, this capability is now something of a commodity. Theoretically, Microsoft should be able to content-enable its applications better than anyone (though theory has historically not been the same as practice).

EDMS 6.0 remains a very developer-friendly environment (there is a separate and robust Developer Studio product) built on Java and adhering to WebDAV. Xythos also adheres to enterprise-grade standards by providing a range of out-of-the-box JSR 168-compliant portlets, and the API supports JSR 170 for cross-repository integration. There's also support for LDAP and Active Directory, single sign on and good (though not extensive) support for multilingual environments.

Is it a Viable Alternative?

Xythos marketing emphasizes cost effectiveness. This is key selling point, but it's not enough for everyone. If you need an ECM system that can support holistic management of e-mail, imaging applications, collaborative environments and Web sites, then Xythos EDMS is not the choice for you. Likewise, if you have complex workflows or need of compound document management, this product will fall short.

However, if you need to manage large volumes of conventional electronic documents with wide-ranging access rights in a highly distributed environment, then Xythos could well be the right choice. What's more, the vendor's experience in education, healthcare, research and government agency implementations has yielded document-centric business applications for all of these vertical markets. With prices ranging from $180 per seat in small installations to as little as $19 per seat in large-scale deployments (in the 50,000-seat range), the cost is, indeed, attractive, and there's even a hosted service now available. A hosted deployment serving 50 users costs about $170 per month.

* Xythos EDMS 6.0 supports J2SE and J2EE and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, IBM AIX, HP UX and Mac OS X. The system supports DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases. A typical 2,500-seat deployment averages $50 per seat.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe is a principal analyst at CMS Watch and author of "The ECM Report," due for release in April 16, 2007.