DMA Specification Approved

After nearly 2 years, the Document Management Alliance's specification for interoperability between document management systems has finally been approved. The DMA 1.0 specification has been unanimously approved by the DMA Task Force, a consortium of vendors and end users sponsored by AIIM (Silver Spring, MD). The standard, tested through three interoperability trials between February and November 1997, allows for interoperability among different vendors' document management systems. Features covered under the standard include document versioning; storage and retrieval across multiple repositories; cross-repository document searches based on document properties; folder creation and deletion, insertion and removal of folder contents, and navigation of folder hierarchies across multiple repositories. "The good news is that the DMA has succeeded in coming out with a viable specification that addresses a need that is almost as pressing today as it was 2 years ago," according to analysts from

Delphi Group (Boston). "The bad news is that in the interim, many users have sought alternative means of solving the problem or have simply lost interest in the DMA." The success of the new standard will be measured "in user demand, not just in vendor head-nodding," according to Delphi.