WhetStone brings imaging to GroupWise 5

E-mail, once a valuable but limited one-trick pony, is now a promising vehicle for a number of companies trying to hitch their wagons to what is probably the second most widely used office application. FrontOffice recently debuted, adding document management to Microsoft Exchange.

Domino from Lotus brings document management and workflow to Lotus Notes, and Netscape SuiteSpot has entered the space with its own E-mail and document management features.

Enter WhetStone Technologies (Park City, UT) with a new trick--image-enabling GroupWise 5 from Novell (Park City, UT, http://www.novell.com). GroupWise imaging solution pack (ISP) provides GroupWise 5 users with image scanning, editing and conversion, and it allows users to share and collaborate on images the same way they do with text documents, E-mails and faxes. They can store images in shared folders and do searches on image profiles of annotations within images stored in the GroupWise system.

GroupWise ISP uses Xerox's PerfectScan API to enter and manipulate document images into the GroupWise system. Image files, such as color photos or newspaper articles, can be viewed from within the GroupWise system. When the document or image is opened, GroupWise launches the GroupWise ISP viewer and displays the image in tabular format where it can be annotated, sent through OCR'd, faxed, edited or stored. GroupWise ISP ships in June and is offered at suggested retail price of $79.