Palantir release software designed to assist companies control their electronic documents

Document Management software is heavily hyped for a very good reason: it works. It is one of the few IT expenditures that have been proven to have a real and major impact on cutting costs and improving productivity. However, in South Africa, choice has been limited for some time between a rock and a hard place. Feature-rich but hugely expensive international products have been matched against more reasonable but normally unreliable, insecure and poorly supported local systems.

Many of these systems are difficult to use, and apply major constraints on how your documents are processed. Others are difficult to integrate with external systems, limiting their utility and driving up their total cost of ownership. It is sadly far too common for document management systems to be bypassed and unused; or used as simple file stores.

Ease of use is all too often overlooked in document management systems, which is a great pity, since this simple feature eases the deployment of such systems and also increases the likelihood that they are used productively in the organisation.

Too many document management systems force you to organise your documents into folders; a technique which quickly becomes difficult to control once the number of documents rises into the thousands and beyond. Consider the Internet itself as an example; when it first began, web directories were the most common way of finding web pages, clicking from category to category until you found the page you needed. Nowadays, search is the dominant form of finding documents on the Web, and it should be for your documents as well.

Palantirs’ Signate 2010 Document Management System is aimed at filling these holes. It is easy to use, simple to administer and it’s powerful and fast search makes finding relevant documents a breeze. Web View, High Speed Capture, Workflow and Archive are standard components out of the box. Scanning, Office Integration, and Digital Signatures are available depending on the edition selected.

Palantir (Pty) Ltd has been developing software for major South African companies since 2001. Signate 2010 is Palantirs’ first packaged software product.