Xerox's new low-cost content management offering can help solution providers tap into hot SMB demand.

With its recent release of DocuShare Express, Xerox offers a new alternative for small and midsize businesses hungering for better content management capabilities. At the same time, the introduction gives solution providers an additional tool for cultivating the growing software and services side of the printing market.

DocuShare Express includes many of the same capabilities for storing, retrieving and sharing information found in its venerable, enterprise-oriented namesake. "Having a multifunction product (MFP) that can scan documents into your network and then using something like DocuShare to search and retrieve [information] based on the contents of those documents is just absolutely critical today for a smaller business," says Paul Gleason, Xerox's vice president of small and medium business.

At $1,800 for 10 users and 10 read-only seats, the Express version is about one-tenth the entry-level cost of the traditional product. "If you have only five or ten employees, you didn't want to buy 100 seats," the minimum required by some enterprise solutions, he adds. Xerox plans to distribute DocuShare Express through channel partners, in addition to its direct sales force.

Growing Market

Demand for electronic document management solutions is steadily growing among SMBs, as more of those companies understand the importance of maintaining better control of content, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst with CMS Watch, a content management research firm.

Despite the economic downturn, the SMB market for content management is "very healthy, partly because you can use this kind of technology to automate tasks," which can reduce workforce needs, Pelz-Sharpe says. In addition, compliance regulations are inducing SMBs to evaluate these solutions.

Gleason says the software can help solution providers further exploit SMB demand for bundled services solutions, which he calls one of the fastest growing segments of the printing and imaging market. "SMBs are seeing all these new features being built into MFPs, but if the companies don't have the back-end software, all those bells and whistles are kind of useless," Gleason says.

Bundling MFPs, content management software and managed services programs, such as Xerox PagePack, offers a package that satisfies document management needs while also controlling printing-infrastructure costs, he says.

Sales Strategies

Although many SMBs may now recognize the need for content management, a sizable number of companies still "don't know they need it," Gleason says. His advice for solution providers when speaking with these firms is to prepare a list of questions that probe the customer's current document management processes, including whether digital systems or old-fashioned filing cabinets act as the foundation. "[Solution providers] can hit a big home run by finding those small or medium businesses that haven't yet made the leap" to digital solutions, he says.

Even companies that have moved to electronic documents may be candidates for tech-refresh opportunities, thanks to regular improvements in content management software and MFPs. The key is asking them about the age of their solutions and the degree of satisfaction those products are delivering. "Someone may have bought a scanning solution two or three years ago without getting all of the character recognition, file access and retrieval capabilities available from today's packages," Gleason points out.