Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Docubase Ports Document Management Suite to iSeries Linux

Docubase Systems has ported a portion of its document imaging suite to run on the iSeries. Last month, the Florida company announced that the server component of its Docubase Enterprise Suite has been certified to run on the iSeries inside a Linux partition. The company, which is a subsidiary of a French company, made the move with the help from its partner, DalTech International, an iSeries reseller.

The Docubase Enterprise Suite is a six-piece collection of applications that work together to capture, index, and archive paper-based and electronic documents for later retrieval. The suite includes a central server-based module and various add-ons, plug-ins, and adjunct offerings that extend the core archival functions with character recognition, "screen capture" of emulation windows, computer output to laser disk (COLD), integrated workflow, browser-based clients, and integration with applications through an API toolkit.

The central server-based module that Docubase ported to iSeries Linux is called DB-Document Manager. (The DB-Document Manager module is still referred to by its old name, Docubase.Form, on the Docubase Web site.) DB-Document Manager is the module that processes, stores, and retrieves the documents that the Docubase software has captured; basically, it's the brains of the system. By porting this component to the iSeries Linux environment, DB-Document Manager gains access to an array of iSeries I/O resources, including disk, tape, DVDs, Ethernet connections, COLD devices--anything that a traditional OS/400 application would have access to.

DB-Document Manager traditionally has run on Windows and Unix servers. While most Docubase customers have chosen to run the software on less expensive Intel hardware, the more demanding users run the software on AIX, HP-UX, and other Unix environments, says Bob Larrivee, a sales and marketing representative with Docubase.

Docubase decided to port the software to iSeries Linux to enable its customers to make better use of their OS/400 servers, Larrivee says. One of the Docubase components, called DBLink, lets users scrape data from legacy emulation screens and make it available to the Docubase repository. There are a good number of Docubase customers using DBLink to scrape 5250 screens for data, so the company decided to make their lives easier by running the core server module directly on the OS/400 server. "The advantage to the user is it allows them to utilize the hardware they bought, as opposed to buying an NT server," Larrivee says.

Docubase, which is owned by the French company Groupe Cegedim, has been headquartered in Clearwater, Florida, since moving across the Atlantic in 1996. The company counts thousands of customers, and tens of thousands of end users, for its imaging system, and most of them are in Europe. Larrivee says it has customers in Europe using the iSeries Linux version of DB-Document Manager.

Helping Docubase with the port to iSeries Linux and the certification effort was DalTech International, a Dallas, Texas, IBM and Hewlett-Packard reseller. Larrivee says DB-Document Manager will run on both major Linux environments supported by the iSeries, which are Red Hat and SuSE.

Pricing for a multi-user implementation of DB-Document Manager for an iSeries Linux environment will typically start around $18,000 to $20,000, Larrivee says. By comparison, a single-user "stand-alone" version of DB-Document Manager running on a Windows server would start around $4,500, he says. For more information, visit the Docubase Web site at www.docubase.net or that of its primary reseller, DalTech, at www.daltech.com.