Esker Upgrades Content Management System

Published: March 22, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Esker last week unveiled a new version of its content management system, DeliveryWare, that features a host of new features and capabilities, including a new Document Manager interface, improved management of inbound and outbound faxes, a new "WatchDog" monitoring component, integration with Esker's mail and fax "on-demand" services, and new sales order processing capabilities for SAP enterprise environments.

The new sales order processing for SAP tops the list of new features in DeliveryWare 4.0. With this new feature, an organization can capture and input into SAP any sales order, regardless of whether it was received via e-mail, fax, or by scanning a physical document into the system with OCR. Organizations benefit by eliminating manual document processing and accelerating the "order-to-cash" cycle, the French company says.

The availability of the DeliveryWare environment should also be boosted through two new features, including Esker on Demand and the WatchDog. With Esker on Demand, the company is providing services to ensure the delivery of all critical business correspondence, including via fax, email, SMS, and physical mail, even if the customer's IT environment is taken off-line for some reason. However, any downtime will first have to get past the WatchDog, which Esker bills as a DeliveryWare monitoring component that can also take action, such as restarting a failed component of the Windows-based application. New failover capabilities were also added to the fax server component with this release.

Finally there's a new Document Manager (formerly Esker Web Interface) where users interact with the DeliveryWare environment. This Microsoft .NET-based interface has been entirely redesigned, the company says, and boasts new capabilities in the areas of audit trails, out-of-office management, better queue management, customizable list views, a new validation interface, and a new teaching mode that can help DeliveryWare "learn" specific details about a customer's implementation of the product, such as the placement on a document of a total of a sales order.