Sharp, Xerox And Canon Spotlight Partnerships At AIIM/On Demand

Sharp Document Solutions Company of America, Mahwah, N.J., said it has teamed with eCopy, a Nashua, N.H.-based ISV and solution provider; Notable Solutions, a Rockville, Md.-based content-capture workflow solution provider; and Captaris, a Bellevue, Wash.-based provider of business document routing and management solutions.

Plans call for Notable's customer workflow software to be integrated into Sharp's Imager multifunction printers and for Captaris to tailor its RightFax MFP Module for Sharp's Imager products. ECopy plans to port some of its document management software to the Sharp lineup as well.

"There are people who still think of [office technology] as just another copier or device," said Bill Taylor, product manager at eCopy, which added Sharp and Toshiba to its lineup of hardware partners, which already included Canon. "We have to show them that there is so much more they can do than just copy."

Xerox introduced a new Partner Solutions Catalog, a listing of 14 technology partners with 28 solutions developed for the Xerox DocuShare platform. Under the arrangement, the Stamford, Conn.-based document technology giant and the partners formed reseller relationships, in which the VARs can blend their applications, DocuShare and Xerox printers, copiers or multifunction devices into end-to-end document and workflow solutions, said David Ferretti, director of worldwide sales for Xerox's DocuShare Business Unit. "It's a Xerox family," Ferretti said.

Canon U.S.A. said it has partnered with Ribstone Systems, Chicago, which makes software that captures and helps process documents for the legal market. Canon said the partnership brings to market the first vertical solution based on its Multifunctional Embedded Application Platform (MEAP) for its imageRUNNER multifunction devices.

The MEAP platform was created to enable the integration of third-party document management technology into Canon hardware, the Lake Success, N.Y.-based company said.

The AIIM/On Demand Conference and Expo, held this week in Philadelphia, is expected to draw about 20.000 attendees from the document technology, digital content management and IT arenas.