Overview

Overview

The Document Management Alliance (DMA) is an AIIM Task Force with the charter to develop a uniform programming model enabling enterprise-wide interoperability among document-oriented application programs and document management systems (DM systems) from different vendors. The primary product of DMA is a specification for an integration model and interfaces by which applications and services from a rich variety of sources can integrate into a document-management solution. The members of DMA include a diverse group of DMS vendor companies, end user companies, governmental agencies, industry analysts and consultants, and industry press.

The DMA Vision

The DMA Task Force and the DMA architecture exist because of a shared vision among users and vendors of document management systems. The DMA vision is best described as a software architecture that allows unification of all document management systems and document-aware application programs in an enterprise, regardless of vendor, hardware platform, or software platform, into one seamless document management system spanning the enterprise. This vision rewards users with uniform access to any document, any format, anywhere across an enterprise, despite the existence of "islands of information" -- that is, despite separate departmental document management systems and document-aware applications from different vendors which do not work together in the absence of the unifying architecture specified by DMA.

The DMA vision is realized in this specification as an object-oriented programming framework that document management vendors, integrators, and developers can use to provide their customers and users with the following capabilities:

Uniform access to any document, anywhere in an enterprise
Self-describing systems and documents for ease of setup and configuration
Scalable document management solutions from legacy systems to fully-featured, state-of-the-art document management systems
Expanded collaboration opportunities
High-level integration of services and applications

Uniform Access to Documents Anywhere

"Uniformity of access" means an end-user need only learn a single application to access all documents in the enterprise. DMA frees an end-user from having to install, configure, master, and maintain a complex set of application programs from all the vendors of document management systems in an enterprise. DMA's unifying programming model allows a single application program to work with all DMA-compliant systems. End-users with DMA-enabled document management systems can perform the following actions:

Build and use document management systems that provide uniformity of access and integration with other systems over a wide range of scales, from desktop to department to enterprise and beyond to federations of systems among strategically-linked organizations.
Locate and use electronic documents, wherever they are and in whatever form they exist, while still operating local document-management systems designed around specific areas of practice and strategic business applications. Other organizations can access the local document-management environment for appropriate collaborative shared-use of documents.
Retrieve a format appropriate for the user's machine. DMA provides the mechanism to track the document format, so that the appropriate application can be launched on retrieval, if available. If a user lacks the software package used to create the document originally, DMA allows a document management system to maintain additional "renditions" of the same material in alternate formats that are compatible with the user's installed software.
Retain access to the document legacy of an enterprise over time. Documents remain accessible and usable in the face of technology substitutions, organizational and application growth, and changes of scale, technology, and distribution of document management in the enterprise, so long as the systems used are DMA-compliant.
Freely choose best of breed DMA-compliant document management products with the assurance they will all work together. Innovations in document-centered applications, in document management systems and in document services can be rapidly deployed and integrated into enterprise information systems. (New capabilities can be smoothly introduced and quickly made effective.)

Self-describing Systems and Documents

DMA systems are self-describing in a way that captures the essential information about the systems and the electronic documents they manage. DMA provides for run-time discovery of systems, classes of documents, properties of those documents, and supported search operators for each property. DMA applications require no advance knowledge of classes of documents, properties, or search capabilities within each DM system. This approach simplifies the setup, configuration, maintenance, and overall complexity of these applications, which reduces the total cost of ownership per user.

DMA also provides a run-time "capabilities" mechanism for determining the set of optional DMA features offered by a particular DM system. This mechanism allows DMA applications to adjust automatically at run-time to the different feature sets offered by each DM system in an enterprise, thereby promoting interoperability and flexibility in the mix of DM products in an enterprise.

Scalable Solutions

DMA defines a scalable and flexible Application Programming Interface (API) that accommodates a simple property database or file-system-based storage repository all the way up to high-end, fully-featured document management systems. The scalability and flexibility of the API allow it to be used by vendors, integrators, or developers to integrate legacy DM systems of varying capabilities with state of the art DMA-compliant DM systems and DMA applications in a uniform and cohesive enterprise-wide DM system. Therefore, DMA can be used to protect and leverage the user's existing DM system investment and ease the conversion from legacy DM systems to new DMA-compliant DM systems.

Expanded Collaboration Opportunities

As the recent explosion in use of the World Wide Web has shown, users want to share and manipulate documents regardless of their location. DMA expands the opportunities for collaboration by bridging the "islands of information" and allowing users to access documents across previously separate organizations.

Higher-Level Integration of Services and Applications

Enterprise applications involve more than documents, even when documents are the principal carrier of the information being used. Document management systems are increasingly being used as services by which applications are constructed for support of enterprise activities and strategic applications. The integration of workflow-management systems with document-management systems is typical of this trend. The value of document-management systems is extended by being able to offer them as building blocks for extensive, specialized applications, just as database management systems serve as building blocks for on-line transaction-processing applications and other processes.

DMA systems will support increased integration into higher-level applications in three ways:

DMA's uniform application interface makes consistent access to document collections available to both document-management applications and applications that incorporate document access in their implementations.
DMA provides a service integration model that allows additional services to be incorporated and accessed, where appropriate, by delivery in the guise of document management services.
DMA's interface model allows for regulated introduction of extensions to basic DMA interfaces, so that the DMA model does not inhibit introduction of specialized functionality.

The DMA Approach

The DMA specification establishes an open software framework in which developers and customers can configure document management services and repositories that inter-operate across different platforms and systems.

DMA Concepts

DMA provides a global document system in which users gain access to collections of documents using a uniform model. (See the DMA Uniform Access Model figure below.)

DMA is analogous to a library and other systems having well-defined methods for storing and finding information.. The access provided through a DMA system is similar to using a library system in the following ways:

A library system consists of multiple libraries, both public and private. A DMA System is like a library system, made up of one or more DMA document spaces.
A DMA document space is similar to a single library or collection. The features and capabilities of a library may be described in a printed guide available to its patrons. Similarly, clients of a document space can find out its features and capabilities from descriptive information associated with the document space.

DMA document version ("DocVersion") objects are like the items that can be borrowed from the library (books, videos, CDs, audiotapes, etc.).
The materials in the library have properties -- attributes that describe the media and features of the item (e.g. creation tool, format, date created, last modification date, author, etc.). DMA calls these attributes of documents property values.
Materials can be checked out from a library, which keeps tracks of who checked out each item and when. DMA defines a mechanism for a document space to track this kind of "document management state information" for each document.
A particular book may be available from a library in more than one rendering, for instance in printed form as well as audio form. A DMA document can similarly have multiple Rendition objects, for example one in HTML format and another in PDF format.
In order to locate something, the user must first decide which library or collection (document space) is most likely to contain that item, then search a card catalog or computer catalog. DMA provides a powerful search capability for not only searching a single document space, but also across multiple document spaces in a System in a single query.
The library user (DMA client) requests information from the librarian (DMA service provider). A document space implementation that responds to client requests is the prime example of a DMA service provider.
The librarian (service provider) controls access to the library (security) and can find materials based on a variety of search criteria.

Figure-1 DMA Uniform Access Model

DMA Document Spaces

Within the document system, document spaces are the DMA representation of document collections. The DMA System provides a mechanism for an application to determine which spaces are available and what their capabilities are.

DMA Document Version Objects

Documents within the document space are described by properties (characteristics) of each individual document such as the application that was used to create the document, when the document was last accessed, etc.

Unification of Heterogeneous Document Management Systems

Because DMA systems provide common points of access to documents throughout an enterprise, users will be able to find and use documents created in most common office applications. Through a DMA system, users can have transparent, reliable, and uniform access to documents, regardless of their location or the form in which they exist. DMA defines the mechanism for a DM application to issue a single query to multiple DMA document collections to find documents that match that query.

DMA Application Architecture

The DMA application architecture is composed of three required elements:

DMA client applications
DMA middleware
DMA service providers

The figure below shows each of these elements.

DMA client applications interact with the DMA middleware and DMA system providers using the DMA Application Programming Interface (API). All user interactions and user interfaces are provided by the DMA client applications. These applications can be implemented in a variety of programming languages. The applications may combine other complementary document management specifications such as ODMA, the higher-level Open Document Management Interface, with DMA to achieve the benefits of both.

The DMA middleware provides the two primary functions of a DMA System, namely 1) cross-document space query coordination and 2) registration of DMA service providers so that they can be made available to client applications. The middleware, which gets its name from its position in the middle between DMA clients and service providers, interacts with the service providers using the same DMA API used by DMA clients, with the addition of a small set of methods used by service providers to register themselves with the middleware.

The DMA service providers typically provide the services of a single library service or document management repository, termed a "document space" in DMA. In this figure, the Library Services and Value Added Services are DMA service providers. The Library Services represent specialized DMA-compliant document repositories from document management vendors. Examples of value added services defined by DMA 1.0 are merged scope plug-in, text ordering service elements and OIID parser service elements.

Figure 2 Application Architecture Utilizing DMA

Provision for Uniformity and Unification

DMA supports unification of document-management systems in three ways:

The uniformity in which document-management features are delivered to applications through the DMA model enables DMA-compliant front-end applications to access any DMA-compliant service element, regardless of differences in supplier, location, or capabilities.
The uniformity in which document-management features are supplied to the DMA system by service providers enables a DMA-compliant service provider to offer itself for access to any number of front-end applications.
The DMA coordination layer (middleware) provides additional value by facilitating unification as well as uniformity. DMA systems that provide coordinated searching allow different document collections to be accessed as if unified in a single collection. The unification mechanism allows exploration of combined collections without the front-end application or the user having to be concerned about differences in implementations of the collections.

DMA Allows Evolution

Document-management systems that are integrated under DMA are not restricted to DMA-compliant access alone. For example, an existing document-management system (designed as a standalone system) can be integrated under DMA in evolutionary steps:

Existing applications can continue to operate with the DM system as they do presently.
The DM system can be upgraded to offer access to its collection as if it is a DMA-compliant service provider. This service provider need not offer all the functions of the standalone system. It is common to simply provide for DMA-compliant access in order to support wider use and interchange of documents, but rely on the existing applications for more-complex operations, such as enforcement of policies, change control and so on.
The DM system's integrated front end can be expanded to not only access and manage material of the integrated system, it can incorporate the DMA interface to access DMA-compliant collections from other sources.
Combinations of the two steps can be taken for the same integrated document-management system. (The capabilities offered and exploited this way can be grown over time.)

The evolution of DMA capabilities and DMA-compliant components

The DMA specification provides a component based drop-in model for introduction of new document collections and new DM components and capabilities. In addition, the model allows for document-management systems of different levels of capability and performance to coexist in a single DMA system. The goal of the model is to allow document-management systems to be highly scaleable and for individual document-management systems to evolve over time in response to customer requirements (and the capability of underlying technology). The DMA model establishes basic operations and common elements of all DMA-compliant document-management systems. Many of the elements are elective in ways that can vary between collections and can vary over time as document-management software is upgraded and reconfigured. In addition, there is provision for customization beyond the specific provisions of DMA, but in a way that is compatible with DMA and will not interfere with the evolution of the DMA specification.