Tired of e-mailing documents back and forth to co-workers and dealing with compatibility issues along with files that were too large, the Distressed Property Institute turned to Xythos on Demand, a document management site that allows customers to store any file type. At $400 to $600 a year, it's the right fit for a six-employee company that couldn't maintain a server and backup at that price.
Getting ready to address a roomful of real estate agents, Alex Charfen was in a bind. His laptop wouldn't start, and the PowerPoint slides he had prepared for the presentation were locked inside. "I was standing in front of 75 people who had paid $500 apiece to be there," said the principal of the Distressed Property Institute. "What was I going to do -- call tech support to come in and fix my computer?"
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That wasn't an option. The six-employee startup, which trains real estate agents to help financially troubled homeowners fend off foreclosure, doesn't have a dedicated computer specialist on staff. And in any case, figuring out why the computer failed would take more time than Charfen had. Thinking on his feet, he borrowed a laptop from one of the attendees. Five minutes later he was back in business, teaching real estate agents how to get lenders behind bad mortgages to settle for "short sales," where proceeds from a property sale don't cover the balance of the loan.
Charfen's PowerPoint presentation was stored on the Web in a document management site called Xythos on Demand. "All I had to do was sign in and get it," he said. He is, of course, pleased that Xythos helped him avert a crisis, but that wasn't what he had in mind when he opened his account a couple of years ago. "I was tired of e-mailing business documents back and forth to co-workers," he said. "We had a hundred different versions of files on e-mail. Some were Mac; some were PC." It was time-consuming to comb through messages, folders, and attachments to find what he was looking for. And that wasn't the only drawback of using e-mail to manage documents. The approach simply doesn't work for very large files, said Charfen, noting that some DPI presentations run 200 MB -- too big to attach to an e-mail message. Now, for $40 to $60 a month, DPI keeps its key business documents on Xythos on Demand. "We have advertising PDFs, flyers for the different courses, live files we are editing, and all of our PowerPoint presentations," said Charfen.
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Xythos on Demand and its competitors operate at the small- and midsize-business level of the market, said Forrester Research analyst Craig Le Clair. "They are about managing business content -- primarily, the output of Microsoft [Office] applications." Such offerings are very different from traditional document management or content management systems aimed at large enterprises executing complex business processes, such as handling documents associated with insurance claims, added IDC analyst Melissa Webster. Services like Xythos on Demand meet a more basic need for storing and sharing documents through a Web interface, she said. "You want to get [business documents] off the file server, off e-mail." Web-based document management avoids the problem of, "It's on the file server, someplace. I can't remember which drive or what I named the file," she said.
Xythos on Demand lets customers store any file type, including video clips. Pricing is based on how much storage capacity the customer requires and the number of users on the account, said Jim Till, Xythos chief marketing officer. Xythos also backs up customer files and stores them off-site. That aspect of the online offering is critical for DPI, Charfen said. "We know where our documents are. We know they are backed up. We know they are secure."
Xythos also makes it easy for customers to search for files within their accounts, manage file versions, and define which employees can see which files. To enable customers to share documents with colleagues outside their account, Xythos uses what it calls "tickets," which rely on SSL encryption technologies to transfer data securely, Till said.
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