DocuWare Reviews

I find DocuWare to be a low-cost solution. It is used for specific requirements that banks and insurance companies have in the industry. There are expensive products and solutions like SharePoint, Documentum, and others. These products are heavily loaded with a lot of features, which small and medium enterprise banks, SMB banks, which cater to about say 5,000 to 20,000 users, may not require. They don't need a very big product like SharePoint, Documentum, et cetera. They need a local solution that can satisfy their requirements for storing documents and for scaling up in terms of the number of documents and users. At the same time, they need something where they can add on some new features, either workflows or forms. 

For example, let's say a bank or insurance company wants to do a KYC. They would like to capture the medical information about the client who's going to purchase insurance or open an account in a bank. With this product, you can create forms, you can have workflows and approvals, or you can upload documents and you can scan documents. There are OCR capabilities as well. DocuWare fits very well as it is cost-effective and it has a perpetual license per environment. There is a yearly support cost too. I find that product neatly fits within the requirements of SMBs. 

For all my compliance and data storage and data security needs it has helped us tremendously.

The documentation part where you can store documents of any type is very good. Whether it would be for office-related documents or videos, MP4s, or any type of documents could be stored. 

Apart from document storing, you could also store information about the document. We generally call it the metadata or index stream. Searching for documents becomes easier, and categorizing and grouping the documents becomes easier. 

One of the greatest features is the storage of documents. At the same time, the space occupied within the database is not very large as the documents are not physically stored in the database - unlike with SharePoint where things can take a lot of space. Here, the documents are stored on a storage device and the link to the document is stored in the database. It makes it a very cost-effective solution.

The OCR is very good.

For the most part, the initial setup is easy. There's good documentation.

It should have collaboration features. For example, if I upload a document and I want the document which I upload to be discussed among my colleagues and peers, I should be able to share. I'd like for us to be collaborating, discussing the document, adding to the document, et cetera. I'd like it to be possible for teams to collaboratively create the document. 

Compliance or records management could be improved. For example, if I upload a document, a legal document such as a contract, when you onboard a new customer, you would like to have that contract document stored. At the same time, it should be logged. Once a document is approved and taken by printout and sent to the customer, it should be logged. It should not be allowed to be editable; you shouldn't be able to make changes to it. For records management, it should only be accessible to some people, not everyone.

I would like to have records management features and compliance features where data could be hidden. Items such as personal data should be hidden or masked. 

I would like to have GDPR features added. 

We had some slight hiccups during the setup process. 

I've been using the solution for the past four years. 

For a company that has about 20,000 to 25,000 users or customers, I find this product quite fit and quite stable. We would need to revisit the capabilities when the data increases beyond 1 million or 10 million records or something. 

If we hit 100,000 records or customers, then I may look at the scalability of the product in terms of how good it can scale and it can support. I find they have support for vertical scaling or horizontal scaling. You could invest in more hardware. I can add in one more database that could take care of the load of the data. At the same time, I can add more web servers that could again take the load of an incoming request. They have a feature where you could increase vertically or horizontally by adding more server hardware, however, that use case needs to be checked. What we have used is only for 25,000 customer records so far. I haven't checked how they would do for 100,000 records or customers. That needs to be tested appropriately.

The support is good and quite quick. If there's a ticket at the support site, it gets resolved within the next four hours. There's community support as well. There are regular users who use and post issues and they also post resolutions to those issues. I find that quite encouraging and motivating. I prefer community support to filling out a support ticket. It's a very active community of users who post resolutions and the issues out on the community sites and you can find answers very quickly.

I've worked with Documentum and with SharePoint. Both are very hands-on. On SharePoint, I have 15 years of experience and on Documentum I've worked for 10 years. They are very heavy products with a lot of features and they could be used by small to medium to large organizations. They both offer a lot of features. 

Setting up the environment, setting up the product - including installation, configuration, and setting up the infrastructure had us facing a few issues initially. There were certain prerequisites or requirements for the software to be set up like service accounts, infrastructure, DDS. That said, the installation was quite seamless and easy. We could handle it well and had it up and running within two to three hours.

It's a straightforward process. They have good documentation in terms of outlining the setup. 

For setting it up, one infrastructure guy and one technical guy who can understand how to install, are needed. Two people are enough to set it up. For supporting it will again need two people.

I was involved in the initial setup along with the vendor.

The pricing of the solution is very good. There's no additional licensing beyond the initial payment. It's a one-time cost initially. There is a support cost which you need to pay per year.

We've been using an on-premise version of this product at our client's site.

While the current version is six, seven, or eight, I need to check back to see what version I'm using. I'm not sure if it's the latest or not.

I'd rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I would suggest this solution to companies that have a bit of a budget but who would still like to have decent support for documentation and storage of documents, and don't want to make a big investment in supporting it. It offers a very good return on investment. Companies should see returns within a few months. Within six months you can see returns typically. Small and medium-sized organizations should start with this product. Bigger companies may benefit from something a bit more robust, like SharePoint as it offers more features. 

When you grow, you can always move on to those products, however, to start with, DocuWare fits very well within most budgets.