Hi Claire
To understand content management from and SAP perspective, you need to understand the variety of modules used and what their intended purposes are.
SAP DMS is a solution designed primarily for plant maintenance and the types of documents used in this environment. Typically, the documents would be documents that change (like word documents) would include things like cad drawings, procedures, policies etc. SAP DMS has versioning and the document doesn't have to link to anything. I.e. it can live as an entity of its own and the document itself is workflowed.
ArchiveLink is the recommended module for scanning solutions. It allows you to link a scanned document to a transaction in SAP. This is the recommended module for scanned documents so please do not create custom object links with SAP DMS or you will waste your time duplicating functionality already found in ArchiveLink. The reason this would be used for accounts payable as an example, is that the invoice is actually a supporting document for the transaction itself (sundry purchase or purchase order) and if the invoice is outside the tolerance, its the purchase order that has to be re-approved, not the document itself.
Scanning documents typically requires third party software, although you could scan documents and upload them individually but without third party software you won't have the ability to scan directly into SAP. This is not an issue with low volume scenarios but if you have a high volume scenario which is often the case with Accounts Payable, trying to scan and manually put in 60000 or a 100000 documents a year becomes a tiresome process. A number of vendors provide third party scanning solutions for various scenarios including Open Text, Readsoft and Kofax. Open Text is more of an enterprise solution provider so they cater for scanning into pretty much any scenario found in SAP and have solutions for a variety of customer scenarios including Employee File Management, Accounts Payable, Customer Information Management, Data Archiving etc. Readsoft and Kofax are more specialised in Accounts Payable so if you have a requirement that spans outside of just AP, its probably worth looking at something to meet those requirements so you aren't stuck with 5 different ECM solutions. If you already have an ECM solution, then you could look at individual solutions to meet the short comings of your current ECM solution.
On the issue of the SAP content server, let clarify that there is a free SAP content server and there are SAP certified content servers. Open Text they give you a certified content server of their own that adheres to ISO and government standards like DOD and Open Text is actually sold by SAP themselves off their price list. For Readsoft and Kofax, you would either have to use the SAP content server or license another third party server if you want to meet any local standards if they are required and not met by the standard SAP content server.
regards,
Athol
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