Xythos' document management gaining government converts

I've been hearing about Xythos Software for months--a neighbor, Ed Miller, is the CEO. The company recently issued a press release that caught my attention, claiming two million users of its document and file management software. Xythos has numerous education and government customers, including major universities, NASA and the US Air Force and Navy. The security-conscious US Joint Forces Command, for example, has an installation--Cross Domain Collaborative Information Environment--with 5,000 users.

Xythos doesn't appear to be in the business of trying to boil the oceans. The products, based on the WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) open standard, don't appear to be born of the 'all things to all people' design philosophy. For any business or government agency, finding products that are both cost effective and perform a specific task without layering on extra features that add cost and complexity is not easy. Most vendors tend to allow feature creep--because engineers can't help themselves and marketers hope to gain more high-end, marquee customers and better margins--rather than improving usability or scalability.

We live and work in an era in which secure content creation, sharing and management must be baked into the fabric. Local, state or federal governments with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousand or millions of workers are looking for solutions in multiple categories that are simple to deploy; easy to use and maintain; work better than as advertised; can scale to huge numbers of users; and are low cost (not lowest cost). 

For independent evaluation of Xythos' suite, check out the comparative review by Jim Rapoza in eWeek of Ricoh's DocumentMall 8.3.2  and Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite 5.0.