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SSA13: Document management winner

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6th Nov 2013
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SSA13: Document management winner

The race for the document management prize in the 2013 Software Satisfaction Awards included a couple of interesting new names, but the ultimate prize was contested by two previous winners.

The table below presents the results based on a percentage score calculated across four ratings for ease of use, functionality, support and value for money, plus a component based on users’ willingness to recommend their software to others.

Document management winner: Spindle Professional (90%)

Shortlisted:

  • V1 (68%)
  • IRIS OpenSpace (44%)
  • Logical Office (32%)
  • INVU (24%)
  • Lindenhouse (24%)

While most of the other contenders came from the practice side of the profession, Spindle Professional was originally designed as an add-on for accounting systems such as Sage 50 Accounts, but now supports a whole range of financial and ERP systems. V1 has a very similar design profile, but as part of the Advanced Computer Software, it is more commonly found in larger organisations.

Spindle topped the category for ease of use and according to Draycir’s Robert Ball this is one of the product’s key characteristics. “One of the things about software is that the easier it is to use, the harder it is to build,” he said.

Like the tax and practice software categories, document management remains primarily a desktop-driven software market. In terms of market share, IRIS is the leading supplier of specialist practice tools with its client/server IRIS Accountancy Suite.

But in document management, IRIS is the disruptive newcomer, particularly since it launched its cloud-based OpenSpace portal in September 2012 with a free offer of up to 2GB. Ironically, OpenSpace did not get the highest ratings for value for money, but performed very respectably for ease of use and functionality.

A word about the figures and shortlists

To prevent suppliers with very small market shares prevailing unfairly over those with much larger user numbers in our survey, the Software Satisfaction Award shortlists are compiled using a threshold of half the category average. For document management, this means that a supplier had to get 14 ratings (3.5% of the total sample) to be considered for the shortlist.

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