If you’ve ever worked for an organization with a legal department, you might have dealt with document comparison software at some point. You might even have heard of DeltaView from Workshare, which has been around for about a decade. Workshare’s technology is Microsoft-centric—that is, it doesn’t require your users to leave Microsoft Word as other document comparison solutions might. The ability to break down content, analyze it and its context, is the secret sauce of Workshare’s DeltaView technology, according to Brian Specter, vice president of business development at Workshare. With that technology, an organization can keep track of any file, what changed, who changed it, and use policy to prevent it being emailed or to encrypt it if it’s allowed to be emailed.  

Recently, customers of Workshare approached the company and asked not for the software, but for the APIs to integrate the document-comparison technology with other business solutions. “It's like we made a Corvette with a great engine and someone said, 'Why don't you just sell the engine?' Big professional law firms and financial firms used our software—now they're all coming back saying  'You do content analysis, why don't you crack open the engines and we'll create products internally,’” says Specter. So this month the company announced WorkshareOpen, a platform that lets ISVs and IT departments alike integrate Workshare comparison technology with other business solutions.

Say you want to encrypt email messages and content based on document analysis. Encryption products  typically don’t have content and contextual analysis. If they do, says, Specter, “it's really rudimentary. We have the most granular content analysis engines. You could use our install product if an email is going out—you could write a script and say ‘does it have these words, then quarantine or encrypt.’ You're actually proving compliance. Or let's say you've got a price list that's updated constantly. You could use our engine to fingerprint a price list, then tell the engine to run a scan after several months, ensure that the old price list is known, and write a script to go in and automate updating the price list. You could do comparisons of previous vendors’ purchase orders. You could look at financial controls and automate workflow.” He notes that Upside Software contract management software uses the comparison engine and QUMAS has licensed Workshare’s content-analysis system to analyze financial documents.

To learn more about Workshare and its WorkshareOpen platform and other products, go to http://workshare.com.