Text documents are a valuable resource for virtually any enterprise and organi­za­tion, and in many cases, document processing is a highly collaborative pro­cess. Thus documents have to be stored, managed and handled with the utmost care and efficiency.
Strangely enough, while other data (most prominently customer, product, finance, and the like) have long been supported by sophisticated database and work­flow technologies, until now, documents have typically been treated as second-class citizens, where mostly ad-hoc, home-grown, and often intricate solutions are being used.
As a consequence, many of the achievements (with respect to data organization and querying, recovery, integrity and security enforcement, multi-user operation, distri­bution management, uniform tool access, and similar) are not easily avail­able for documents.