Leading document management and information management vendors have announced a specification aimed at creating a software standard that allows document management systems to seamlessly integrate with desktop applications.

The specification was worked out by representatives of 14 vendors last month in Palo Alto, Calif., at the headquarters of the XSoft Division of Xerox Corp. It is expected to be ratified this month or in early July. The vendors who attended the meeting included Abode Systems, Andersen Consulting, Interleaf Inc., Documentum Inc., Oracle SoftSolutions Technology Corp., WordPerfect, New Science, Spicer America, Verity, Watermark Software, and PC DOCS Inc.

Jim Bair, senior analyst at New Science, a Gartner Group company, also attended. He said the "spirit of cooperation at the meeting was very high. The industry's finest companies sent their finest people to cooperate on integrating DMS and API technologies."

Larry Stevens of Oracle said his company's goal is "to create scalable software that manages all of an enterprise's information, including documents and messages."

Larry Warnock, director of market development for Documentum, said the Open Document Management API (ODMA) "will make a difference for users right away." He says it answers their demands for document management vendors to incorporate a call to the DMS directly through their API.