If you’ve been reading the reviews about Apple’s new iPad, you may have recognized a familiar theme. Reviewers spend most of their time either praising or criticizing the amount of content available through the iPad rather than the device itself. They recognize that regardless how cool the device is, content is what users really want.

We’ve been making this same point for years about document management projects. We’ve watched a good many purchasers buy granddaddy content management systems for all the bells and whistles when what their users really needed (and wanted) was more basic and far less expensive.

The truth is, most users don’t use the “shiny, sparkly” features that only add cost to those big old document management systems. Mostly, they just want to capture, store, retrieve, and share documents. The tragedy is that after the bloated purchase price and overlong, expensive implementation, the customer runs out of money for the content conversion of all the paper documents needed to populate the system!

Image API’s “Start Specific, Scale Specific” approach, backed by the most advanced .NET iCenter content management system available, lets government and business clients get what they need, when they need it. Sure, we have “bells and whistles.” But these are optional modules. Our customers can address their specific requirements in a cost effective way without restricting future growth.

Oh, and there’s plenty of money left over in the budget for scanning and indexing backfile and day-forward paper documents. Afterall, content is king.