Docsvision start - and continue

My name is Vladimir Andreev, I am one of the founders of the company “DoksVizhn” , at the moment I am its president. In this, the first for us, post, I would like to tell you about what our company is doing, and prepare a little for what our blog will be about.

It will soon be 15 years since we began to develop a product called Docsvision. During this time, Docsvision has evolved from a fairly simple development, “assembled on the knee” by two enthusiasts, to a lottery product, which is being introduced in such organizations as Sberbank, Rosneft, and the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation. Today, our company has grown to nearly a hundred people, and dedicated development, application design, technical support, and consulting services have appeared in it. We have chosen only vendor business model and, accordingly, all Docsvision implementations are carried out only by our authorized partners. At the moment, our partner network consists of more than hundreds of partners in Russia and the CIS.


People often ask me: "How did it all begin?" I will try to briefly tell in our first post.
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Idea

Like all good things in my life (and, perhaps, of every person), everything started with “white envy”. When I first started my career in the IT industry in the early 90s, life pushed me with the team of Igor Agamirzyan (the current head of the Russian Venture Company ). Then he led the development of a document management system for the Swedish Patent Office. At that time this project seemed to me a perfect fiction, it was terribly enviable to the guys who worked on this system. Thus was born the "Dream of Life" - to do something similar.

First customer

The first 5 years were spent studying the subject area and finding sources of investment. Fortunately, life has once again pushed me with a good man, Andrei Fedorov (one of the founders of Digital Design ), who supported me in this endeavor.


Andrey Fedorov (on the left) and I at the Docflow 2005 exhibition

By some incredible coincidences of circumstances, we received an order to develop a full-fledged corporate platform of electronic document management system for a very large customer, from scratch. The amount at that time seemed absolutely fantastic (if I’m not mistaken, it was about $ 15,000) and the development time seemed very long - more than 7 months, as we were naive then ... By this time we already had a team of several like-minded people - one experienced developer (co-author of one of the first books about SQL Server in Russia) and a couple of students with whom we developed prototypes of a system based on Microsoft Exchange (by the way, in the end we decided to throw out all the written code and start from scratch) and the project started .

Docsvision Birthday

These were probably the most fun 7 months in my life! During the project, our very single developer received an invitation from Microsoft and left to develop a SQL server. As a result, we had to throw out all the written code a second time. But, despite all the difficulties, exactly on December 31, 1999, the first version of Docsvision 1.0 was launched into commercial operation at as many as 16 workplaces.


The interface of one of the first versions of Docsvision

Docsvision today

Currently released version Docsvision 5.2, and now it is a powerful platform for creating various solutions for managing documents, tasks and processes. The platform contains a number of tools for creating such solutions: a set of designers, an open API for refinement. We use all these tools ourselves, and also provide to our partners and clients (partners - for free). And, as I have already said, we ourselves do not introduce our product, becoming one of the few Russian companies that have abandoned design practice in order to concentrate on producing the most convenient platform for our integrating partners. This required a tremendous effort from us to transform both our business model and the product manufacturing process. And the process has not yet come to an end, since paperless technologies are developing very quickly and more and more penetrate into our life - the directors are already signing electronic documents on tablets, and any citizen can contact the state through a website on the Internet.

By the way, according to IDC, the market for electronic document management systems (EDMS) is growing by 23% annually, with a software market growth of 15% per year.


The interface of the web client of the latest versions of Docsvision 5.2

Conclusion

Well, in conclusion, I would like to tell you why we are at Habré. It's simple: we have long wanted to share with the professional community our experience in developing a replicable product.

Who will be the authors in our blog? Programmers, business analysts, technical experts, engineers, marketers, area managers are all involved in the creation of Docsvision.

It seems to me that publications devoted to various aspects of the development of the Docsvision platform, the organization of its support and implementation will be of interest to many readers of Habr. For our part, we promise to invest our time and energy in this blog so that it is interesting, useful and alive.