NEW YORK--June 28, 2005-- As part of a multi-year contract with Xerox Corporation, the City of Newark will be streamlining the document-intensive processes that underpin the city's business, offering residents online applications for various services and programs like public housing and assistance. In an effort to better serve constituents and streamline internal work practices, the City of Newark is moving daily business - involving paper and digital documents - online. It will rely on electronic document management processes that leverage Xerox Web-based software and advanced multifunction systems. The new document management system, which the city expects will be a model for other cities in New Jersey and the Northeast, is designed to facilitate quicker decisions and boost productivity. "The James administration is committed to keeping the City of Newark on the cutting edge of all technology to meet the demands placed on New Jersey's largest city," said Sharpe James, mayor of the City of Newark. "The new Newark Document Express system allows us to greatly enhance our paper-flow efficiency. I congratulate our Office of Management and Budget team on moving ahead with this initiative that will keep our municipal government's services and operations on the express track to quality customer service." In addition to linking about 1,500 city employees into a document management network, Xerox is overhauling key delivery processes at the city's print center. It is also improving automated check printing and making scanners and multifunction systems readily available so paper documents can be converted to electronic ones. "We discussed our vision with IT vendors but found that Xerox had a solution that fully addressed our problem. We needed an easy-to-use document management system and an end-to-end solution that integrated copying, scanning and printing," said Danny Hill, Newark's chief information officer and director of the Office of Management and Budget. "A bonus with the Xerox system is that a single-platform network replaces a hodgepodge of departmental and agency storage systems and applications that demanded increased IT staff support." The City calls its new document management system Newark Document Express, or NDEX. By Sept. 1, 12 city departments will be linked to NDEX, enabling the city's office workers to collaboratively capture, manage, publish and share electronic content. NDEX is based on Xerox DocuShare software, a secure, simple to use, Web-based enterprise document and content management application. In subsequent phases, project managers will make NDEX documents and forms available to the public; implement Verity Liquid Office, software that automatically routes forms from one DocuShare user to the next for approval and electronic signatures; and integrate DocuShare users with the city's central print shop via NowDocs' Now Print software. The system will also streamline how agendas and minutes are distributed for the city's various board and council meetings. DocuShare will help drive the distribution of the agenda and supporting materials to more than 150 internal and external recipients - decreasing the time and resources spent preparing for meetings. Based on a Xerox assessment of its workflow and document utilization, the city has purchased 26 Xerox WorkCentre Pro color and black-and-white advanced multifunction systems that copy, print, scan, fax, and e-mail, and 50 DocuMate(TM) 252 scanners. These devices will replace legacy copier systems and support scanning hardcopy documents into DocuShare. Using Xerox FreeFlow(TM) SMARTsend(TM) workflow software allows people to send scanned images to multiple destinations -- including e-mail addresses, DocuShare folders, remote printers and more -- with a single scan on a WorkCentre Pro device. Xerox will also equip the city's print shop with the Xerox DocuTech 6115 Production Publisher, the DocuColor 6060 Digital Color Press, and the Xerox 8142 Wide Format Color Printer. The Finance department will use a DocuPrint 180 MX Enterprise Printing System for check-printing capabilities. "Xerox understood and shared my vision of a unified, comprehensive and productive way to deal with the documents that make the city run," Hill said. The City of Newark is America's third oldest city. The city serves a population of 273,546 citizens in the Newark Metropolitan Area, according to the 2000 census.