Desert Docs Invests to Let Lenders Match Electronic Docs with Data.

When Desert Document Services Inc. announced having completing a massive XHTML forms conversion of 35,000 documents in October 2003, the news was that the conversion enabled sending data and formatted documents together electronically. The underlying story is that the DesertDocs change control system allows the company to manage and verify a billion forms changes each year.

DesertDocs provides software to manage and complete the templates lenders use to prepare closing documents for borrowers. Its Web-based system lets lenders combine information from loan applications and their DesertDocs software via an XML interface or by data entry to populate closing documents. The company's forms library boast 2,000 templates, each of which is subject to myriad change requests to comply with state and federal regulations, GSE requirements and various lender requirements.

DesertDocs stakes its reputation as a top-tier provider of Internet document providers on its ability to track and manage every change in an error-free manner. The issue that never goes away for DesertDocs and its competitors is that every change request can trigger hundreds of related changes because the document sets differ for every party and loan program in the mortgage origination process. Every change request has to be tracked and managed through multiple change channels.

With a clear mandate from its customers to move away from ad hoc changes and toward a reliable, integrated system for logging and tracking every change request, DesertDocs went looking for a cost-effective solution that could be implemented quickly. A key requirement was gaining the ability to backtrack easily to find the origin of the change request and to see quickly which forms were affected by the change. The system also had to offer ease of use by people with a wide variety of technical skills.

DesertDocs picked Computer Associates' AllFusion Harvest Change Manager for its ability to integrate the tracking process with actual file versions. "AllFusion Harvest separated itself from other products, with its integration of versioning control with the work flow process," said Desert Docs CTO Tim Underwood.

Because AllFusion offered a straightforward tool ...