Zoho just announced the launch of their Docs product for Android. It already existed on iPhone and iPad, and the Android version looks pretty much the same. It lets you access, search for and view documents created in online versions of Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show and Docs,and share private documents with other Zoho users. Small regret, no advanced features like editing documents from the mobile device.

Zoho is one of the smaller competitors to Google and Microsoft in the Cloud Document space. Cloud Document Access from mobile devices is a natural extension, and now Android users can have it as well.

Interesting article on Cloud Computing drawing a nice (although not really new) parallel with the evolution of the electricity industry -  from small individual factories to a “grid”, how one man revolutionized the way electricity was distributed, matching supply with demand, realizing economies of scale, and drive efficiency – what the cloud should be bringing to us all.

Although the title is about Microsoft and Bill Gates’  fears about the cloud, I personally believe that Microsoft has negotiated that turn pretty well – and is in a very good shape today.

A bit provocative, this article in PC World evokes many of the aspects that are central to the Evolution of Documents – and the disappearance of Print Media.

Encyclopedia Britannica is officially going out of the print business, yet another sign of the “Less Paper Office“. All this for very good reasons, and is good for the environment, etc… But the author points two good reasons why this might not be such a good trend.

The first point is around electronic document permanence, which is central to this blog, and I feel is still an open question – will my digital documents still be readable 5, 10 or 20 years from now? What about the old iomega zip or floppies that I don’t have a drive for anymore? Even if I still had a drive and a device driver, would the media still be readable? And if then, could I still have an application that can open those old propietary formats? But, worst of all – how can I find the document that I am looking for on one of these media?

But the second point is even more important, and although I have touched upon at times, is equally important: It has to do with “trust” in digital document content.

Paper documents (especially books), freeze facts, ideas, concepts, ideas at a given point in time, and, as such, represent our history. That allows us to learn, retrospect, avoid repeating mistakes, improve. Document 2.0  is social and collaborative, and “evergreen”. This is all great, but has risks: anyone can rewrite or edit facts, and that “snapshot” at a given point in time is usually lost.

But the truth of the matter is, paper in that historical role has mostly disappeared a long time ago: In the late 90s, Xerox researchers had observed that ““we are not headed towards offices that use less paper but rather towards offices that keep less paper”.

So we need to evolve technology in the hope that the digital media can be more long lasting. We now have open XML formats (OOXML, ODF) or PDF/A that should be more better as they are standards (although often owned and sustained by major corporations). Plus, cloud storage promises that this information can be readily available, indexed that  it remains available – but also accessible years from now.

And it’s true that for a few documents – photos, kid’s drawings, etc… nothing will replace paper.

PCWorld has had this interesting series called “30 days with…” for a while now. The latest one is “30 days with the cloud“, as seen from an end user perspective, and will compare various cloud tools over the next 30 days.

The first aspects the writer is discussing is choosing an online office productivity platform – between Google Docs, Zoho Docs and Microsoft Office 365 – a topic that I regularly blog about. Yesterday was Zoho, Google Docs was right before that, can’t wait for Office 365 and the final choice later today, then for other consumer cloud tools later this month.

I did not know these series before, but there are some interesting ones, including  30 days with the iPad, with Windows Phone 7 or Google Docs.

Microsoft often comes up with cool videos showcasing their vision of the future. The latest one, called “Productivity Future Vision” can be watched on Youtube:

As always, a very interesting and refreshing view of a possible future of technology. Although I have to admit I found this new video a bit less “visionary” than the Future Vision 2019 (produced in 2009)  that I blogged on a some time ago. Sign of times, most users now have tablet displays rather than ubiquitous displays in many different shapes or forms.

Will this vision really happen? Microsoft, having the largest R&D budget in the technology sector – is one of the few companies that can make their vision happen. Some argue the Return on their R&D investment is not always clear, but this huge company has turned out to be very successful in adopting new technologies such as Cloud Computing while maintaining or winning back their traditional business e.g. office productivity suites.  Let’s see if they can also negotiate the mobility turn, too, with Windows Phone 7 and their Nokia alliance. Now that HP/Palm is out, RIM is in a very bad shape, Apple is losing ground (and vision), and the Google-Motorola alliance might impact Android adoption, Microsoft stands better chances and could come back into the game.

Anyway, ComputerWorld article believes that this vision will really happen – and provides an interesting analysis on the video and the Office Labs too. Worth reading.

A few  interesting videos have been posted recently on Youtube, discussing one of my favorite topics: Cloud Computing. Both of them talk to the affordances of both public and private clouds, but also the security issues they bring. All these good topics that I mentioned in my White Paper on “Can you trust the Cloud?”.

The first video is a high-level conversation between John Kelly and General Hayden. Interesting viewpoint in general, I like in particular his angle on  ”security patches”.

The second one is a more down-to-earth discussion between Cisco’s Tom Gillis, VP and GM for Cisco Security Technology Business Unit, and RG Conlee, ACS VP of Information Technology. The same messages – the cloud can bring very significant cost savings (30-50%)  but security needs to be taken very seriously. And finding the right balance between public and private cloud is important.

Accessing documents from a mobile phone becomes a regular need in our modern but is not – always – easy. In particular, finding the right document can be a challenge on such a small mobile phone. Plus, that usually assumes the document is stored somewhere online, not always with the greatest security levels.

Document repositories usually rely on native HTML browsing, although there exists dedicated apps which provide richer user interfaces (e.g. Mobile Entree for Sharepoint, Sharepoint mobile extensions, etc…).

Docushare now has its own app, and it’s pretty cool. Called DocuMob, it allows remote repository browsing from iOs devices. |The user can securely access and navigate collections, perform full-text search, find, view and share content, email the original link to the document, or print. Microsoft Office documents are natively supported by Documob.

Although most of these tools are about browsing and viewing, the next frontier will be editing, and printing / scanning documents from those mobile devices.