The Future of Documents

It sounds like my enthusiasm for the Xerox-ACS acquisition was not as universally shared as I candidly hoped. Lots of reactions about it, some good, some not so much.

In any event, I am not a specialist by far, but if you want to know more about it, you can can check out this very good post: “The ACS-Xerox deal – was it a smart move?”. Excellent and very convincing material (at least to me!).

The part I like the most is a commentary from the Wall Street Journal: “Xerox hopes to marry its document technologies with ACS’s paper-heavy processing work. t can use its overseas presence to expand ACS. Xerox also is paying a reasonable price of about 13.5 times consensus fiscal 2010 earnings, well below the 29 times that Dell is paying for Perot. Investors may be overreacting. It’s not a smooth and easy road, but I am confident it will pay off.

Now that’s a big deal: Xerox is getting full speed into the Business Process Outsourcing business. This should give Xerox much more credibility and much better ownership of the downstream Business Outsourcing – a natural extension of our core competency in intelligent paper document processing, and moving up the value chain through this synergistic partnership.

That’s consistent with a number of consolidations,  such as HP-EDS last year, or Dell annoucing it would acquire Perot systems last week.

This is also a great news for the Future of Documents: firstly, because some of the technologies I have been working on are instrumental in that partnership; and secondly, because that Xerox will now have a path-to-the-sea for some of the more advanced technologies. 

As for the details, read on the announcements by MarketWatch, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, or your favorite online business magazine.

It is not yet mainstream, but e-Signature is certainly a way to realize the “Less Paper Office” – avoid printing in paper those documents that previously had to for legal reasons. This is particularly true in the mortgage industry, a very paper-intensive process, which is slowly moving towards e-signature.

Among recent news, EchoSign reached one million users for e-signatures earlier this month. EchoSign’s web-based document electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. A basic version of that service is available for free.

This sounds relatively small, but this little Palo-Alto based company got significant momentum from partnering with Salesforce and Zoho, among others. One of its main competitors, Docusign, claims close to 42 million electronic signatures. As these can typically be pretty long documents, that can save quite a few trees.

This interesting post: “The New Way to Work: The Future of Document Management Software“  caught my attention. Although very high-level and generic, the vision remains quite interesting – and very much in sync with my own.

This enticed me to learn more about Huddle.net, which I did not know much about yet. Huddle is a cloud-based Document Management Software, with a strong focus on collaboration. It is in the vein of some of the online tools that I reported on during my Office 2.0 coverage last year,  but with an interesting twist which might make it appealing for companies with distributed teams.

Its uploading and online editing (Word and Excel) capabilities are relatively standard, but its “project dashboard”, workflow capabilities,  and audit trail of documents, make it sound like a very good tool for small companies with intensive document processing and interaction needs. What does not hurt, too, is the included support for online collaboration, including phone and web conferencing, IM, and an interesting “Whiteboard”.

Probably an interesting player to watch in that Document 2.0 space.

Hands on experience of someone that really tried going paperless – which proves to not be so easy, but can work if you are really motivated.

Stephen Shankland at CNET’s DeepTech tells us about the barriers, tips, but also satisfactions of going paperless – or more precisely, less paper. Among the lessons learnt:

• Going paperless is a significant undertaking and should not be taken lightly, start small then grow gradually; 
• It needs a well-proven standard for your electronic archives, but also  good practices for longer-term preservation such as backup.
• At the same time, start moving some of your day-forward incoming paper flow to full digital (e.g. electronic bank statements)
• Some of these physical artifacts just cannot be totally replaced by a digital version.

The only area where I don’t fully agree with Stephen is on how much indexing is required when creating these document archives. Stephen assumes (rightly or wrongly) that search techniques will improve over time and make initial indexing or categorizaton obsolete, allowing easy search through that e-clutter. I would not be so sure about that, so I personally use searchable PDFs for all of my paper documents, and try to add metadata, tags or categorization to help later retrieval based on the content. Even though 10 years from now OCR might be close to error-proof, Finding these “statement” images in the first place might be a challenge without prior indexing – and, even worse, searching the content of pictures might still be a challenge.

Anyway, it’s always good to hear and learn from someone that went through a Near Paperless Experience

Orange, the french telecom operator, and french editor Robert Laffont announced today the first “hyperbook” - adding affordances of the Web, such as interactivity, multimedia, and collaboration, to hardcopy books. An english version of the article seems to be available here.

Titled “Le sens des choses” (”The meaning of things”), the hardcopy version of that book from Jacques Attali will include 2-D barcodes in the margin, which can be scanned from a mobile phone to access additional content such as audio and video, or discuss online some of this book’s content.

Is making paper documents more interactive a good strategy to counter e-books? Probably more of a complement, but an experiment well worth watching. The book will go on sale on September 14th.

Business Process Automation solutions provider Kofax is reinforcing its invoice processing capabilities through the acquisition of 170 Systems, a leading provider of financial process automation software. The transaction should amount to a total of $32.9 M in cash.

Headquartered in Boston, 170 Systems has around 140 employees, and a very large customer base including Bank of Montreal, BT, France Telecom, Sandia National Labs, Verizon Wireless, and over 150 other organizations. Its flagship product, the MarkView Financial Suite, is a proven workflow solution for invoice processing and accounts payables. 170 Systems was already using Kofax, but also EMC Captiva, as onramp for paper invoices.

It sounds like a very good move for Kofax, as it should considerably expand its Accounts Payable Offering (mostly paper-based today) with much stronger e-Invoicing capabilities. But it should also allow the UK-based company to move downstream in their customer’s business process – allowing more advanced workflow capabilities and direct integration into customer ERP systems, through 170 Systems’ SAP and Oracle’ integration.

After the Esquire magazine experiment last year, where they put an miniature e-paper display in magazines, here is something even crazier – Entertainment Weekly will embed a Pepsi video advertisement in selected issues of their magazine on Septenber 18th.

It will not quite look like paper though: the tiny video display is 2.7 mm thick, has a  320×240 resolution, and one hour of running time. Not quite the Harry Potter newspaper yet…

But hopefully, color ePaper will make this easier – and better integrated. Sipix, a unit of AU Optronics,  is scheduled to ship its first color ePaper modules in 2010. PVI, the current market leader, is not expected to have color products for 3 years.

Riding the “green” wave, ePaper is gaining a lot of momentum, despite its current limitations. The global market for e-paper products should grow by up to a CAGR of 40% over the next nine years. From just over a billion today, the market is expected to grow to $9.6 billion (77 million units) according to one study, or even $41 billion in 2018 according to another.

But are eReaders that green? I am not so sure, given that their lifetime is probably very short. I’d be interested in finding studies on the full carbon footprint for eReaders.

Fierce Content Management published an interesting interview with David Smith, Vice President for Xerox Docushare, on ECM, less paper (aka”paper-light”) - and where Xerox is playing within that space.

Interesting insight on current Xerox directions, intersection between Document Management / ECM and Entreprise 2.0, and the increasing role of scanning, workflows and ECM in our daily life – all topics that my readers should be pretty familiar with by now, and a good opportunity to replay my joint webinar on the topic:  ”Money Saving Content Management Strategies“.

Vacation are great, but you sometimes miss important news like this one.

Canon recently announced the acquisition of 17% of IRIS group SA. IRIS is a well known player in Intelligent Document Recognition, but also to some extent in Entreprise Content Management. Canon and IRIS had started their relationship around IRIS’s latest scanning software suite, which is used for electronic archiving and compression.

This is another example of a traditional hardware (print and scan-) company moving into document management solutions, and enabling a tighter connection between their Multi-Function Devices / scanners and their customer’s paper-intensive workflows. The next logical step might be, just like Xerox Global Services, to strengthen its Services offering beyond simple Managed Print Services, into Pofessional Document and Business Process Services, including generic Imaging and Document Management Services, or more specialized services such as Client Acquisition and Lifecycle Management, Finance and Administration Services, or Mortgage Services.

It is interesting to compare with Océ, who moved the opposite direction by selling its Océ Document Technologies to Captaris about 1.5 years back.

So, which model is right – Océ moving away, or Xerox, and gradually Canon, moving into Document Management and Business Process Services? Time will tell – I have an idea, but I might be biased