The Future of Documents

Very interesting move, and a major step for Microsoft: the software giant announced yesterday that it will enhance its Office line of products with native support for competing formats.

Microsoft will add native support for Open Document Format (ODF ) 1.1, Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5 and PDF/A, as well as their own XML Paper Specification (XPS). This support will start with Office 2007 SP2, and will be implemented directly in the next version of Office, codenamed Office 14. Microsoft will also join the OASIS and ISO working froups working on ODF.

Interesting to see how Microsoft have moved away from their proprietary document formats, which were previously considered as their “crown jewels”, and now focus their innovation efforts on the applications themselves. 

More surprising though, is the fact that Office 2007 will not support OOXML, Microsoft’s own competing format for ODF, which they recently “fast-tracked” through ISO approval.

In any event, this is great news for the Future of Documents, as this is a major step towards one open document format for easy interchange between applications.

Excellent Webcast from Gartner on how the electronic workplace and moving to electronic content management and “basic content services” strategy can help you get greener… while improving your business efficiency.

Mark Gilbert, Research VP at Gartner, and Patricia Calkins, take us through a very interesting presentation. Key learnings are that leveraging scanning, eForms or electronic documents, to reduce paper usage… sounds familiar ?

Very good report published by IDC on Xerox Global Services (XGS) strategy.

One of the key messages is the importance of innovation in Xerox’s strategy for the Future - good to hear IDC resonates with that !

Early this week occured a great event at Xerox PARC: an open house saw many journalists invited for a peek preview at some of the Xerox innovation in support of the Future of Documents, but also on Green technologies.

Here are two excellent videos on the topic:

• Latest development from legendary lab, on CNET TV.
• Xerox: more than just of a printer company, on ABC.

For those of you that prefer reading, here are a few sources:

•  Xerox’s Research Arm Now a Business, Execs Say - on PC World.
• Getting innovation out of the lab at Xerox by Fortune Magazine.
• A look inside Xerox PARC - onExtreme Tech.
• Xerox Innovation that Benefits the Workplace, Healthcare, and the Environment - by Design Taxi.
• Inside Innovation at Xerox, from whattheythink.com.
• Xerox and PARC on comeback trail with Cleantech and other technologies, by SiliconValleyWatcher.
• Inside Xerox Parc 2008, by IEEE spectrum online.

It’s always good to see great innovation on very focused topics (whether 3D visualisation of documents or reusable paper) is getting such excellent coverage. 

While browsing the Digital Preservation Coalition site, I found this other interesting recent report on long term preservation, written by my Xerox colleague Rob Buckley for DPC.

 Indeed, records management and long-term archiving need to support documents in various formats - good old electronic or paper “office” documents, but also images or multimedia.

As suggested in “JPEG 2000: A Practical Digital Preservation Standard ?” , JPEG 2000 is a very good option to combine very high quality, high compression, and openness - therefore a good choice for long-term preservation of image documents.

And of course, I’m always glad to see colleagues involved in shaping the Future of Documents.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has just published a report on digital preservation, which states that “PDF should be used to preserve information for the future”. This is an important step for the Future of Document - whether for records management, long-term archival, or other forms of preservation, it is important to choose a format that will make today’s archive documents readable and accessible a few decades  from now (or even later).

 The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) was established in 2001 to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base.

 If you remember my blog on XML or PDF-A for archiving, this is fully in line with what I have been advocating for - you need to make sure whatever digital format you choose will still be accessible or queryable in a few decades - and there’s nothing like a stable, standard format, with long-term support commitment.

However, it is true that PDF is just a generic container, and will not contain the “semantic” information that a specialized XML would carry, and which will make your document “queryable” in the future (be aware, though, that general-purpose XML “standards” such as OOXML or ODF probably won’t carry much more semantic information than PDF…). However, the schema for querying your document will be vastly different from today’s, if at all supported. So, for the time being, I would agree PDF/A is your safest bet.

I highly recommend reading the actual DPC report (”Preserving the Data Explosion: Using PDF“) which provides detailed history, concrete tips and useful resources and links (including for specific verticals). My only builds would be common sense: embed as much information as possible in your PDF while complying with the standard (e.g. original hi-res image with text for a paper scan, full-text information for native electronic documents, add as much meta-data as possible etc…) and put a plan in place for preserving your files…

The “less paper office” is becoming a popular topic, even beyond the corporate world - See here CNN’s coverage on the topic. Although quite simplified, this view is very similar to the one which is exposed in the Less Paper Office White Paper.

An interesting article from ContentWrangler describes how Document Classification techniques, such as those that are regularly discussed in that blog, can be applied to adding intelligence and structure to Legal documents.

Although a bit “salesy” this article (originally written by A2iA, a leading Advanced Document Recognition company) shows how technologies such as Document Classification, Intelligent Data Extraction (including handwriting) can help the Legal market, but more generally any paper-intensive content management system.

It has been a few years since mankind started to realize how scarce and precious natural resources were, and what impact our activities, however insignificant, could have on the environment. This is especially true of document activities, with recent examples such as estimates of the “Paper Universe” or Xerox’s Carbon Footprint Calculator made available to estimate your print fleet’s impact on the environment.

But mankind is now starting to realize that even digital, “virtual” information has a cost and impact, as we see first attempts to evaluate its footprint. IDC and EMC are at the forefront of these activities, with the Digital Footprint Calculator.

For those of you that are familiar with my blog, you might remember my first post on the topic and the humongous estimate of the Digital Universe; This report and estimate has been revised, and is actually higher than expected - 281 exabytes in 2007, due to grow to 1800 exabytes.

In fact, less than half of that activity is created by human activities (documents, pictures, phone calls, …). The rest constitutes a “digital shadow”, surveillance photos, logs, journals, backups, etc…

The report is available online at this URL, and more interesting resources such as videos and a copy of the Digital Footprint Calculator can be found here.

Scary, huh ?

See this interesting article on News.com on how research derived from printer research can be applied to clean tech and sustainability, e.g. to purify water or to create extremely efficient solar panels. Worth reading !