The Future of Documents

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.

Pretty interesting vision presented by Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems on ZDNET news.

What does it have to do with the Future of Documents? Well, I think Cloud Computing is one of the next frontiers for electronic Documents (as you might remember from blogging on events such as Office 2.0 last year). Cloud Computing will provide the infrastructure for processing, routing, storing documents in the not so distant future. But to me, this infrastructure will support my own vision of Document 3.0: this will be a ”Mash-up” of multiple sources,  evergreen (capable of retrieving more up to date information or new relevant information, self-validating (or self-retiring), self-repurposing to meet a specific reader’s interest and reading device. Far off for sure, but we need to prepare the future!

Microsoft is finally introducing an online, cloud-based version of its Microsoft Office products, as annonced during their Office 2010 Worldwide Partner conference.

These Web Apps, including Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and One Note, will be free, but might not be fully featured.

Microsoft is quite late in the Document 2.0 game, compared to Web-based document editing pioneers like Google (for Google Docs) or (lesser known but arguably more powerful) Zoho Docs - to mention only a few mainstream players. Even OpenOffice 3.0 has been available online for quite a few months (on the Ulteo cloud computing infrastructure. Microsoft ensures cross-browser compatibility, and could have a few cards to play through a tight integration with its desktop software and its Azure infrastructure – wait and see.

If you want to know the answer, please check out one of my latest podcast - a chat with Ismael Ghalimi, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference, and CEO of Intalio, an open-source Business Process Platform available as Saas / on the cloud.

Ismael discusses some of his visions for Office 2.0, why the association between Xerox and Cloud Computing / Web 2.0 seems natural to me, while I digress about the panel discussion around Document 2.0, as well as some of my “visions” of the Future of Documents at the expo.

Check it out !

(you can also check out my other podcasts at this URL)

Interesting article from the Economist on the paperless office – on its way at last? 

One of the justifications for this transition are generational changes and Generation Y college kids entering active life with their “digital life” habits,  and replacing older generations with their paper habits.  Of course, advances in technology (including “cloud computing” and new document affordances, ie Document 2.0) are also a major factor in this mutation. e-Readers are not mentioned but will play a major role over the next few years.

An interesting side effect is that users demand less quantity, but more quality – “higher bright” paper, as the article calls it, are growing by 8%, along with color printing.

A second article: ” Technological Comebacks – not dead, just resting ” gives more precise numbers on the decline of paper usage by US workers. It should be noted that this view is quite US-centric. and might not generalize well to the rest of the world. Let’s bear in mind that the US, with 5% of the world population, represent 30% of the world paper consumption, so should lead the way to the Less Paper Office.

Practices are quite different in emerging countries especially BRIC, where paper continues to grow, if not explode. But for how long?

Making your personal documents available on the cloud does not necessarily mean making them fully editable anywhere like in GoogleDocs, Zoho Docs, or myBooo. Sometimes the goal is to be able to more easily share your content with others, like Scribd.

Docstoc, “the premier online community to find and share professional documents”, sits somewhere in between. Not just a social document service, it now provides the capability to input and output documents to a personal space, while providing a very intuitive and friendly user interface.

• myDocs is the self-proclaimed “best way to store and preview and manage your documents online”. You can upload your documents in any format to your myDocs space, and edit metadata or choose them to be private. These documents can then be organized with a traditional File Explorer metaphor and a nice UI: organized in folders, listed as thumbnails or lists, opened and previewed online in DocStoc’s propietary format.  But even more importantly, myDocs also provides you the capability to retrieve the original documents, either as a download, or by email.

• DocStoc Sync allows your documents to be synced automatically between your personal computer and your myDocs space.

This is a great solution for having your personal – and shared – documents accessible anywhere, if you don’t need editing capabilities. The document format is preserved, and you can retrieve it from anywhere. And you can obviously share it with others (the only downside being that it is an opt-out rather than an opt-in: all documents are shared by default).

A nice feature of Zoho Docs is the fact that it provides an API and enables other applications to use its own applications. One such application is myBooo – a new “mobile desktop” which lets you store, create and synchronize documents on the fly, and have all that accessible from any browser.

MyBooo is actually much more than just a Document  sharing application. It is a virtual desktop, accessible from your favorite browser, with a very cool UI. But the nice thing is, your documents are actually stored on “the cloud” and can be edited from anywhere in the world where you have a browser. That desktop provides you access to most of your favorite applications, directly in the browser: mail, IM, browser, Document apps, calendar, search engines, games, and much more.

You can import some of your existing documents from your real desktop, modify them with Zoho Docs, then export your files back to your real desktop. You can then also share documents with other myBooo users, from anywhere you have a browser. Even better, soon will be able to sync some of your local directories with your myBooo virtual desktop with Booosync.Where it gets even more interesting is the fact that myBooo provides you access from your documents from mobile devices, or upload some of these documents from your mobile phone. Any smartphone with a browser provides you a web interface for retrieving your documents, but a dedicated iPhone application (called iBoooDrive) will shortly be available.

myBooo is still in beta test (Firefox recommended), but it definitely looks very promising!

 Of course, I cannot talk about the Future of Documents in the cloud without mentioning GoogleDocs, which let you edit, manage, mash-up and track your documents online. I could talk about it for hours, but I’m sure my readers know it quite well already.

Probably not as widely known , but maybeeven more powerful is Zoho Docs. Zoho Docs brings together Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho show, into a comprehensive, single interface available to manage, edit and share all your documents online. You can create your own login or use your Yahoo or Google login.

But where it gets more interesting  is the fact that your documents can be versioned, shared, updated in real time. They can be labelled but also tagged – the document becomes “social”. Even more importantly, elements of a document can be included between applications. For example, you can copy a Zoho sheet into a Zoho presentation, and if the original sheet is updated, the corresponding slide will be updated. The document is moving away from that atomic container of information, really becoming this “evergreen” mash-up of document bits coming from various sources. But of course you can still import or export in more traditional formats.

Anecdotically, I found amusing that the latest version of Zoho Writer actually comes back to a page metaphor which is strongly inspired by paper. In the new version, it is possible to insert header/footers or get a “page view” which was requested by many users… Interesting paradox, since this is really legacy from the paper document!

 Although the interface might not be as cool as Sliderocket (which is Flash-based), the tight level of integration between the various applications and document formats, the supporting capabilities (sharing, tagging, online conferencing), but also the complementarity with Zoho business apps (CRM, People, Projects, invoice…) really make Zoho an excellent Document 2.0 application.