The Future of Documents

Nice initiative: test drive some of the latest Xerox Innovation  – Open Xerox is an Open Innovation space to explore Xerox technologies, interact with Xerox scientists, or even establish innovation partnerships.

Currently only one demo is available online – Natural Language Color Editing. This technology lets user use common words and phrases to change and improve color images – no need for advanced photo editing skills and tools. Nice example of making very complex technology much simpler to use and accessible, with a simpler version being part of the Xerox 7500 color printer driver.

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

There is an increasing awareness of cloud computing affordances… but also of its risks. According to this article from  FierceCIO, IT execs are increasingly aware of cloud computing services (60% of IT buyers have it on their radar screen) but also of its risks (50% of respondents have concerns about cloud computing, up from 45% in 2008).

The biggest concern is loss of control over the data – 37% in 2009 versus 28% last year. And in fact, less than 10% are currently implementing coud services. This discussion is interesting, as this is exactly some of the topics whichI raised with some of the cloud computing community during this Document 2.0 panel last year - concerns that resonated strongly with the audience.

So should you trust your documents, the lifeblood of your organization, to the cloud? Yes, I believe Document As A Service is inevitable – your document being scanned, composed, routed, stored, archived, printed or even self-updated automatically on the cloud for you. This will bring many benefits along the way such as cost, ubiquity, and processing power. But it will take a while until this becomes mainstream – and technical issues might be secondary to psychology, in fact.

Scribd, one of my favourite Document Sharing 2.0 technology (”Youtube for Documents”),  is showing a significant usage slowdown. Traffic has dropped by close to 50% since June’09 and keeps declining.

In this article, Scribd CEO invokes 3 main reasons. The first one is a summer dip which its competitors do not seem to feel: Docstoc and Issuu are still on the rise- although orders of magnitude lower still  (5 times less estimated traffic for Docstoc).

 It might have a bit to do with technology. Scribd introduced its new iPaper 2 technology recently, which improves the browsing interface significantly and should drive more volume; but at the same time Scribd’s new SEO filter might bring more relevant searches from search engines.

To me, it mostly has to do with the business model – and the content. Moving to a “pay” business model might have not attracted as many attendees as hoped. At the same time  -sadly – the most wanted content must have been copyrighted material, which is being removed and filtered out.

Let’s hope this dip is only temporary, because this sort of technology – and experimentations – are essential for the Future of Documents.

This is the topic of my last podcast interview: “How To Succeed in a “Less Paper” World: Recommendations On How To Manage Documents In All Their Changing Forms” – a pretty ambitious title and topic, but I am sure it will be useful to many of you.

You can listen to the full podcast (which is 20 minutes)- or jump to a specific section:

• How to Succeed in a Less Paper World – listen now (4 min 47 sec)
• Working with Documents in Evolving and Multiple Formats – listen now (5 min 59 sec)
• Making Documents More Effective – listen now (5 min 47sec)
• The Future of Documents – Technological Innovations – listen now (3 min 54 sec)

As I will be away two weeks, you should have more than enough time to listen to all of it

That’s the rather “surprising” idea that a Dutch government report recommended – suggesting to tax ISP subscription to fund dwindling newspapers. That report is about a month old, so I am not sure whether there has been more recent evolutions of this interesting proposal as my dutch is pretty poor these days – but you can see a Google translation of the original article there (in Dutch). Any update is more than welcome.

My first reaction was, like most, that this is a pretty crazy idea. But on second thoughts, How is that different from instituting an ISP  ”tax” for downloading MP3s, which is currently being discussed in France, and I’m sure in many other countries? In fact, the death of the newspapers is directly caused by online media, because journalism had to move – and new content (articles) are now being generated and consumed online. In the case of music, the Internet is just a medium for sharing - so why should we support that other ailing industry (except because of more powerful lobbyists) more than the newspaper industry?

More seriously, a number of industries are dying because of drastic business model shifts - caused by the Internet. Some of them are successful at reinventing themselves, some less so. In any event, such “taxes” will only allow them to survive for some time and is not available in the long term – evolution is required.

Kindle Review has two very interesting posts for anyone that is interested in ePaper and eBook / eReader technologies.

The State of ePaper lists most (if not all) of the technologies that are currently in play for next-generation eReaders. Beyond eInk’s technology, the this post lists most of the runner-ups, and compares their technology with the current champion. Whether LCD-derived technologies (Pixel Qi), Color (Bridgestone, Fujitsu), or many others, the post explains the differences and illustrates with videos, when applicable.

The State of the eReader lists  the key characteristics of eReaders (price, screen technology, usability, social aspects, and many more) and for each of those reviews the current state (”best-of-breed” products) as well as what the ideal eReader should be.

Excellent and very impressive work putting all this together and analyzing it – definitely worth reading for anyone that has interest in the future of eReaders !

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.

Even better than Erasable Paper (aka Transient Paper) would be Programmable Erasable Paper, Paper that can be programmed to self-erase after a certain period of time!

That is the promise of a new technology developed by Northwestern University. A team of researchers is leveraging the unique property of certain nanoparticles – their ability to change color based on how close they are to one another - by coating them with certain molecules (MUA, also known as aka 4-(11-mercaptoundecanoxy)azobenzene by some but not me :-)), so that they change position under UV light.

The printing process is similar to Transient Paper – beam UV light to print an image. This new technology, once well mastered, should allow the disappearance of the ink to be more “programmable” – by changing the amount of MUA coating, that speed will vary (whereas Transient Paper is a standard 16-24 hours). These nanoparticles should also provide more color options (although probably limited to shades of purple, blue and red based on this New Scientist Article).

Right now it does not have the look and feel of Real or Transient Paper (two sheets of plastic with gel in between) and the “program” speed depends, just like Transient Paper, on external conditions such as lighting and temperature. However, this is very promising technology as a replacement for paper, that could bring us one step closer to the “Less Paper Office” a and a sustainable use of paper.