The Future of Documents

An interesting IDC report on How Generation Y works with paper and Electronic Documents in the Office.

Among the key conclusions: this workforce under 30 years old still see paper continue to play a critical role in many everyday business processes. Although they do not see paper disappearing overnight, they are moving fast towards the Less Paper office - although this is driven more by their “green” and environmental consciousness than technology savviness.

Other interesting insights include how document length or formats impact the preferred document form, how Gen Y perceives faxing and scanning, and where electronic and paper have the respondents’ preference.

Although quite focused on hardcopy vendors, this report is the first one of a very promising IDC series on “The Future of Print”, and can be ordered here.

Interesting article on the New Yorker about the Future of Newspaper - how many newspapers (paper but also electronic) are going bankrupt, because of decreasing advertising revenue.

Beyond the traditional print vs digital divide, the overall future of newspapers looks pretty grim. As the author points out: “many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net”. Most newspapers suffer from the “Not invented here” syndrome – no liink to other articles or provides.

Still, according to the author, the real problem for newspapers, isn’t the Internet, but the readers. They want access to everything, now, and for free. “That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product. [...] But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.”

Anyway, maybe lessons for all of us in the traditional print business – learn how to make the best of the Internet and new technologies, and surf the wave rather than fight against it.

Very interesting podcast from John Kelly, President of Xerox Global Services North America and Thought Leader on Document Outsourcing.

In this podcast, John discusses some of the changes he has noticed in the outsourcing business in the recent economic turmoils, including new ways of reducing costs,  observations on the impact of the economic crisis on different sectors, and finally a few words of advice for listeners who are starting or continuing their journey towards outsourcing in these troubled times.

One of the major barriers to the adoption of e-Paper is its weight and “clunkiness” – current e-Readers are rigid, flat, and quite heavy, because they require heavy electronics to address the individual “pixels” on the e-Paper surface. But that might change soon.

Hewlett-Packard and the Flexible Display Centre in Arizona demonstrated recently a new type of “soft”, unbreakable flexible display that could make e-paper displays much more affordable and drive mass adoption.

This new production process called SAIL (Self-Aligned Inprint Lithography) is a low cost process which is very similar to printing on plastic. SAIL allows the low-cost, environmentally-friendly (up to 90% reduction of materials required compared to traditional displays) roll-to-roll printing of Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) arrays on a substrate. The prototype used E-Ink’s e-Paper technology for the actual display.

First applications of this technology might appear in around 3 years, but should be targeted at military or mobile phone applications initially, not e-Readers. Too bad!

Talking about webinars… If you missed my original webcast (sorry for my European readers, that was quite late…), or just want to listen to it again, The Future of Document webinar is now available for replay.

Just go to the lobby page, register (or login with your email if you have already registered), then click “Click here to enter the webcast” at the top of the page. Not only will you be able to view the webcast, but also individually access the videos which I presented during the webinar.

Enjoy!

Despite the Paperless Office promises, one of the reasons paper is still around is its affordances – UI, look and feel, and ease of navigation and manipulation.

None of the attempts at making “virtual copies” of documents in virtual worlds have been very successful so far. Although the information that could be provided could be nearly as good or even augmented from a physical document or book, the interaction remained relatively poor.

But User Interfaces are getting much “richer” – think about multi-touch on your iPod or Tablet PC, or even better take a look at that video:

With such rich interfaces and the “quality” and real-life feeling (not to mention augmented capabilities) that can be delivered in current 3D worlds, I would not be surprised if Virtual Documents and Books could become very usable in a few years.

A very interesting post  on “Why meaning extraction?” examines the recent evolutions in search and document mining – in that case, on intelligence reports.

It takes a look back at a few areas where search engines have progressed over the last 10 years. This includes increasing the size of the index database, expanding the search semantically (actually this is more precisely query expansion, because the semantic level is limited to synonymy at best), parsing the query with Natural Language Processing, and providing an interactive UI to massage and refine the results. The author claims that none of these techniques have brought any significant improvements in the search experience over the last few years.

Although I do not necessarily agree that none of these technologies have helped, I strongly concur that in isolation they are not enough – more efficient search comes with a mix of search improvements, user interface, analytics tool and good UI built to address specific needs for specific verticals. But it’s time to  ”Stop searching, start finding”, as the author points out.

“Search engines must evolve to have in-depth understanding of the searched material.  Beyond search, categorization, faceted navigation, and entity extraction, which we all understand by this point, the future of search is meaning extraction” - also known as semantic documents, one of the promises of Document 2.0 (or beyond).

I’ll be running a live Webcast on the Future of Documents on December 3rd. The lobby page is now up and running - you need to register there.

I’m really excited about it! It will be the first time I share insights in an online presentation – quite different from the usual show and tell in front of the audience, but I will endeavour to make it as rich as possible owing to using Web (and Document) 2.0 technologies.

Some of my early readers might remember one of my blog posts on a possible new, free market distribution of documents. This was inspired by Radiohead’s experiment to distribute their album, In Rainbows, through a pay-what-you-want (if anything?) download model, and its success.

After intense buzz during the launch, Radiohead was quite silent onthe outcome of the experiment, leading many to believe it was a failure – giving the band’s experiment the 59th position in “Fortune’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business“.

But, one year after the experiment, the band finally communicated  the results of the experiment - which is, in fact, a massive success. Indeed, over 1.75 million physical albums were sold through this business model, and over 3 million total… to be compared with “Hail to the Thief”’s (their previous album) couple hundred thousands.

Why not try that model for Documents? Paulo Coelho, the author of the Alchemist, has already tried it for books, but this trend might grow in the future, and inspire new content distribution models for reports, novels, or other content sources.

One of the significant news for the Future of Documents last week was of course the launch of Open Office 3.0 which was very successful – if not too successful !

It’s free, works on all major platforms – Linux, Solaris, Mac, and of course Windows. Many improvements, including better image, table, and note management,  an improved User Interface, makes it well worth trying. It can read its main competitor’s (Microsoft 2007) file formats. It can also output documents into Office 2003 files – although you probably want to stick to using ODF, which is the future XML standard for documents, and should ensure long-term portability and preservation of your native electronic documents.

But what’s even more interesting is that it can also be made available through your browser – Ulteo, a new Open Source project that delivers software applications to web browsers, gives full access to OpenOffice 3.0 in a browser, and adds its virtual desktop  and on-and offline syncing capabilities!

Definitely worth the test – provided your corporate firewall is not blocking access…