The Future of Documents

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

Just wrapped up a webcast on Money Saving Content Management Strategies. This started as a very interesting discussion with Brian Lincoln and other members of the Docushare team, on how ECM could contribute to some of the core topics covered in my blog – going “Less Paper”, being green, improving productivity – all that while cutting costs.

In this webcast, Brian covers present – working – strategies for Content Management, while I talk about some of the Future of Document Technologies that will have a strong effect – all that in 24 minutes.

In the Attachments tab, you’ll be able to (re)discover a video of Transient Paper, showing how it can be imaged using UV light, vanishes over a few hours, and can be re-printed over and over again.

Enjoy!

More consolidation in the ECM (Entreprise Content Management) space – OpenText announced last week that they would acquire Vignette for 310 M$. OpenText is one of the last remaining proprietary vendors in the CMS space.

Although that deal is interesting financially given Vignette’s current financial troubles, analysts question the strategy behind it. there is not currently a strategy or plan to integrate the two overlapping technologies, and ECM and Web Content Management (WCM) technologies will remain distinct technologies for OpenText. Not to mention the integration nightmares, caused by very heterogeneous technologies.

Less than a year after acquiring Captaris, OpenText seems to not suffer from “acquisition indigestion” apparently. This market, overall, is undergoing significant consolidation, as Autonomy and Interwoven recently showed. Is that the only way to survive?

Interesting feedback on the  AIIM panel discussion on the paperless office . Ron Miller from Fierce Content Management describes his attendance of this panel discussion, hosted by Docushare, at the occasion of the launch of the Docushare Virtual Filing Cabinet.

The discussion mainly went along an interesting divide between content in two areas: coming from outside (customers, providers, 3rd parties) and internal content. As the discussion went, participants admitted the first area cannot be turned to “paperless” overnight – it needs to take into account the various parties’ constraints. I would add that in most cases, it all comes down to the lowest common denominator for communication between the various parties – which often ends up being paper.

Going paperless is easier in house – at least in theory. However, just like at my Document 2.0 at Office 2.0 panel, a few speakers admitted they still liked their hard copy after the ice broke. And, as the author concludes, moving your paper documents into digital format is only part of the problem. After your documents are scanned, , move the digital version of your documents around, index them - not to mention storage requirements. That’s what ECM is about. However, ECM does not take care of the extraction of all the structured content you have on those documents, for categorisation, indexing, or intelligent analysis…

 Anyway, lots of great debate around our favourite medium – which we love to hate.

 The distinction in particular

Hosted by Docushare

Are you drowning in paper documents? Want to go paperless, or at least “less paper”, and move all of these documents into the electronic world? But you want to make sure these documents are safely stored on a central ECM system with all of its benefits: indexing, metadata, backed up, and securely accessible 24hrs a day?

Docushare Virtual Filing Cabinet can help you. This new offering combines archival software, a high-speed scanner, and a new Docushare 6.5 version. But, probably even more important, it includes some consulting to help you get started, analyse your existing file cabinet organization, and set up your electronic system.

Besides the easy and secure access and distribution, this sort of technology helps you go green, save on costs, and claim storage space back.

Sounds interesting? For more information, check this short video out by clicking the image below.

Autonomy announced last week that it will acquire Interwoven for 775 M$ in cash.

Very promising synergy between a company providing state-of-the art document and content understanding technologies, and a leader in Electronic Content Management (ECM). This will allow more automatic tagging and content analysis of your documents, directly as they enter your ECM system. Furthermore, this is a very good way for Autonomy to reinforce its position into the exploding eDiscovery space.

This is a synergy that only a few companies can provide today. Xerox very well positioned for this,  with its Litigation Services branch, its Docushare ECM solution, possibly combined in the future with some of its unique “meaning extraction” technologies such as Factspotter.