The Future of Documents

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.

I blogged about this a year or so back, but thanks to Deepak for pointing it out: the Codex Sinaiticus (’Sinai Book’), the world’s oldest Christian Bible, and one of the most important books in the world, is finally online.

This book marked the transition between papyrus-based codices and parchment-based codices, and was written in the 4th Century. It is also the oldest substantial book to survive antiquity.

The actual documents are housed in four separate institutions across the world:  the British Library, University Library in Leipzig, National Library in St Petersburg, and Saint Catherine’s Monastery. Internet technologies make the pages available in a nice, Web 2.0 User Interface. Worth checking out!

Interesting Wired Article on the Future of Reading book.

The author’s view of the future of reading books resonates strongly with my view of the Future of Documents: in order to move away from paper in many usages, the electronic document needs to provide affordances than the “legacy” format (paper here) does not provide. This includes annotation, but more importantly the capability of allowing these annotations to be shared with some of your colleagues through “Web 2.0″ channels, as is provided by technologies such as WebNotes or reframeit.

As the author concludes: “Taking them digital will unlock their real value: the readers.”

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.

XPLOR Document University closed yesterday. Overall, this was a very good show. The most valuable part to me was the education and the conferences – lots of very good information and technical content – but the networking and the expo was great too. My only minus would be that the vast majority of the attendees came from the traditional “print” business, and electronic documents were not yet the main interest of a few of them.

However, most of the attendees agreed attendance was a bit low – I was lucky to have 50-60 people in my session though. The economy does not help of course, but the attendance had been declining over the last few years – the same event could gather thousands of people a few years back.

The question on everyone’s lips was how to get back the past glory of XPLOR. Personally, I think the conference and association content need to accelerate the change they have initiated- and comprehend the full document lifecycle in the entreprise, including scanning, content management and workflows. The future of customer communication print is multi-channel, and needs to include the inbound correspondence and other paper-bound intensive processes.

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.

Well, maybe not quite 2009, but things are moving.

On the one hand, A few more details on Plastic Logic’s much anticipated e-Reader can be found in this video. It will support most office documents, subscription content, and advertising, with a form factor and a price which should make competitive against current players and “ready for mass adoption”. Unfortunately, its launch is now delayed to early 2010.

On the other hand though, Prime View International (PVI) announced that it would start mass production of flexible electrophotoretic displays (EPDs) in the second quarter of this year, and color EPDs by the end of the year. To be confirmed…

Xerox’s sustainability calculator was cited among the Green-tech trends for 2008 on the Sustainable IT blog. Excellent visibility for this tool which lets you estimate the energy, greenhouse gases, and solid waste generated by your current printer fleet, but also test “optimized scenarii” and monitor how effective they can be.

The “Less Paper” effect or potential reduction in paper consumption is not yet measured in the tool – but this kind of environmental benefits are better measured in a more thorough assessment.

As we getting ready for the Less Paper office, it is important to “know the enemy” – paper.

The Environmental Paper Network has a very good report on Paper and the state of its industry: types of paper, all about recycling, cleaner production and responsible fiber sourcing.

By reading this very interesting document, you’ll discover that over 40% of the industrial wood pulp goes into paper production (growing), paper production is among the top toxic releasing industries, or how printing and writing paper is being used, or what difference a recycled paper makes from a virgin paper.

An avalanche of very interesting facts – definitely worth reading. But please, do not print the 77 pages, even though it makes it much easier to read

The Web Document is becoming mainstream. The number of unique scribd visitors tripled between January and December 2008 - culminating at 23 million unique visitors in November 2008. This makes scribd pop up at rank 16 in ComScore’s top 20 social media sites. Although 10 times less than blogger.com or Facebook, this is still quite an impressive achievement. Competing services such as Docstoc or Issuu attract significantly less visitors, but are still growing.

It is a snowball effect – as more users contribute content, the service becomes much more relevant to everyone and easier to find. I was pleasantly surprised, recently, to see quite scribd documents come up among the top results for my Google searches.

This confirms an emerging trend in the Future of Documents: the social, web document is becoming a significant alternative to paper. Many alternatives are required in Document 2.0 to move towards the Less Paper Office while covering all possible use case scenarios for the document. The web document is one of them, and is becoming a very credible alternative for sharing documents in a view-only, easy to share format, complementary to virtual desktops or online office document applications.