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.

An interesting article in the New York Times on Xerox and the Paperless / “Less Paper” Office. 

Technologies mentioned include Extensible Interface Platform, or the direct access to workflows from the Multi-Function Device, Xerox Mortgage Services, Xerox Litigation Services. The only advanced research project mentioned is “Intelligent Redaction“, a PARC technology which controls access to sensitive information.

Also interesting is the mention that Xerox has joined the Information Overload Research Group, an organization in charge of “reducing information pollution” and lists things like feeds, voice mail, social networks, interruptions, blogs, Web 2.0 services and search engines as “polluters”.