The Future of Documents

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.

If you want to know the answer, please check out one of my latest podcast - a chat with Ismael Ghalimi, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference, and CEO of Intalio, an open-source Business Process Platform available as Saas / on the cloud.

Ismael discusses some of his visions for Office 2.0, why the association between Xerox and Cloud Computing / Web 2.0 seems natural to me, while I digress about the panel discussion around Document 2.0, as well as some of my “visions” of the Future of Documents at the expo.

Check it out !

(you can also check out my other podcasts at this URL)

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.

Another very interesting technology from the Office 2.0 conference is reframeit. This browser extension adds a margin to any web page, allowing users to comment, leave a note, or discuss specific elements in its content. The web document becomes “social” and “collaborative” – the real Web 2.0 !

The comments can be added very simply and are kept in context - they are linked  with specific elements of the page, such as sentences or images. They are then shown across the highlighted elements – the reframeit bar provides an interesting way of power reading through document by clicking through comments, taking you to the noteworthy parts of a long document.

This cool Document 2.0 technology transposes good old paper affordances (writing in the margin of a book or document) into the digital web universe. You can keep annotations to yourself, share it with your team, or with the world – turning any web page into a real “social” medium.

Make sure to check out this funny video of how presidential candidates can also be reframed.

Microsoft announced yesterday that their next Generation of Office applications will see many of its core components translated into web-based, cloud-hosted applications. Following the path of Google Docs, Zoho docs, or even OpenOffice 3.0 (made available on the cloud by Ulteo), this web-based version of Microsoft Office will have many of the Document 2.0 affordances such as instant collaboration or online storage, but will only be available late 2009 or early 2010 (as part of its Office 14 launch).

Why wait so long? The Office 2007 applications can already be tested in a browser in Office 2007 test drive today, so it cannot be that big of a deal? My suspicion is that this time will allow Microsoft to find the right business model. But Zoho, Google and OpenOffice will have moved on…

Making your personal documents available on the cloud does not necessarily mean making them fully editable anywhere like in GoogleDocs, Zoho Docs, or myBooo. Sometimes the goal is to be able to more easily share your content with others, like Scribd.

Docstoc, “the premier online community to find and share professional documents”, sits somewhere in between. Not just a social document service, it now provides the capability to input and output documents to a personal space, while providing a very intuitive and friendly user interface.

• myDocs is the self-proclaimed “best way to store and preview and manage your documents online”. You can upload your documents in any format to your myDocs space, and edit metadata or choose them to be private. These documents can then be organized with a traditional File Explorer metaphor and a nice UI: organized in folders, listed as thumbnails or lists, opened and previewed online in DocStoc’s propietary format.  But even more importantly, myDocs also provides you the capability to retrieve the original documents, either as a download, or by email.

• DocStoc Sync allows your documents to be synced automatically between your personal computer and your myDocs space.

This is a great solution for having your personal – and shared – documents accessible anywhere, if you don’t need editing capabilities. The document format is preserved, and you can retrieve it from anywhere. And you can obviously share it with others (the only downside being that it is an opt-out rather than an opt-in: all documents are shared by default).

 Of course, I cannot talk about the Future of Documents in the cloud without mentioning GoogleDocs, which let you edit, manage, mash-up and track your documents online. I could talk about it for hours, but I’m sure my readers know it quite well already.

Probably not as widely known , but maybeeven more powerful is Zoho Docs. Zoho Docs brings together Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho show, into a comprehensive, single interface available to manage, edit and share all your documents online. You can create your own login or use your Yahoo or Google login.

But where it gets more interesting  is the fact that your documents can be versioned, shared, updated in real time. They can be labelled but also tagged – the document becomes “social”. Even more importantly, elements of a document can be included between applications. For example, you can copy a Zoho sheet into a Zoho presentation, and if the original sheet is updated, the corresponding slide will be updated. The document is moving away from that atomic container of information, really becoming this “evergreen” mash-up of document bits coming from various sources. But of course you can still import or export in more traditional formats.

Anecdotically, I found amusing that the latest version of Zoho Writer actually comes back to a page metaphor which is strongly inspired by paper. In the new version, it is possible to insert header/footers or get a “page view” which was requested by many users… Interesting paradox, since this is really legacy from the paper document!

 Although the interface might not be as cool as Sliderocket (which is Flash-based), the tight level of integration between the various applications and document formats, the supporting capabilities (sharing, tagging, online conferencing), but also the complementarity with Zoho business apps (CRM, People, Projects, invoice…) really make Zoho an excellent Document 2.0 application.