The Future of Documents

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.

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…

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).