The Future of Documents

We’ve had a great Document 2.0 panel discussion at the Office 2.0 conference. Noone really knew what to expect, but I think it ended up coming out great - it was almost too short. After a “warm” up period, the room participation was great, and we just could not stop the discussion. I will post a video recording of this session as soon as it becomes available.

I was joined by Ed Chi (PARC), Mitch Grasso (SlideRocket), Jason Harrop (Plutext), Gregg Johnson (SalesForce.com), Luis Sala (Alfresco) and David Terrar (WordFrame) for a lively discussion on the role of Documents in Office and Entreprise 2.0.

If needed, this confirmed that documents still has a very strong role to play in Entreprise 2.0. All participants agreed the essence of the Document 2.0 will be different - moving away from an atomic container of information to an aggregation of evergreen content, capable of self-updating itself, available online and offline, collaboratively edited. Although standards and openness will play a big role, the panel agreed that what is even more important are onramps and offramps to and from traditional, legacy formats.

Where it got even more interesting was the discussion on long-term preservation and records management, and making sure the document will still be available and readable decades from now. It became clear that part of the audience wanted to see cloud computing mature before they could trust their company’s lifeblood such as contract to the cloud.

Ironically, the discussion came back multiple times to paper as being a universal medium, yet to be replaced - interesting twist in a paperless conference!

OpenText, a leading provider of ECM software, will acquire Captaris for $131 million.

This will nicely complement OpenText’s capabilities with capture technologies (image and text recognition), which they did not have previously, as well as fax ingestion technologies (RightFax).

Some analysts are however wondering whether OpenText might get a bit of an “acquisition indigestion”. OpenText has acquired a few smaller companies earlier this year, but Captaris is also digesting its own acquisition of Oce Document Technologies and its Dokustar product range.

Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:

• Tag: o208
• Google Apps Account:  http://www.google.com/a/office20.com/

• Office 2.0 Blog Feed:  feeds.feedburner.com/office20
• Clearspace Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/o208
• Twitter Feed: twitter.com/o208
• Video Broadcast: Veodia

I’ll try to record the Document 2.0 panel and make it available. Should be fun !

As part of the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Document 2.0 on Thursday. That should be great!

I’ll be joined be panelists Mitch Grasso (SlideRocket), Jason Harrop (Plutext), Gregg Johnson (Salesforce.com), Luis Sala (Alfresco), and David Terrar (WordFrame), who will bring their unique viewpoints on the role of the Document in Office and Entreprise 2.0, and comment on Information Overload.

After a brief introduction on the “scope” of the discussion (including a small animation that I’m sure you’ll like — I won’t say more), I’ll let them give them their views on many aspects of Document 2.0, such as:

• the role of documents in Office 2.0 (why should you care?),
• Standards for Document 2.0,
• Document 2.0 and Information Overload,
• Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0,
• The role of paper in Document 2.0,
• And many other interesting topics…

This discussion is going to be awesome. Looking forward to it!

Maybe you can join us Thursday, September 4, 2008, 3:30PM to 4:15PM in the Conservatory (4th floor) of the St Regis Hotel in San Francisco?

Back from vacation, and ready for the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco September 3-5 ! I’ll end up moderating my own panel on Document 2.0 - looking forward to see you there !

 Although it might be a bit late, see those two posts from the events organizer -This is a lot about creating a sense of community, so please register (or even become a sponsor!) if you are interested in the topics of Office 2.0 and Document 2.0.

Also, small start-ups in that space can join the Office 2.0 launchpad to draw interest from VCs.

 Looking forward to meet some of my readers there !

I’ll have the unique opportunity to speak at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco early September.

Most of my blogging over the next few weeks will occur there - some of it might be repeats of some of this blog’s posts, but I hope there will also be interesting cross-fertilization with other conference members. Feel free to follow me there !

ePaper and eBooks are, as you know, one of my favorite blogging topics in the Future of Documents, as a potential substitute to Paper in certain arenas. However, the technology still needs to progress further before it can be even more broadly embraced.

One such area for improvement is the ability to render color. A few prototypes of color ePaper have been shown in the past, but it has been announced that they would be commercialized shortly: A Fujitsu unit should debut a color e-Paper device in Autumn.

If based on the Flepia concept, it will have 4096 colors and XGA resolution. Contrast hopefully will have improved over the 2007 prototype, but it will be interesting to see whether it improves readability and adoption of e-Readers as a “Less Paper” office device.

One of the recurrent questions in my blog is : how big is the Document Universe, whether paper or digital ? Mankind now has the Paper Universe (somewhat) under control, and we are moving towards the “Less Paper Office“. The Digital Universe, on the contrary, is still growing at an incredible pace.

A subset of this Digital Universe is the web, this huge collection of readily available documents. Google posted its own estimate for the number of “pages” on the Internet: at least a trillion pages, increasing by several billions a day. 

Although it is not as obvious an impact on our environment as paper consumption, we need to put a leash on this information explosion. The impact on the environment is not cut trees or transportation, but that information needs to be stored, accessible through high speed networks, and indexed / searched.

 Not to mention the time wasted by knowledge workers finding relevant (or often irrelevant…) information. Some estimate that Google, one of the best indexing engine, only has 40 billion pages indexed. That’s a needle in the haystack… yet search is stillextremely difficult!

Hopefully semantic web and documents will help make sense of that data.

We all know print devices have a strong impact on the environment. Not so broadly known is the fact that scanning and running better business processes,  is also a way to get “greener” and more sustainable - in the mortgage industry and elsewhere.

From ”The wastes of paper processing” or ”8 steps to help you quit” to “confess your paper addiction“, Quit Paper” provides a very ironic viewpoint on optimizing business processes and how this can help you “go green”. It even includes a ”green calculator” for your business processes (for what it’s worth) !

optimizing your document processes will help you get greener. Definitely worth a visit.

How much longer until I have to go to PAA (Paper Addict Anonymous) ?

ePaper is slowly making it into our daily lives. Even magazines, where paper has traditionally had a “high value add” (glossy, full color, unusual formats), are testing this replacement to paper. Esquire magazine will have a special edition in September, with an ePaper front cover.

 Looking forward to the results of this very interesting experiment…. although this is not quite the sustainable and “green” usage that ePaper is usually associated with. I suspect many of 100,000 front covers, along with the miniaturized batteries that power them, will be thrown away after their 90 days lifetime, rather than being used to deliver new content.