Document as a Service – the next big thing?
Recently, I participated in the Office 2.0 conference and really had a blast. Besides the sheer “collaborative” experiment, what I saw here is the next wave of Documents – available online or offline, social and collaboratively edited, evergreen “mash-ups” of content coming from various documents… Could that be “Document as a Service?” Beyond Google, watch out for technologies like SlideRocket, Zoho Docs, myBooo or others, to be disruptive in the next few years! I’ll be monitoring those.
I also moderated a great panel discussion on Document 2.0, or the role of Documents in an Office / Entreprise 2.0. Although standards and openness will play a big role, the panel agreed that even more important are on-ramps and off-ramps to and from traditional, legacy formats. Where it got even more interesting was the discussion on long-term preservation and records management, and how to make sure your document will still be available and readable decades from now. It became clear that quite a few members of the audience wanted to see cloud computing mature before they could trust their company’s lifeblood such as contract to the cloud – not to mention potential privacy and security issues. The video of the panel will be available shortly on the Future of Documents blog, along with more on a few of these Document 2.0 technologies.
Ironically, the discussion came back multiple times to paper as being a universal medium, yet to be replaced - interesting twist- in a paperless conference!
Francois Ragnet
Manager, Smarter Document Platforms and Components
XGS / GTOD / SDI / BPS
http://www.xerox.com/thoughtleadership/