Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Document 2.0 followup discussion

fragnet — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:31:10 GMT

During the panel, a number of very interesting questions were raised. where does my document end up in the cloud? Can I trust the infrastructure to hold it?

Among the topics for discussion that I believe we only scratched the surface, were:

Document 2.0 and legal / preservation constraints

Document 2.0 and Information Overload

Enterprise adoption of Document 2.0 and barriers

Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0

If there is interest, we could continue the discussion here, possibly on the Office 2.0 panel page. Please reply on this message (unless we can use some kind of voting capability?) to let me know.

- Francois

Document 2.0 panel

fragnet — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:51:49 GMT

What a great panel we've had! 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.

If needed, this confirmed that documents still has a very strong role to play in Office 2.0. However, the essence of the Document 2.0 will be different — it will move away from this atomic container of information to this aggregation of evergreen content, capable of self-updating themselves, available online and offline. Although standards and openness will play a big role, the panel agreed that what is most important are onramps and offramps into traditional, legacy formats.

Where it got even more interesting was when we started to discuss long-term preservation, and making sure the document will still be there and readable decades from now. It became clear that parts of the audience wanted to see cloud computing mature before they could trust their company's lifeblood — such as contracts — 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!

PARC researcher added to Document 2.0 panelists

fragnet — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:14:58 GMT

Late breaking news: A new panelist will be joining the Document 2.0 panel!

Ed H. Chi is area manager and senior research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and has been doing research on user interface software systems since 1993.

Ed will bring unique research perspective to the panel, including Augmented Social Cognition: "Supported by systems, the enhancement of the ability of a group to remember, think, and reason; the system-supported construction of knowledge structures by a group".

This is getting even better!

Document as a Service

fragnet — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:00:31 GMT

The real conference has not started yet but am really excited by what I'm seeing. So many tools presented here focus on the collaborative editing, annotation, sharing and tracking of documents, whether spreadsheets, presentations, or word documents. That's Document 2.0!

These tools are wonderful, extremely powerful, and very easy to use. They get the work done better than anything else out there and get good adoption from individuals or small groups. But what about Enterprise Adoption? How can we reconcile this trend with long-term preservation, legal compliance, or just security and privacy issues?

These are some of the topics we'll discuss on the Document 2.0 panel. Join us there!

Document 2.0 panel

fragnet — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:01:07 GMT

We'll be having a panel discussion on Document 2.0 that should be great!

I'll be joined by 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.

Join us Thursday, September 4, 2008, 3:30PM to 4:15PM in the Conservatory (4th floor)!

Paperless Office 2.0?

fragnet — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:43:22 GMT

What about paper in all that? Is paper totally out of the equation in Office / Document 2.0? Will Office 2.0 finally deliver the “Paperless Office” promise?

Well, not quite yet… The paperless office became a buzzword after being introduced in an article, “The Office of the Future,” in Business Week in 1975. It coincided with the advent of the personal computer, and the hope was that all documents could be processed electronically and that paper would become irrelevant.

But has paper disappeared? Not quite yet. Actually, paper consumption is still increasing globally, soaring to extremely high levels. Some estimates go as high as 10-50 trillion pages! If we could stack up all printed pages, one year’s worldwide “production” could take us between 5 and 15 times to the moon depending on the estimate…

The good news is, paper consumption is now (somewhat) under control – moderate growth (around 2-3%), even declining in some countries. Still, we can get much greener. Did you know that between 20 and 40% of pages printed are discarded in the next 24 hours? That calls for new technologies such as electronic paper or transient paper, but also (and even more so) good practices… That’s what I call the “Less Paper Office”.

The Digital Universe

fragnet — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:31:12 GMT

Even though the Paper Universe is (somewhat) under control, what about a Digital Document / Office 2.0 Universe in full expansion? Recent estimates are staggering: the Web Universe is made of over a trillion pages. And that’s nothing compared to the overall Digital Universe — a few hundred exabytes, and growing at an incredible pace!How can we make sense of all that data? Isn’t finding a needle in the haystack a piece of cake compared to that? How can we put the Digital Universe under control, and the cloud under control? Although not as direct, this does have some impact on the environment, too…

Infrastructure for Document 2.0

fragnet — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:34:22 GMT

In the future, the document will be aware of its environment. Not any more a single, closed container, it will gradually become a "mashup" pulling information from here and there. It will be able to self-update, self-validate… or self-retire. Stay evergreen or die, that’s Darwin's law for Document 3.0… But let's stop daydreaming.

More concretely and shorter term, this raises a few interesting questions — how can all the associated document processing and storage infrastructure be provided in the cloud? Where will this document be physically stored, but also archived? In an era where all of our activities (and documents) need to be traceable and fully compliant with SOX and other stringent regulations, how do we put in place the infrastructure that will ensure that all of this activity is fully trackable and compliant?

Also, how do we ensure long-term preservation of those documents? A piece of paper (or papyrus) is universal and can survive for centuries; storing an electronic document in a single file, and a format that will still be readable in 20 years is a bit more adventurous; what about capturing that volatile Document 2.0 on the grid?

These are some of the topics I'd love to get input from some of the other conference participants...

Standards for Document 2.0

fragnet — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:06:15 GMT

A Document 2.0 world needs standards. In our past/current (Document 1.0) world, documents were mainly stored in their own proprietary formats. In Document 2.0, documents are increasingly stored in open, interchangeable formats — to everyone's benefit. I am not claiming that Ismael's Document Sharing problems will disappear overnight, but the appearance of a few, and hopefully now a single XML-based standard for document sharing helps move us in the right direction.

This will greatly increase the Entreprise Adoption of Document 2.0 and Office 2.0 technologies. Since documents are increasingly distributed, collaborative, "mash-ups" of information stored in various locations, interoperability and interchange at a very granular level becomes vital.

But this evolution should continue. Being able to identify a table and an individual cell in a document is a definite need, which ODF can handle nicely, but what about extracting documents from unstructured documents such as resumes, letters or contracts? Over time, the document should become semantic — capable of storing semantic information (or even re-creating that structure on the fly), besides structural and layout information.

Document 2.0?

fragnet — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:10:05 GMT

Why should you care about the document?

First, I'd like to point out that the document is not only the traditional, old-fashioned sheet of paper. It is much more than that. It is a "representation of information designed with the capacity to communicate." It is not even limited by boundaries any more, or self-contained — it becomes a "mash-up" of information, put together to convey specific information to other humans. This blog is a document.

Why are documents important in the Office 2.0? They are the lifeblood of the entreprise. Without documents, barely any business process can run. Documents flow through our organizations, are validated, reviewed, circulated, modified, transformed, printed, scanned. They are like the air we are breathing — we don't notice them anymore, but without them, our business would stop.

Just like the Web, the Office, or the Enterprise, the document has to evolve to support more effective business processes. Welcome to Document 2.0! Open, secure, personalized, traceable, structured — we'll explore a few of these traits in further posts.

Hello (Office 2.0) World!

fragnet — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:20:06 GMT

Unlike many other bloggers, this will be my first participation to the Office 2.0 conference. I'm really looking forward to it! This blog will be about my anticipations, thoughts, and hopefully rich interactions before, during, and after the event.

I hope to bring my own "twist" to the Office 2.0 world — the "Document" view. I'll be using some of the content and concepts I've been playing around on my blog, which basically talks about technologies that might change the way we work with documents in the office — and explains why it is difficult to change decade-old practices. I'll test a few of those concepts, hoping to see how they relate and resonate with the Office 2.0 community...