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!

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!

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”.

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...

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.