NextPage launches subscription service for documents

NextPage on Monday unveiled a subscription service designed to hit the sweet spot of ad-hoc document control. The NextPage 1.5  service gives users real-time status and notifications about documents that are stored as e-mail attachments or on hard drives or servers.

Whereas traditional document management systems are centralized and target formal document processes, NextPage 1.5 zeros in on the particular challenge of ad-hoc document creation and collaboration, according to Darren Lee, NextPage CEO.

For ad-hoc collaboration processes, such as writing a press release, creating a presentation, or developing a document with input from co-workers and partners, users don't want to go to a special system, he said.

"For these ad-hoc processes, workers want to work in their normal work environment," Lee said. "The problem with traditional document management systems is that they are for repeatable, centralized processes."

Often, daily ad-hoc document collaborations result in what Lee calls "document chaos."

"You write a document, send it out, get responses back, and suddenly you are in document chaos where multiple versions of same document are spread around," Lee said.

"We are attempting to solve the ubiquitous problem of document chaos with the ability to track and manage documents in e-mail, on a hard drive, or shared drive by tying the documents to a digital thread," he said.

NextPage chose the subscription service model to alleviate security and policy control concerns and to remove the upfront financial investment.

"Documents are a key asset for organizations. They don't want that information out there, outside the company," Lee said.

In essence, NextPage 1.5 is a Global Positioning System for documents, Lee said.

To track the documents, NextPage 1.5 uses meta data pointers to Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents, whether they reside in e-mail or in a file system. The service is integrated with Microsoft Outlook.

"The meta data is indecipherable; we leverage it to track documents and nothing else," Lee said. "We don't host documents. The documents never leave the worker's machine."

The service provides awareness of a document's location, versioning information, and the capability to control edit rights. A lightweight client is installed on users' machines, but outside users don't have to belong to the service to be part of the document-tracking.

Upon completion in NextPage, documents can be stored in a document management system, Lee said.

NextPage 1.5 is complementary to, but not a replacement for, traditional, repository-based document management systems, according to Michael Maziarka, Director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures.

"Most of the [document management] approaches take a more structured view rather than an ad-hoc view," Maziarka said. "I think the ad-hoc nature of what [NextPage] is providing is interesting from that perspective. If you look at document management systems, they have ad-hoc routing, but the environment is more structured."

The need for multiple types of collaboration technologies is growing, and collaboration will be a pressing issue for a lot of companies, Maziarka added.

One key benefit of the NextPage service is that it is easy to include outside contributors, Maziarka said.

"You don't have to grant access to the service to each user or log someone into it," he said.

A NextPage 1.5 subscription is available for a free 60-day trial. Regular pricing is $250  per user, per year.