September 20, 2005

In the B2B marketplace, efficient document management technology is one way to ensure the productivity of various work groups and the integrity of both document content and a smooth workflow.

Line 56 recently spoke to NextPage about the 2.0 version of their product, which adds the dashboard concept to document management.

Cyndi Tetro, VP of marketing for NextPage, says that the company has added an activity center, "which gives you the real-time status of all documents as they go through workflow."

Documents designated for collaboration, whether originally resident in e-mail, desktop folders, or other enterprise systems, show up in the activity center window, along with information pertaining to their status (e.g. when they were last edited, who is working on them, where they reside, etc).

"In 2.0, you get up every morning and check the activity center," says Tom Ngo, CTO of NextPage. "You might have three documents you're trying to get out the door. You can see which ones are in your court and which documents you're waiting for other people to deliver." You can open the documents from within the activity center itself.

The dashboard itself is a thin layer over other productivity and collaboration tools, which NextPage isn't trying to displace. That's good, because workers are already wedded to a set of tools and interfaces that they won't readily surrender.

One current shortcoming of the NextPage product is that, while you can click on any document in the activity center to open it, you can only click on users (e.g. the last person to update a given document) to e-mail them.

You can't yet sent them instant messages (IM) from within the NextPage window, and telephone presence is also missing. NextPage plans to address IM from within the activity center shortly, Tetro says.

Source: Line 56