Mobile Document Management & Collaboration
The overwhelming success of the Apple iPhone has certainly caused a massive wave of innovation in the area of mobile applications and content. Add to that the explosive growth of Google Android based smartphones and the arrival of Microsoft Windows Mobile 7, and you’ll realize that there will be a significant shift in the way we interact with content and applications in the years to come.
So what about mobile document management? While it’s not exactly comfortable to read an MS Word file or review an Excel spreadsheet on your smartphone, it might come in handy to be able to do so. Image you are about to enter an external meeting and you want to check the latest prices in the spreadsheet or review a specific clause in the contract - mostly you won’t have the time to startup your notebook (if you have it with you at least) for a quick look-up.
Today, there are quite a lot of mobile applications (e.g. from Dataviz and QuickOffice) that run on smartphones and allow you to view, edit and create your Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files as well as Adobe PDF files. But what if your documents are not stored on your smartphone? How can you access them? A number of these tools also allow the user to access, view and share files easily from multiple cloud storage services (e.g. Office Live, MobileMe, Google Docs, Box.net,…).
Most organizations rather stick to more classic document management solutions like EMC Documentum, Microsoft Sharepoint, Alfresco or IBM Filenet. Here too, the market is moving quickly and a number of new players are coming up with specific apps. A company called SNAPPS provides an iPhone app that allows you to access your IBM Filenet or Alfresco content repositories while H3 Solutions offers mobile access to SharePoint through its Mobile Entree server side plug-in.
On the other hand, we may also expect ECM vendors to start producing applications that allow mobile users to connect securely to their document and collaboration platforms: EMC is about to launch Documentum Centerstage Mobile for BlackBerry (with support for other devices planned) while Microsoft has some pretty neat stuff up their sleeve with the announced Windows Phone Office Hub and its ability to create and edit Microsoft Office documents, including Word, Powerpoint and Excel, and support for SharePoint.
All these mobile applications might be handy up to a certain point, but the size of the screen remains a major issue for smartphones: it’s just not comfortable to review and edit documents on these types of displays. That is why we’re expecting another boost for mobile document management & collaboration with the launch of Apple’s iPad. This type of device could really become an interesting tool for reading and editing digital files in a comfortable way; the combination of its portability and the large high-resolution, LED-backlit screen will probably be a very appealing offering for business users. And it will not stop with the iPad either: a whole new generation of Tablets or Slate PC’s are currently in the works at many different hardware vendors (HP, Dell, Samsung,…), providing a myriad of operating system choices (Windows, Android, Linux,…).
So again, we might have some interesting times ahead of us as this wave of mobile document management & collaboration applications could really bring new and innovative solutions to the market.