Aimster is not a document management product. It
does, however, represent the future of document
management.
Remember in the late 80s and early 90s when document
management vendors were singing a song that made
perfect sense but turned out to be of just about no
real appeal? Everyone uses documents, they said.
Documents are the lifeblood of business, they said.
Organizations waste huge amounts of time trying to
find documents, they said. The information locked up
in documents is the corporation's greatest
squandered resource, they said. Therefore, everyone
wants document management, they said. And every
sentence was true ... except the last.
No matter how badly document management was needed,
it was doomed to failure so long as it continued to
think of itself as a database application that
required users to lock their documents in a
protected vault. Precisely because documents are the
"lifeblood" of business, users were unwilling to
give up control of them. Worse, managing documents
meant adding a layer of red tape -- filling out
forms, getting permission -- with no benefit to the
day-to-day work of the user; the benefits were
organizational, not individual.
In the early 90s, some document management vendors
figured out that the real driver for the technology
wasn't control over the document construction
process but document distribution, also known as
publishing. This idea ran counter to the vendors'
key assumptions. Document management had been about
securing documents against unauthorized changes and
access, but now it turned out it was really about
making them as widely available as possible. As the
vendors were beginning to get their heads around
this idea, the Web arrived, blowing away proprietary
distribution schemes. Document management returned
to the high-end, document-intensive, regulated-
industry niche that had spawned it.
Now, along came Napster and peer-to-peer (P2P)
computing. Napster, as you'd better know by now,
enables 40 million users to access any music files
you have in a directory on your hard drive that you
designate as available to them. Aimster is another
P2P application, with two differences. First, it's
not aimed at any particular type of file. Second,
rather than opening up my desktop directory to
millions of strangers, it only makes it available to
people on my AOL instant messaging "buddy list."
This does to document development what the Web did
to document publishing. Without my having to do any
additional work, my buddies can access the documents
I'm working on or relying on. So, imagine that I'm
part of a new project to decide where in Europe
we'll open our next office. I set up a folder on my
desktop and tell my P2P document management app --
the one that doesn't exist yet -- to make it
available to the other people in the project. I set
up subfolders as well. Maybe I tell my P2P app that
a particular folder should only be visible to some
subset of my project buddies. As I add documents
that I want to share (an article on changes to the
tax law in Belgium, links to Web sites about the
livability of Dutch cities) and documents I'm
working on (initial thoughts about why Antwerp is
currently my favored city), the P2P app does some
document management work: it indexes them, notes new
versions, tracks access, builds a browsable
"portal," notices similarities to other projects
underway across the enterprise, etc. It does this
without intruding one whit on my work habits.
It's not clear to me whether P2P document management
will come from the old line document management
companies or from the new P2P vendors like
groove.net. Vendors have consistently underestimated
the difficulty of building robust document
management apps, so it may be hard for a hip-'n'-hot
P2P company to succeed, whereas it wouldn't be hard
for a project or document management company to add
instant messaging and P2P capabilities. On the other
hand, the document management companies will be
tempted to see P2P as a way to sneak in the sort of
overkill megatonnage that has kept their products
off of hundreds of millions of desktops in the first
place. Maybe some P2P and document management
vendors will combine forces. But, one way or
another, P2P will be the future of document
management. IMHO.
Events
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