Intranet Journal
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NextPage Brings Organization to Office Docs
Michael Pastore
5/24/2005
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There are about 400 million users of Microsoft Office worldwide and they create and edit billions of documents, most of which are stored on local PC hard drives. Those billions of documents are then, in many cases, attached to e-mails, stored on servers, edited, re-edited, and re-attached to e-mails.
If you collaborate on a lot of Office documents this probably sounds familiar. Darren Lee, president and CEO of NextPage, calls it "ad hoc document chaos," and his company has an inexpensive solution that can help you fix it.
In November, we wrote about the NextPage beta. The Utah-based company has now made some tweaks to its initial release and released NextPage 1.5.3 to help users gain control over the Office documents they are working with.
NextPage was founded in 1999, and last year sold off its portfolio of search and publishing-related products to FAST and turned its focus to the NextPage software. Keeping track of the different versions and edits made to Office documents might sound like small potatoes, but the problem is very large and very real for millions of Office users.
"What you have is a substantially expensive problem related to time, risk of the wrong information getting in, and now issues of compliance," Lee told Intranet Journal.
NextPage works as a combination software service and lightweight client. It integrates with Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client and has no IT infrastructure. The software wraps a common thread through the Office applications, Lee said, and tracks who worked on a document at any time; changes and edits to documents; when new versions arrive; where versions are stored; and leaves an audit trail.
The latest version of NextPage allows you to compare versions of a Microsoft Office document straight from the version history page.
The NextPage service hosts only the metadata of documents, not the document itself for security reasons. The service tracks the document and tells a lightweight desktop client the necessary information about edits and new versions.
NextPage differs from document management and collaboration software like Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM's Lotus Workplace because NextPage works regardless of where the document is stored.
"The biggest competitor we have currently is your work habit for managing your e-mail," Lee said. "The other collaborative systems all require you to enter the document into their repository."
NextPage has no repository, and even works for collaborators who do not use the service because it will track their documents when they come back to NextPage users. Because it requires no IT infrastructure, NextPage is less expensive than server-based document collaboration applications. NextPage uses subscription pricing: $25 per user per month, or $250 per user per year. A free 60-day trial is also available.
Once you have NextPage installed and running, it appears in three places on your PC. An icon in your system tray lets you know it's there and working; there is a pull-down menu in the Office applications, and there is a toolbar. It is seamlessly integrated into Office documents, which shouldn't be a surprise since NextPage is a Microsoft Certified Partner.
A pull-down menu from Microsoft's Office applications allows users seamless access to NextPage.
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