The problem

Our love of the document, in-built into our very beings is the problem we face. Web Tools are OK at ‘documents’ but the web isn’t all about documents. Screens don’t show our chosen sizes naturally – we have to scroll around or zoom in. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that providers of Web Tools have thus far, missed a trick.  We have a suite of on-line tools trying to replicate the off-line world, trying to replicate nice files and nice documents.  When you think about it, the whole computer operating system is built around the concept of a ‘file’ and a ‘folder’ – so those concepts are here to stay, but should we, and could we rethink web productivity tools and their dependence on the ‘document’?

The opportunity

A brave supplier of web productivity tools might try to approach how we work on things from a non-document point of view. Get a bunch of people who know about such things (user interface experts) and look at what work we do with our productivity tools. Perhaps the future looks like a world where we create the ‘data’ then add it to a ‘front end’ be that the written word, a diagram or some numbers in a spreadsheet. Perhaps in the future we’ll work with a ’space’, where we pull in the information, add in a bit of text, add in whatever else we need. Perhaps this sounds a bit like an existing technology – a Content Management System (CMS), and it should because this is what a CMS does. I’ve said it before, but our productivity tools should focus on the internet as their raison d’etre, not focus on behaving like a document.

Why get preoccupied with export or printing, when you can keep your work on-line? This basic idea changes how we work with web office productivity – just as in the off-line world we like to print out documents, put them in a nice shiny folder and take them to meetings, we need a ‘presentation’ of our web office output. We need somewhere to show the documents to those we choose, without having them ‘log-in’ and be part of our web office.  We need easy outputs to collaboration spaces and to presentation spaces. Its not about posting a document somewhere, its about content living somewhere.

The truth of today

Right now, the wide working world are not really ready to think differently. I write a blog about such things, work almost exclusively on the web for work, and yet I still think in ‘documents’, within ‘folders’.  Its almost too difficult a thing to imagine another way – a bit like the question “What created the Universe”.

To help get it, maybe tomorrow, refer to working on the ‘cloud’, and refer to your on-line space – and not, not ever refer to your ‘documents’ on the web. Go on, you might like it.