The Sustainability Debate Paper Versus Digital [Océ Whitepaper]

The company I work for, Océ, has a clear track record as a sustainable company. Way before it became the hot topic it is in these days.

Every year we have a Sustainability Week to focus even more on this topic. During this week an interesting whitepaper was released. It is about 'All in Balance. Océ's eco-efficient and eco-effective approach to analog and digital document'. Reference is made to a paper I wrote with others about (personal) document processes.

I hope you enjoy the whitepaper. If so leave a comment below or here.

Going 'paperless'

I prefer to read longer articles (even blog posts...) on paper. For instance I read Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan articles. Our corporate library allows me to read those articles in hard-copy. Of course the librarians have access to the digital sources of these magazines, but I don't.

What I usually do is browse through the magazine and make copies of the articles I want to read (or I think are interesting for my colleagues). In this way I can read them when and where I want.

When I read articles I usually write comments in the sidelines and highlight what I find interesting and important to remember. These marks are very important to me. So important that I would archive the hard-copy of the article in binders. At least until recently. If I could get my hands on a digital copy I would file that one on my computer with the comments.

Over time I've collected many articles and found that I hardly reuse those articles in my work. Filing them is hard and therefore retrieving them when I need them is too.

So recently I said to myself: Let's get rid of those hard-copies and scan all those articles in. This is quite easy because I work for a company that develops copier-printer-scanners. The scanners have a document feeder so I don't have to scan page-by-page. The scan is automatically emailed to me in pdf (but is not OCR-ed...).

When I get the pdf of the article I trust the scanning process has gone OK and don't check that. I rename the filename by typing in the title, the author(s) of the article, the source it came from and the date. Because Windows wants me to put the file in one folder (I'm using XP) I also add some 'tags' to the filename (by simply adding extra text in the filename) to be able to create intersections over files and folders.

This is working out fine for me. And I'm finding I'm reusing older articles more often now. When I'm asked to look into something I start by search my desktop and collecting the info I already have. Then I move over to my bookmarks (- wouldn't it be great if you could merge bookmarks and files? -) and finally search the internet.

I'm curious what you do with your paper documents. Do you also scan them? Or do you file them in a binder? Do you reuse those documents often? Please share your best-practices!

---

If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers:
Going paperless http://twurl.nl/aju08p

Tags van Technorati: paperless,paperdigital,information management,knowledge management,scanning

Where's Information Headed?

Thomas Baekdal has a very interesting post titled "Where is everybody?" His post comes along with a really nice visualization to prove his point (refer to his blog post and the picture I added into this post).
It would be interesting to extend this post and visualization with other kinds of information. For instance, office documents, flyers, etc. Baekdal also leaves out books. Books would come in between 'local marketplace' and 'newspapers', I think. And office documents (like Word docs) came around 1990-1995? I remember typing my first report in WordPerfect around 1993. At that time you were still allowed to write your report in handwriting. Wow, time flies!

---
If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers:
Where's Information Headed? http://twurl.nl/56qrqe

Tags van Technorati: information,information management,information architecture

Connecting Paper? Extending "the Internet of Things"

ReadWriteWeb regularly keeps us posted on "the internet of things". This is an interesting development and has even been called "web 3.0" (web 2.0 moving to devices, connect people and devices automatically, using semantic technology...).

Their post gives an overview of the news in this world. What I was wondering though is: Paper is also a thing. And knowledge workers are still using lots of paper (printed articles (for reading and reviewing), books, etc.). Could "the internet of things" be extended to the office? We could 'internet' paper. With small (printable) RFID tags, paper documents and books (or even parts of them) could be retrieved (and stored) in a transparent way.

What do you think? Could this be useful? And, does anyone know if this is already being done?

Tags van Technorati: paperless,office,knowledge worker,web 3.0,web 2.0

Idea: Combine an eReader with MultiTouch

A small 'brain fart' (idea).

One of the great things about paper is the fact that you can put pieces of paper side-by-side. This is great when you have to review a document or check difference between documents.

This 'feature' of paper is not supported well in the digital domain. eReaders and computers have a hard time mimicking this. However, using multi-touch screens, like Microsoft Surface, brings this concept closer to the digital domain. Then again, most people don't like to read from a screen. Reading from an eReaders seems to better (more paper-like).

I carpool to work. Yesterday on our way back we were talking about the affordances of paper vs. digital documents. And then we wondered: why can't we combine what eReaders are good at with what multi-touch is good at? We would then have a screen that could be integrated into our desks, giving us lots of freedom to move documents around, annotate and resize them, search on them, pile them, etc. But, because the screen is an eReader screen, the documents are readable too.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Do you think this is possible? And, would this bring the paperless office closer?

Tags van Technorati: office,paperless,user interaction

e-Sticky Note

Just wanted to point you to this. Your traditional sticky note (I use lots of them!), but on epaper. Looks really cool. Could be a mini-wiki too!

[Thanks CNET for the pointer]

Using Flowgram

ReadWriteWeb had a nice overview post on "Slideshows 2.0". As I commented I was hoping they would also mention something about 'slideshare for the enterprise'. But this doesn't seem to exist...

However, Flowgram contacted me following my comment and we had a nice chat about my 'needs'. I'm really curious who will be the first to offer an enterprise 2.0 version of Slideshare!

Anyway, I didn't know Flowgram before and was invited to try it. Here's what I think of this webapp.

First of all, the user-interface is great and very intuitive! I didn't have a problem sorting things out and finding how I could get something done. It just works!

So, I just went on and made my first flowgram. (I didn't make it public yet, because it contain some stuff I don't want to share just yet.) The nice thing is Flowgram allows you to make a presentation consisting of all kinds of files (Office, links, RSS feeds, pictures, etc.). You simply select the file, it's uploaded for you, then you can reshuffle the deck, add audio to the presentation and you're all set. You can then share the Flowgram as-is, or in Youtube. The way they integrated all this and kept the whole process (from creation to distribution) is really great.

This is wonderful stuff for trainers. However, I was thinking how I could use it for my work. I tell you what I think later on.

First, some remarks about the features:

- You can add a note to a webpage. It would be nice if you could fix it to part of webpage. And you can't add a note to documents.

- It would be nice if you could add arrow(s) and circles to pictures and parts of documents/webpages.

- Importing a Word-doc went well, but it was presented in a way to small font. For pdf I had the same issue. When you're on that part of the presentation you can zoom in (Flash zoom), but this not saved.

- It would be very nice if you could uploads types of content and then download those types again (unpackage). Why this could be neat is explained below.

- Adding email to a Flowgram would be nice. Of course you can copy-paste an email, but to make things easy 'eml' import or allow 'forward to flowgram' could be added too.

- Youtube now has a feature to embed parts of the video's. Wouldn't it be nice if we could embed (parts of) a Youtube video in a Flowgram?

What I like about this tool is the fact that you can bundle different types of content (- keep things in context!). This is extremely important for knowledge workers and hardly supported by tools. That's one of the reasons we still work with paper... (More info on this topic can be found here and here.) For instance, when we're researching a topic we usually work with a combination of emails, Word and Powerpoint docs, webpages, etc. Using Flowgram, this can be done in one place.

However, for this to be useful, a user would also have to be able to unpackage a Flowgram to get the different files back in their original format.

Anyway, I'm going to keep trying Flowgram and see where this goes. Flowgram emailed me they're working hard on new features, also some of the ones I requested for.