Industry Insight: Where Is Document Management Going?

Certificate management (DM) tools give business organisation users the power to not simply edit files simply transform content cosmos, streamline workflows, and run a more organized business overall. These tools, which often leverage PDF files, have been so ubiquitous that you probably utilise DM management in your solar day-to-day work life without giving it much idea. However, the field continues to evolve and modernize all of the time.

Nosotros recently spoke with Eugene Xiong, founder and Chairman of Foxit Software Inc., near how the competitive mural is changing when it comes to PDF technology and some of the challenges businesses still face when it comes to this omnipresent tech. In our word, we covered the current direction of DM and some predictions about intelligent features in the space.

PCMag (PCM): Where do you see the DM space equally a whole going in the side by side eighteen months?

Eugene Xiong, founder and Chairman of Foxit Software Inc. Eugene Xiong (EX): One matter we are seeing in particular is that DM is increasing focus on giving the individual document a newfound sense of identity. It'due south very difficult to take a full, full digital workflow with today'southward standard DM systems. Sometimes y'all have to download the file from the system and and then use a unlike tool to process it. In that case, this document is totally out of command of the document organisation.

Several years ago, nosotros adult a tech we call ConnectedPDF. The basic idea was that, if we took advantage of the connections embedded within the certificate, information technology would give the file more than meaning. Continued PDF works like this: In one case a certificate is shared, the creator can proceed rails of who received information technology, what they did with it, and see when tasks were completed. Information technology besides offers strong access controls to individual users. This is all happening in real time. You can configure PDF permissions even after the file has been sent out.

It is hither that we realized that the irresolute landscape of the DM space is all almost giving companies more control over their PDF and making it feel much more "alive" than a standard document. I think, in the futurity, inside the timeframe that y'all mentioned, within a year or two, I think DM systems will shift the focus onto the document itself. This volition be the trend instead of just having disparate systems that don't work together. That'south what we are hopefully trying to exercise: to promote the document into a more free space based on open standards and also cloud services. We build a cloud that connects all the different documents together.

PCM: What sort of technologies are going to bear on DM in the futurity? Practice you run across the PDF space implementing artificial intelligence (AI) features?

EX: I actually don't retrieve information technology'south a right fit. That'southward a lot of unstructured data in PDF. If y'all just have all kinds of different PDFs and put them into an AI engine, information technology doesn't generate meaningful results. What we're trying to do is actually understand the certificate a little scrap more so, starting from the creation of the file, we assign an ID to the document. That allows the document to travel to different places and understand what people are doing concerning the file. Once nosotros have enough data most the document, then we can approach applying AI by looking at some of the more structured data. That'southward going to generate much more meaningful issue.

Documents by themselves contain and then-called unstructured information. It'southward very hard to extract data in a reliable and consequent way from something similar a PDF white paper. I call back it's very easy these days to promote AI in your production because it'southward very exciting tech. The truth of the matter is that documents were designed for human consumption only. They have a great deal of unstructured information that current AI tech just can't decipher effectively. With that said, we'll see more initiatives to extract structured data—things such every bit pricing info, titles, and names—and that will drive more than meaningful document intelligence to users and managers. It will provide a much bigger assist in terms of increased productivity for knowledge workers.

PCM: What should small to midsize businesses (SMBs) be thinking nigh when it comes to DM?

EX: That's a good question, and small businesses need to give a bully bargain of thought to DM. Foxit itself is not a big enterprise; we are still an SMB ourselves. And even then, nosotros still see huge amounts of data exchanged inside our organization and between ourselves and other companies. The answer to that is to build a complete document solution that is cloud-based and spider web-based.

A lot of pocket-size businesses might go scared when they talk about DM. They have to pay a lot of coin and likewise go through a lot of effort to deploy, configure, and maintain those kind of DM systems. Nosotros see that, in the near time to come, a lot of providers, including we hither at Foxit, are going to provide a complete solution—not just just a DM organisation but too certificate productivity tools. We take an piece of cake-to-employ, browser-based PDF version which offers all the customization features as any other production but it requires no boosted installation. Smaller businesses should be focused on adopting lighter, more sensible solutions for their PDF operations.