The headlines are full of visionary predictions about our cloud computing future. Virtualization is a hot topic. And people are already talking about the next phase in the evolution of the Internet… the Semantic Web or Web 3.0.

All of these developments are very exciting and suggest that we are rapidly approaching another Information Age inflection point.

What gets far less attention, however, is the changing role of documents.

How will documents change and change the way we work? Here is a brief overview of this 11 page Whitepaper:

The next generation of documents will be:

• More intelligent and proactive so they can perform tasks on our behalf
• Self-structured to improve search and content mining
• Actively seeking and assembling relevant information, multimedia content and hyperlinks from a variety of sources
• Cloud-based and more dynamic
• Free from the restrictions imposed by proprietary, application-based formats

Changing documents will also:

• Virtually eliminate the barriers between paper and electronic documents
• Liberate content from the document containers so “chunks” can be easily accessed, repurposed and imported into other documents
• Give people the freedom to pursue an individualized, nonlinear information-gathering path through multiple linked documents
• Facilitate collaboration