Wither Document Management? Part 1

I work for Open Text. Livelink is Open Text’s flagship platform. At its core it has a comprehensive feature set for document management, but as with everything there is always room for improvement.
In looking at how people share files, it seems to me that there are two diverging paths, or more accurately, there is the established 1990’s model where people navigate through a repository to deposit a document or other file in the ‘right’ place, where version control and other docman features can be applied; this is the model Livelink was designed to support, although it was the first docman system to support navigation by a browser. However, as e-mail has become pervasive in the last ten years (it’s hard to remember that in the 1980’s and early 90’s only academics and geeks had e-mail) companies have started to struggle with the uncontrolled proliferation of documents by e-mail. Big players like Microsoft and Adobe are starting to add 'control' features, and there are a host of startup companies with approaches to address what I consider to be parts of the problem. In future entries to this blog I’ll discuss this further…