From The Cupboard to the Cloud. Where next for document management?

Since the dawn of the 20th Century, we have been obsessed with making things smaller.

Now we are at a point where smaller is literally as small as it can get. When it comes to consumer devices such as the likes of mobile phones and televisions, when they got to the point of being almost too small, they went bigger again…with add-ons of course.

Mobile phones got to their smallest around the mid to late 2000’s and the dawn of the smart phone, a technical innovation in itself, meant that phones were suddenly bigger again, but with good reason. The same goes for TV’s. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s it was a priority to get them as small as they possibly could, and when this was achieved, they realised that going small wasn’t a benefit for a TV, it was a hinder. So now we have TV’s of all sizes, 40″, 50″ and up to the size of your wall if your budget will allow for it.

The only thing that consumer devices like those have in common with the document storage business is the near obsession with getting things as small as possible. However it’s not an option for this market to go big again when we can’t get any smaller, so where do we go next?

We are at a point where cloud computing is starting to take off with all numbers of services popping up for businesses and personal archiving alike with the likes of Dropbox leading the way. With these services, some offering quite handsome free packages as well as even better paid ones, it is possible to store quite a bit of your life in the ether as well as share files between office and home computers and vice versa. The likes of Google, Amazon and Apple are also jumping on the train with music services with Google Music currently in beta, and Apple’s own surprisingly-titled iCloud waiting in the wings.

Google also offer the ability to store and even edit all your documents in the cloud itself through their own Google Apps service which includes Microsoft Office-like Word and Excel editable system, as well as being able to set Calendar dates and who knows what else in the coming months.

Google have even launched their own operating system and their own notebook range containing their OS, which is in effect…Google Chrome, just with more power. This is both innovative and daunting for users who are used to having a desktop and separate applications to do work as well as a web browser.

Saving everything on the web is also still a hugely daunting process for many so Cloud technology on a mass scale might be some way away, and although Google’s innovations are superb and very forward thinking, they may have taken it a step too far.

Regardless of what the future holds, we as humans like things a certain way. We like to be able to access our files quickly and easily without too much hassle or too much change. Change is the big word here as we always talk about change and how everything can be better with change. Politicians use it more than anyone else as they know what a powerful word it can be in practice, but as people we don’t like things to change too much, especially when it comes to the way that we work. Storing documents and files in the cloud is a big jump forward and it is even reflected in the name; it suggest something large, way above us and almost is suggestive of somewhere where we don’t belong. The power and the capabilities are there for all to see, but we are also very much set in our ways.

This is why, at least for now, we feel that having documents digitised and hosted on a computer network throughout the office is the best way to do it. It lowers a bridge to the future which is, inevitably, the cloud. It just allows that little bit of breathing room to get used to being more reliant on technology and less so on paper before the big push to everything being out there flying around in the clouds. And that, as people, is what we really need.

If you’d like to talk to us about our document scanning / archiving services, as well as our easy to use document management products, give us a call on 0161 832 7991 or email us: info@pearl-scan.co.uk