Does imaging have more than an application future? Is there more to life than imaging at the desktop? The answer is yes.

The ability to recognize and search for a document -- not just with a text-based search but by color, shape and other visual features -- takes imaging to another dimension. Compound documents will provide an overall framework for managing new-age data -- electronic text, image, graphics, video, multimedia -- challenging the dominance of record-oriented information.

Imaging Will Enable Everything

Dr. Charles E. Stenard,

advanced image recognition solutions manager,

Lucent Technologies

Over the past five years, we've heard claims about imaging's enormous potential. Now we're seeing successes with real-world implementations.

Today's successes are the result of intellectual capital built over the last half-century. Pioneering organizations have been working on imaging for years. As early as the mid-1970s, many groups believed it could be applied in narrow vertical niches like medical imaging. These early adopters received benefits great enough to outweigh the upfront investment.

Just recently, though, drastically reduced costs and improvements in software have moved imaging far beyond what we thought possible only a few years ago. Some systems now can read imported fax images and use workflow to route them throughout the enterprise.

What's on the imaging horizon? I see the technology evolving to include accepting electronic and HTML forms -- and other kinds of messages. Once you start viewing imaging as an enabling technology, you see it playing a substantial role helping organizations improve key business functions like transaction processing. Paper-intensive industries like banking and healthcare are already benefitting from implementations.

In the not-too-distant future, imaging applications will include voice and video, and applets will be embedded into the messages. And why stop there? Why can't we design a system that lets users receive messages in their choice of media, be it hard copy or text-to-speech?

I see a day when this will all be possible. It's simply a matter of thinking beyond current applications. We've moved so far in my 20 years in imaging that I no longer believe that anything is unattainable. I just wonder how quickly we can achieve it.

Internet Imaging

to Explode

Samuel DenHartog,

president, CyberLink Labs

In 1997, imaging, document management and COLD will continue to converge. The result: document-based information management systems and central information repositories.

For the new information to be accessible within the corporation and to the broader world accessible by global communication, the information management infrastructure must be based on open technologies, including TCP/IP, HTML and Java. These exciting intranet/Internet technologies, along with the new network computers, will provide improved access to information on documents at a much lower cost. We'll see a lot of growth in the number of companies combining imaging systems with intranet/Internet technologies over the next year.

Terabytes in Your Pocket

Lee H. Elizer, founder,

DataThink

Storage is an interesting challenge today, but it will be the new frontier in the next decade. Imaging has redefined online mass storage. As a result, applications expand as fast as the price of storage hardware plummets.

Remember when word processing was a new thing? When kilobytes of storage held a "bunch" of letters in the late '60s and early '70s? When spreadsheets, the "hot" new application, were the most useful way you could use 100 KB of storage? When PCs became inexpensive with a 10 MB hard disk and a floppy disk held less than 1 meg? When CAD/CAM became the engineering application that generated humungous storage requirements (megabytes) in the late '80s and early '90s? When multimedia arrived de facto in newly purchased PCs in the ý90s? Today, Internet applications and their use abound. Everyone's storing images, e-mail and downloaded files. Storage needs on today's PC easily exceed two gigabytes.

But think about the storage explosion that will occur during the next decade, containing exciting new applications and yet-to-be-determined "killer apps" on the market:

Imagine the day when we all carry a few gigs in our pockets: text, images, voice-prints, fingerprints. There's no question that extremely high capacity, interactive storage at the desktop will arrive by 2005. The technology for this type of storage is now being developed by forward-looking companies who will integrate the storage for the next millennium.

Imaging Will Transform Management Styles

Geoffrey James, author

Business Wisdom of the

Electronic Elite

Improvements in imaging technology will change the social structure of corporations all over the world, throughout the next decade.

More information will be stored inside document databases, eliminating much of the interoffice junk mail that now clogs our desks. Massive rows of filing cabinets will disappear, because the most current version of any document is available online. As a result, an increasing number of workers won't have to report to work each morning. They'll merely telecommute to where information is stored. Or access the data from their homes.

At the same time, improvements in mobile computing, multimedia and direct video will make it easy to coordinate projects using workflow and groupware. It will become less necessary to have people working in close quarters merely to coordinate projects.

These changes in technology will force managers to abandon today's "command-and-control" style of management. A result-based model, where workers are paid for projects accomplished rather than for warming seats, will become more common.

This will force the social structure of the corporation to become more decentralized -- a meritocracy rather than a bureaucracy. Corporations that embrace the new technology and the new style of management that it demands will grow and prosper. Corporations that adhere to old management will discover that the combination of industrial-age thinking and information-age technology is entirely toxic. Old-style organizations with empowered bureaucrats and control-obsessed micromanagers, will falter, decline and ultimately disappear.

Document Management is Dead, Long Live....What?

Michael C. Row,

Vice President, Business

Development, EZPower

In the scramble to jump on the internet bandwagon, many in the electronic document management industry overlook a far more ominous transition -- the death of document management as we know it. An extreme statement? Possibly, given that EDM has barely emerged from infancy, according to some experts. Plus, the business issues addressed by document management (information access, security, and control) are increasingly critical, even more so with the growth of the web.

Still, the value-added of stand-alone document management systems (DMS) is declining. The new model will integrate EDM functionality with line of business applications databases and distribute this new functionality across the enterprise. This shift, from library-oriented EDM to database-oriented EDM, is already changing the industry.

Library-oriented EDM/DMS emerged to tie together all an organization's document-based information: imaging of paper documents, COLD, word processing files, spreadsheets and other electronic documents. Products from vendors such as FileNet (including Saros & Watermark), Documentum, PCDocs, and EZPower provide a unified and consistent way to organize, access, and control document-based information without users having to be concerned with the technical format or physical location of the information. The primary metaphor of these systems has been a library or repository of documents.

Now, the traditional value added for stand-alone DMS is increasingly commoditized, part of the operating system, or both. Databases, groupware, and internet/-intranet services (like Netscape's catalog server) are aggressively encroaching on areas previously the province of DMS.

Plus, databases are being extended with object technology to permit flexible storage management, while operating systems are extending storage management functionality -- the NT 5.0 distributed file system will provide most of the functionality now found in top of the line storage products, including jukebox management and HSM functionality.

If basic library services are ubiquitous and nearly free, what is the future of EDM? The next frontier in EDM is database-orientated EDM, leveraging existing application databases to provide flexibility and control in document organization and retrieval.

In this model, documents will be treated as part of the organization's information model. EDM functionality will be tightly integrated with key line-of-business applications such as human resources, sales-force management, and customer-service. Yet documents will still be accessible throughout the enterprise in a controlled and consistent fashion.

But What A

Data Type

Peter Hamilton, president and CEO, LAVA Systems

Reports about the "death of images" have been greatly exaggerated. True, the image viewer, as a marketable, discrete application, has a limited future. With free viewers on the Web and ActiveX controls being bundled with Internet Explorer, imaging services are becoming part of the standard desktop. What this really means is that imaging, far from dying, is now a pervasive technology, with scanned documents widely accepted as "just another data type."

More and more large organizations now use imaging as an efficient way to access information traditionally held on paper. The small office/home office market is discovering imaging through the use of fax modem software and inexpensive scanners. Consequently, the number of people encountering scanned documents at the desktop is growing exponentially. Vendors are even starting to talk in terms of the "casual" image user.

What's most important to these users is the content and value inherent in the document. They don't care if it's an image or another data type.

Value can best be added to an image document by relating it to other information sources.

Users want to access and work with documents, of whatever format, within the context of their core business systems -- perhaps even from the user interface of an existing application.

To support this need, many vendors need to rethink their product architecture. They must move towards a distributed computing model, where the necessary elements of imaging, document management and workflow technology are object-based and can activate on demand, wherever they are needed.

This will let organizations provide users with a single point of access to all business information through an interface that offers the methods and manipulation tools appropriate to the data type, but which appears seamless and intuitive.

In a world where document images are everywhere and any computer user can access and view images for free, the focus of development must shift from the problems of image access to new opportunities for image use.

The future of imaging lies not just in the ability to access images, but in the incorporation of that ability into a larger, more comprehensive information access architecture.

Smart Objects Blend Imaging with CAD

Chris Dukes,

imaging product manager,

Softdesk

In the CAD (computer assisted design) area, object technology holds the future of imaging. Industry-leading CAD vendors have begun to make this trend possible by including technology that lets developers add their own objects into the CAD environment.

For instance, Softdesk's Autodesk included the ARX (AutoCAD Runtime eXtension) development environment, which enables the creation of objects, in its latest version of AutoCAD software.

An object, in this case, is a CAD entity with intelligence. For example, a door in a CAD drawing is typically a collection of lines, but a door object "knows" what its appropriate behavior is. (For starters, it knows that it cannot exist in space -- it must be within a wall.)

Applications developers can narrow the range of possible behaviors to the set of appropriate behaviors. What does this mean for imaging? With object technology, even scanned images can become objects with intelligence.

Object technology lets you work with black-and-white, grayscale and color raster files as easily as you can work with CAD entities. It enables raster images to actually become part of the CAD model and of any electronic document.

Previously, raster images (which are composed of dots) were difficult to integrate with vector drawings (which are CAD drawings and models defined by mathematical coordinates).

But object technology lets you work with raster and vector data as one object. This means you can edit both raster and vector simultaneously.

Web Imaging Is

Your Future

David Skok,

chairman and ceo,

Silverstream

The World Wide Web has introduced three new and very important standards to the world of electronic documents and electronic messages:

1. A universal electronic document format, HTML, which everyone can read.

2. Universal e-mail addresses.

3. Web sites with Web addresses.

All three eliminate paper: HTML simplifying the exchange of electronic documents; e-mail by replacing fax and mail; Web sites by eliminating physical duplication and distribution of documents.

Obviously, there are huge benefits to keeping information in electronic form, using e-mail and the Web for storage, distribution, sharing, and management. The result: paper will be a secondary form for documents, used only where it is more convenient to read. Many paper transactions -- loan applications, insurance forms, etc. -- will become electronic.

The elimination of paper threatens imaging and document management. The Internet and intranets allow corporations to build a single universal architecture for distributing, sharing and processing information. You don't need to turn paper into electronic documents if the document is electronic to begin with. You don't need special document management software if you have an intranet.

For document management vendors, this means serious new competition from Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, Informix and IBM/Lotus. These players are drawn to the enormous opportunity presented by intranets. They are shipping products that include features that used to be the purview only of document management systems.

Corporations will find current document management systems offer only a small piece of the pie. They want the complete suites of servers now offered by Microsoft and Netscape, with document management tightly integrated.

Some additional predictions:

1. Imaging, document management, groupware and web servers are converging into a single information repository, to be stored in a new generation of universal databases from Oracle, Informix and others.

2. The Web browser will be the universal viewer for all information types. You can use it to view HTML, PDF, JPEG, GIF, Word files, PowerPoint, sound, video, VRML, etc. It's only a matter of time before TIFF image viewing is included.

3. Successful vendors will be those who move to thin Web clients first. This means offering imaging/workflow/document management clients that are a mixture of dynamic HTML and Java.

The Document: It's Alive!

Joe Forgione, VP of business

multimedia products,

Lotus

The 1990s, characterized by the phenomenal growth of the Internet, have ushered in the most significant evolutionary wave for document media. Today, documents are not only electronic vehicles for communication and collaboration, they also offer "interactive" interfaces to information.

A document today can contain a narrative created in a word processor, financial analysis created in a spreadsheet and links to databases or Web pages. Like Frankenstein's monster, the document has become an electrified, living creature.

Acceptance of diverse data streams -- e-mail, bitmaps, fax, HTML, voice, alphanumeric pages, video, telephony, paper -- has spawned demand for a personal solution to content management within networks and I-nets. The future lies in liberating users from the Herculean task of managing this essentially unmanageable mass.

Perhaps users need technology that automates a document's life cycle. Maybe we'll see documents that arrive ready-made with preprogrammed business rules, or stored logic, letting documents determine their own review cycles, classification, routing, migration and eventual self-archival.

These so-called "intelligent agents" (user-defined attributes or rules) could move documents through a business process without end-user involvement, changing along the way to reflect new rules for each consecutive step. Set attributes could define the next series of reviewers, the classification of the document and the file cabinet in which the documents should reside. And since documents reach a point where they are rarely accessed, rules could define the transfer of old documents from the file server onto lower-cost storage media.

Pipe dream? Not really. Soon, this will be the status quo, as we begin to embrace even loftier forms of communication, such as 3-D Web sites, Web broadcasting and video streaming.

Capturing Images

Faster Than Ever

Serge Moisan, president, Dunord Technologies

Scanners as we know them, slow and fast, will become faster. The trend toward affordable 200-plus-image-per-minute (ipm) production scanners will continue.

We should see scanners capable of processing more than 500 images a minute within the next five years.

Slower-speed scanners will advance too. They will continue to offer more features and color.

Super high-speed scanners bring two new challenges: