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September 29, 2005

Why Web Document Management Just Makes Sense

Very few people in the 80's forecasted Microsoft and it's family of products as a dominant industry force. In fact, if one was to make a decision on what technology to standardized document management on in this era, it would probably be DOS-based thick clients, communicating via manual disk swapping; not very appealing by today's standards. This brings up an excellent question: What makes people think that the future will run like today? We have already seen a large leap forward in Linux adoption, and not just on the server side. There has also been a decent amount of people moving to Apple, especially in the younger laptop market. So what should we standardize on, or should we standardize at all? That's where the web comes in. Apple's OS X, Linux, Windows and many other operating systems can, and are used as clients. In fact, it is much harder today to find a network that has only one operating system being used as the client. The accountants and business departments use Windows, the graphics and media guys are on Apple OS X and the developers are working on Linux. The best solution is to use a method of application deployment that the overwhelming majority of operating systems can handle. That solution is using the web. For example, Say Joe needs to leave work (where he uses Windows) early to see his son play baseball but he wants to be able to get some work done at home after the game (on his OS X laptop); With a thin client application setup via the web, Joe can do just that. Likewise, Bill can do the same thing from inside his software development cubical using his Linux box. Not only does using the web allow people to access the system from the operating system of their choice, it also does not introduce the need to force one operating system on everyone (which generally doesn't go over well!). It also eliminates the need for a new operating system license, which is always a good thing.

Posted by on September 29, 2005 06:10 PM

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