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The Document as Application (part 2)
By Jake Sorofman
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The Convergence of Document Publishing and Application Development
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Enterprise Information Integration (EII) and other middleware technologies can sometimes federate access to data and documents —
side by side — as part of a unified application. While an improvement, this solution fails to address data that is actually part of the document content and must be
viewed within the document itself.
Take, for example, a technical field service manual for complex capital equipment or a recipe for a chemical compound. These documents include data found outside of
the document, in relational databases and other sources. Viewing data and documents side by side is better than nothing, but the logical user experience is in the
document itself.
…To Data in DocumentsData and document convergence must transcend data and documents to allow for data in documents, the essence of the document-as-application.
The document-as-application is fundamentally different from today’s XML-based authoring. While organizations can rapidly propagate change to unstructured documents
via XML-based authoring, the data that originates in structured databases has no native connection to documents. With the document-as-application, structured data in
documents has direct, persistent links back to its native sources, ensuring the documents and the systems of record are always in sync.
Moreover, the document-as-application enables a new level of interactivity. Beyond inline edits, comments, or workflow processes, users can interact with documents
as if they were business applications, e.g., performing queries, transactions, calculations, etc., against backend data sources and live enterprise information. All
of this interaction takes place within the document, thereby maintaining context and persistence. Teams and workgroups can share and collaborate on the document —
e-mail it, associate it with a workflow — without ever breaking the connection to this live data.
Organizations have never had this sort of interactivity within documents. The tradeoff has always been between the business application’s live data and
interactivity, and the document’s persistence and context. But that is changing as the worlds of documents and business applications collide and the
document-as-application emerges.
About the Author
Jake Sorofman is Vice President of Marketing and Business Development North America and EMEA for JustSystems, the largest ISV in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML
and information management technologies. Learn more about JustSystems at http://na.justsystems.com, and contact Jake at
jake.sorofman@justsystems.com.
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