Web 2.0 Meets Document Management

Traditional document management is a term that only librarians and true IT staffers can get excited about. But when you cross document management with a Web 2.0 environment -- complete with feedback, collaboration and other elements of social networking -- it gets fascinating indeed for the rest of us. Fellow blogger and EIPP enthusiast Manoj Ranaweera recently launched his new venture edocr. In the site's words, "edocr allows you to upload and tag your documents. The ever growing community interacts with the uploaded document through ranking, commenting or writing to the publisher, e-mailing to friends and colleagues, embedding on to blogs, linking from other sites, and book marking to popular sites. The community interaction generates invaluable feedback for publishers of documents, whilst providing a rich resource for knowledge seekers."

On the site, documents can take the form of whitepapers, case studies, and analyst reports -- or just about any other type of written or graphical material you could imagine. How do you ask is this relevant for Spend Management? Today, it's great for learning more about the space (think of it as almost an aggregated vendor learning center). For example, you can click here to see a number of collected whitepapers already available on the payment and eProcurement space (along with ratings). It looks like Ariba has even posted some of its document collection by the looks of it. Longer-term, I have some ideas on how a socially networked document management approach like this could transform such areas as contract and engineering specification management between organizations. But I'll leave these ideas for Manoj to hear when I take my next much overdue trip across the pond. That is, if he's willing to buy me a pint of bitter (why in the rest of the world is beer served cold, I've always wondered?)

- Jason Busch