Tracking Service Targets Office Documents

NextPage Inc. wants to bring sanity to the chaos of managing Microsoft Office documents.

Following almost 18 months of testing and refinement, the Draper, Utah, company on Monday released its namesake document management service.

NextPage 1.5 tracks Office document versions and revisions while also notifying users of changes and of where various versions of documents are stored.

The service is an alternative to centrally storing documents and uses a lightweight desktop download in order to manage documents stored on local drives, network drives and in e-mail, NextPage executives said.

"We add a digital thread to these documents to track them wherever they go," NextPage CEO Darren Lee said. "Think of it like a GPS for the document."

Click here to read about NextPages decision to focus its business on document tracking.

NextPage is targeting Office documents because of the prevalence of those documents in enterprises and the workflow problems that arise as multiple people edit and share documents such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, Lee said.

"All told, about 7.5 billion documents are created on annual basis and the bulk of them are created on the edge and sent over e-mail," Lee said. "Thats the target area where we find a sweet spot for the service."

Along with tracking documents, NextPage 1.5 provides an awareness service that displays notifications about the status of documents. It also provides access controls to let the creator of a document determine who has the right to make changes to a file.

NextPage 1.5 is available now and pricing starts at $250 per user for a year.

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