Mobile file access: Can Xerox deliver?
Xerox, which bills itself as "The Digital Document Company," is no laggard in the field with its mDoc 2.1 application that provides access to corporate files. Xerox offers a few variations on the mobile delivery theme that position mDoc as a true enterprise system. But more importantly, Xerox demonstrates that it could potentially become an industry leader when it comes to file viewing technologies for mobile devices.
"Could" is the operative word, because the viewing technology that Xerox is showing here has yet to be incorporated into the mDoc product. Xerox has a remarkable reputation as a company that can develop stunning innovations while failing to market them effectively. Think back to the graphical user interface and the mouse-both were primarily developed by Xerox and helped usher in profound changes to end-user computing. But whether these were cases of Xerox being too innovative for the time or simply not opportunistic enough, it was ultimately left to companies like Apple, Microsoft, and others to successfully turn the technologies into blockbuster products.
This time around, Xerox has a chance to make some significant noise in the mobile world. The viewer technology runs on the mDoc server and converts a variety of document types to image files using the JPEG 2000 imaging and compression standards. The results are impressive--snapshots of documents that are lightweight enough to send over relatively slow wireless transport mechanisms and maintain all of the original formatting including graphics. As demonstrated on a Compaq iPaq Pocket PC PDA, document pages were rendered sharply even on the unit's diminutive screen. But Xerox takes the process a step further. Even on the roomiest high-resolution PDA display, a dense page of text is difficult to read in miniature form. So Xerox provides a tool that lets you zoom into selected areas of the page. This technique should work great for viewing the details of schematics or engineering drawings. And because the processing is happening on the server and only minimal amounts of data are being moved, performance--response time--should be acceptable for practical use.
The results of Xerox's technology are impressive; the company has essentially broken down one of the key barriers that has kept PDAs out of the mainstream of enterprise computing.
Some of mDoc's more prosaic features are still notable for enterprise environments. For example, while many other companies offer mobile file access that requires users to pass their requests through the companies' own Internet-based services, Xerox puts that function behind the corporate firewall. On the mobile side, carriers and services such as Motient and GoAmerica handle the request routing from Web-enabled mobile devices; on the secure side of the firewall, an mDoc server running atop Windows 2000 or NT on the corporate network responds and routes the requested documents back through the firewall. Files may be accessed directly from a network server's file system, but the system also integrates with Xerox's DocuShare document management system. Hooks into other repositories, such as Microsoft's SharePoint, are in the works.
But the viewer is the key part of the mDoc picture. Xerox has built a small, agile company within the company to develop mDoc, and it has a patent pending on the technology. The company says that this streamlined operation will allow it to incorporate the viewer technology into mDoc by June of next year. Given its history of technological triumphs and marketing flops, the question isn't so much whether Xerox can deliver on the technical promises--the guess here is that it will--but it's more a matter of whether Xerox can beat the competition to market with a usable, reasonably priced product. Time will tell.