Draper, Utah – May 11, 2005 – NextPage today announced that a recent study conducted by InfoTrends/CAP Ventures validates that most company workers have a strong need for collaboration solutions in the workplace. However, the research also shows that the biggest challenge to using collaboration is to get people to adopt those technologies in their day-to-day work.
According to the survey respondents, as published in InfoTrends report “Content-Centric Collaboration” in early 2005, 51 percent of technology users collaborate as part of their daily jobs and need collaboration technologies to do their work. Survey respondents anticipated that need would grow over the next year. However, the top two challenges of supporting collaboration were “convincing users to consistently take advantage of capabilities” and “encouraging users to contribute information into the system.”
“The study shows that companies are making investments in technology to facilitate collaboration,” said Michael Maziarka, director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures. “However, they are concerned about realizing the full benefits of collaboration, because it can be very difficult to get people to adopt new technology. With nearly two-thirds of collaboration today utilizing e-mail, any collaboration solution should integrate with e-mail to increase its chances of success.”
In addition, research respondents viewed “integration with e-mail” as one of the most critical capabilities when assessing collaboration technologies. Capabilities such as “notifications and alerts for new information” and ”document comparison between versions” were also viewed as being very important.
Survey respondents expected some of the biggest payback from investments in collaboration technologies in areas such as the quality of information, improvement in customer satisfaction, and improvement in the quality of the company’s products or services.
“The survey validates a lot of our customer research, which showed that many collaboration technologies were not taking into account the ad hoc processes that happen in e-mail and Microsoft®Office,” said Cydni Tetro, vice president of marketing at NextPage. “Our new service, NextPage® 1.5 Document Collaboration, helps fill those needs by integrating with e-mail and Microsoft Office so users can realize the benefits of collaboration and document versioning without leaving their primary work applications.”
NextPage 1.5 Document Collaboration is a new subscription service that eliminates ad hocdocument chaos for millions of business professionals who use Microsoft Office every day. NextPage 1.5 Document Collaboration provides users with real-time status and notifications about all documents on which they collaborate, providing control over the ad hoc processes that create the estimated 7.5 billion documents produced each year.
Unlike typical centralized solutions, NextPage 1.5 Document Collaboration doesn’t require IT infrastructure, takes only a few minutes to install and works with the applications people rely on every day – e-mail and Microsoft Office. In addition, users can still work with non-subscribers, and the service automatically knows when a new document arrives that it is a version of the original.
Professionals can download a free trial of NextPage 1.5 Document Collaboration at www.nextpage.com/trial.
About NextPage
NextPage brings control to the ad hoc world of business by introducing the first service that ties together uncoordinated and disconnected document versions that are stored as e-mail attachments, on hard drives and on servers. NextPage’s subscription service delivers up-to-date feedback, tracking and notifications about document versions, using the tools users work with every day – e-mail and Microsoft Office applications. Teams and organizations rely on NextPage to prevent wasted time working on wrong document versions, reduce the risk of sending out incorrect information and deliver control to normally confusing ad hoc document processes. Since NextPage was established in July 1999, the company has been building profitable document applications. For more information, visit www.nextpage.comor call 801-748-4400.
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NextPage is a registered trademark, and Digital Thread, Document Signature, Version History and Version Check are service marks of NextPage Inc. All other names are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Contact:
Mark Fredrickson
NextPage Inc.
801-748-4443
pr@nextpage.com