nextPage® security overview

Documents provide tangible evidence of decisions and agreements. They contain crucial intellectual capital. And they make key contributions to your brand and image. As a result, your organization invests significant time and resources creating infrastructure and processes to protect critical documents, safeguard information resources and manage the associated business risks.

NextPage understands the importance of document security. We work with thousands of customers to make sure that the NextPage service takes full advantage of existing security-related standards, technology investments and cultural practices. This technical paper provides information about how NextPage document security services can work within your current environment to support and enhance your existing information security processes and technologies.

NextPage provides a document solution that leverages your existing security infrastructure—and does not force you to implement complex new document permission schemes, provide security for a new centralized repository of information or force people to adopt unnatural new processes for sharing information.

You can read more about the NextPage security principles by clicking below.

The NextPage approach to document services breaks the conventional document management paradigm of centrally storing and managing documents. Rather than checking documents in and out of a central repository, NextPage users continue storing and sharing their documents the same way they always have—based on your organization’s existing business practices and social conventions. The NextPage service weaves a Digital Thread™ through these files, allowing users to track and manage them through the entire document lifecycle—regardless of where they’re stored.

To accomplish this, NextPage embeds a small amount of opaque metadata in every file it tracks. These metadata act as the file’s DNA and allow the service to determine whether and how any two files are genetically related.

The NextPage Client Service runs on each user’s computer. It consists of a background process and four add-ins (for Microsoft® Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Microsoft Outlook®). Together, these components perform the following functions with minimal user intervention:

The NextPage Global Service maintains just enough system state to allow it to ensure global consistency of metadata across the entire NextPage system. The global service runs in a hosting data center on a redundant server cluster. The Client Service can run indefinitely without contacting the Global Service; after a predefined amount of time, it merely displays out-of-date information.