Draper firm fields document tracker

NextPage
Draper firm fields document tracker
Program follows files among computers or drives, enforces policies
By Tom Harvey
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 06/16/2008 11:53:39 PM MDT

Companies are beginning to deploy new document management tools, created by NextPage of Draper, that allow them to track documents even if they are on an employee's computer, have been forwarded by e-mail or are on a USB drive.

NextPage is rolling out software that aims to solve document problems for large businesses that create millions of electronic records annually but have trouble managing them or even knowing which ones exist or where they reside. When sued or facing regulatory action, the companies often must spend millions of dollars just responding to demands that they produce relevant documents.

"Essentially the business problem we're chasing down is that today, in a highly sensitive legal and regulatory environment, the customers that we serve need to have tight control over all the documents they create," said NextPage CEO Darren Lee.

Lee, in a recent interview, cited a study by Dupont of five lawsuits in which it was involved. During the process of responding to requests for information, the company found 75 million documents.

"As they peeled back those 75 million documents, over half were documents that should never have existed," he said. "They should have been deleted or thrown away based on existing policy."

The cost of identifying and classifying those documents was $12.5 million.

Allan Bendall, president of Strategic Discovery Inc., a San Francisco company that helps companies manage documents, said NextPage offers a distinctive response to such concerns.

Most document management systems depend on centralized control, a system where everyone works out of the same server and must check in and check out documents. But such centralization often rankles employees.

"It's very difficult to get people to do that, particularly in professional services," Bendell said, citing "knowledge workers" who find such systems inefficient and tend to ignore protocols and work off the hard drives of their own computers.

Under NextPage's product, "people can continue to manage their documents independently, while offering some of the benefits of centralized control," said Bendell.
NextPage's solution is software that tracks documents into all of those areas where they might be stored.
"We would know of everything on your hard drive," said NextPage's Lee. "We would know of documents on your e-mail. We would know them on a USB. We'd know them if you sent them to someone. We know every single instance of it. We know every version of it."
That knowledge allows a company to enforce retention policies consistently through its ranks.
A study of 108 chief information officers found that more than 60 percent said that only half of employees cooperate with company retention policies. NextPage sponsored the study.
With NextPage's software, companies are able to set up policies that can range from benign e-mails telling an employee that a document should be destroyed or retained to the drastic: going into a hard drive and deleting a document.
"You can be as light or as draconian as need be" in enforcing retention policies, said Cyndi Tetro, vice president of marketing.
NextPage was started in 1999 when it created products for Internet searches. Those products were sold and the company then began work on its document management system.
tharvey@sltrib.com