The evolution of document processing

document word processingBefore computer

Before the computer age most if not all of the documents where handmade.
A lot of labor work was needed in order to produce documents and calculations.
Letters and forms to fill where handled by typing machines and calculations
where made by people.
A reference book with tables of pre-calculated logarithms where used by
people.  many techniques that we think of as computer-based
were actually developed to improve the efficiency of manual processes, many
employees worked as human “Computers”.  When we think about it today it’s amazing and it was about 5 decades ago, that’s all.

 

document word processing

Microsoft Office

During the nineties, Microsoft Office broke into our lives and it dramatically
changed the way we are using documents.
Documents were used in all aspects of business processes.
The ease of use of Office made it the official application for documents within
organizations and individuals.
But still, the most use of Office was as a stand-alone product.
Most documents where needed human labor in order
to layout documents, enter data from external data sources and so forth
There where still problems using server-side Automation of Office
Running Office Applications from a server-side environment was risky and
unsupported.

document word processing

These days

Share Office documents on the cloud by using Office 365 or other Cloud solutions
became possible and let Office users in organizations working on shared documents
on major business processes.
The changed structure of Office documents into Office Open XML   made running Office Applications from the server-side environment becomes possible without all  the old
problems that we had using binary Microsoft Office documents.
Now we can have fully automatic processes contains documents generation and server
updates from these documents in a secure and trusted environment.
Using Open standards and Cloud technology we can now go through the limitations
that we had using documents.
The documents today are much more complex than it was in the past so we have to look
for new methods for document handling.
Documents automation and sharing are no longer a vision. Full automation of handling
documents on the server is here now.
All this tedious hard work can be done robotically. Think about it, robots don’t get tired,
they don’t need a salary they don’t get angry, and they work 24/7.