Records Management

In many industries - especially financial services - there are regulatory requirements to store data for various time periods. Examples include customer records, transaction records, financial statements, and even emails.

This adds up to a huge administrative challenge. Millions of records are created by many different systems - each has to be categorized, stored, regularly reviewed, available to retrieve at very short notice, then deleted as soon as the time period is up. Of course, in the meantime the legal definitions and time periods are regularly changed. And if you get it wrong, you're in deep trouble with regulators and establish a reputation in the press for bad management.

Part of the issue is that records exist in so many places - paper, database tables, email archives, file shares, mainframe storage. Every record should be tracked and tagged with a category, a creation date, an owner, and an expiry date.

Records Management on the web
Of course, a growing proportion of these records are now online - and this presents huge advantages:

• The URI: finally, a universal way to locate records.
• HTTP: a simple technique for transferring records, including standard descriptive headers
• Search Engines: sophisticated technology for crawling for records and for retrieving them
• HTML: a text format for records that can be quickly scanned and analysed, including meta tags

And of course, the web includes a cacheing system to manage expiry dates on every record.

There are two basic conclusions.

Firstly, you can expect Records Management Systems to become more and more like search engines - crawling the intranet for records, analysing them, categorising them, and flagging them when their expiry date is past.

And secondly, the best way to implement a records management solution is to migrate systems to the web - the basics are all built in!

Adobe's internet strategy

Adobe occupies a unique position in the market. With a focus on desktop graphics technology, it has also branched out into document workflow (Acrobat) and website design (Dreamweaver).

This focus on desktop applications is a weak point. As applications migrate to the browser, Adobe will have to change to avoid being taken over by internet-based competitors. So far, its attempts to cater for the internet have ranged from the hugely successful (Flash) to the barely begun (Photoshop).

So I've tried mapping out what Adobe should be like in a couple of years, after executing an ambitious internet strategy.

Adobe the hosted service provider
You can imagine logging on to Adobe.com (or your hosted site), viewing and uploading your videos, images and websites, and editing them online via your browser.

This takes Adobe beyond Google's YouTube and Picasa, by enabling online editing and private hosting. And Dreamweaver is replaced with a website hosting service, where professionals can log in and edit the site.

But end users will also log in to create their own webpages, like a blogging tool that enables images, tables, columns, videos, etc. This is the word processor of the internet age - a massive opportunity, and it should be a core competency for Adobe.

I've also decided that Adobe should lose its proprietary PDF file format, in favour of standard HTML and SVG. There are only three reasons why PDFs are popular - because everyone can read them, hardly anyone can edit them, and their conversion from other file formats (e.g. MS Office) is high quality. But everyone can read HTML and SVG / VML too, website permissions can be more tightly controlled, and Adobe can re-use that file conversion knowledge on their web hosting site.

Adopting an internet strategy
Here are the future products:

• A browser plug-in for playing video and audio
• An online hosting service for video, audio, and images (both raster and vector), with integrated online design functionality.
• Offline desktop versions of the video, audio and image design tools (useful for editing large files)
• A website hosting service, with integrated online website design tools (including a service for perfectly converting old office documents to webpages)

Here are the products it should no longer sell

• Acrobat reader - the PDF format is replaced with HTML and SVG / VML
• Desktop web design tools e.g. Dreamweaver
• Flash vector graphics - vector graphics are handled in the browser by SVG / VML

Massive opportunity
Because the industry is changing so quickly, there are massive opportunities in Adobe's market. Adobe has a lot of valuable experience - such as file format conversion, graphics technology, and website design - that will stand it in very good stead.

But to take advantage of these opportunities, Adobe has to adopt an internet strategy of moving away from desktop applications towards a hosted model.

Google, Silverlight and Apollo

So, as predicted, Google have announced online presentation software, and it's done using SVG and VML. You can see a sneak preview at http://ajaxian.com/archives/tonicpoint-ajax-powerpoint-with-svgvml

This makes the race for graphics plugins - Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Apollo - hard to understand. If they're not needed for the highest profile web graphics application, then what are they for?

Well, they'll both play videos and audio. It makes sense to treat these as plug-ins, because they rarely have to interact much with the rest of the page.

Mixing Vector Graphics with HTML
But for vector graphics - circles, lines, shading, rotations - plug-ins are a red herring. You need the browser to handle vector graphics directly, because you need it to be seamlessly mixed in the same document as HTML. That way, you can:

• mix and match HTML elements (e.g. fonts, bulletpoints, linebreaks etc) with additional graphical elements (circles, lines, shading, coordinate transformations) to enabler richer web applications
• share the events model - to seamlessly respond to user events (e.g. an SVG slider controlling an HTML form)
• share javascript and DOMs - adding, modifying and deleting nodes, or using Ajax, to create interactivity between any elements on the page
• share CSS, to style your site consistently

No plugin could ever satisfy these demands, all of which are required to produce web presentation software.

The web graphics market
Funnily enough, I think management at Adobe accepts these arguments. It's just that they don't have a browser, so they have to rely on plug-ins (which are quickly become very similar to a browser) until they find something else - likely improved designer tools for creating SVG / VML websites.

Microsoft have tried the other route - of replacing SVG / VML and HTML with a new language, XAML. But even an all-powerful monopolist won't be able to fight against the internet.

It's a myth that vector graphics in the browser are weak. They're good enough to produce presentation software, and they're getting better - SVG support is getting even better in Firefox, Opera and mobile devices, and Safari is gaining SVG support in the next release.

SVG / VML is the future
If you're considering writing a web application that requires vector graphics, you shouldn't worry about Apollo, Silverlight, or Flash. Just mix some SVG and VML in with your HTML. The technology already exists, it works fine, it provides the best possible integration with websites, and it won't go away.