JustSystems announced the “document as the application,” the company’s vision for the future of information creation, collaboration, and delivery.

JustSystems’ ‘document-as-application’ approach blurs the line between traditional documents, which provide rich context, persistence and portability; and business applications, which provide live data and an interactive user experience. The result is a dynamic document that comes to life with diverse and distributed information sources that are always up to date.

“A pervasive business dilemma is how to best inform people,” said Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing and business development for JustSystems. “Users get the latest data but little context when they’re working within business applications. Documents provide users the bigger picture, but the data it includes is often stale as soon as the document is published. The JustSystems approach provides the best of both worlds, giving users a real-time, fully contextual view of their business.”

Based on JustSystems’ XMetaL and xfy (pronounced “x-fie”) product lines, dynamic document capabilities have transformative potential for document-centric business processes in financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and other industries where data constantly changes, and where working with out-of-date and out-of-context information carries a high price.

Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC said, “XML and XML-based solutions from companies like JustSystems are breaking down the barriers between content and data and documents and applications. The concept of a dynamic document blends the rich context and portability of a document with the live data and interactivity of a business application, allowing documents to become authoritative sources of information, rather than snapshots in time.”

Detailing the Document as the Application
JustSystems’ XMetaL and xfy products form the basis for the ‘document as the application’ vision, which is about creating dynamic documents that come to life. With dynamic documents, the worlds of document publishing and application development converge. Traditionally, publishing processes focused on rendering of static information in static documents via print, PDF, HTML, and other formats. However, business depends on dynamic data, and static documents only provide a snapshot in time.

Users who need the most current information possible must go to the source – the business applications and other systems of record. That sort of “on-the-glass” user experience is fine for some business processes, but others are inherently document-centric. Product design, field-based maintenance and service delivery and other human-centric and collaborative processes depend on the persistence and rich context that a document format uniquely provides. As a result, users are forced to copy and paste data into documents, breaking the link to the sources of record and freezing the data in time.

The JustSystems view of dynamic documents is fundamentally different from today’s traditional XML-based authoring, offering advantages in data access, interactivity and rendering, including:

• Persistent links to source data
• Interactivity
• Dynamic rendering