NetDocuments: bringing the world one step closer to a 'paperless' society.

• Author: Conlon, Grace

FREE love, one world and a "paperless" society. Those were three visions of the future promised by the tie-dyed generation of 40 years ago, when computer technology was in its infancy. Movies, television and the daily assault of seductive e-mail messages attest to the cultural wallop of the first prediction. A world tied together through international commerce lends credence to the second. And technology now available through NetDocuments, an Orembased provider of web-based document hosting, renders a solid foundation for establishing the third.

The need for a more paperless society that a document web hosting company such as NetDocuments affords has burgeoned over the last 30 years, as corporations of all sizes began wondering how to best deal with a gowing mountain of documentation. The possibility of a paperless planet became more of a probability in 1999, the year CEO Kenneth W. Duncan, his brother Lee, and Alvin Tedjamulia formed NetDocuments. "[The company] is unique in that it functions as a host service [for documents] on the web," says Tedjamulia, now the company's chief technology officer. Today, NetDocuments technology is changing the way many companies even think about documentation.

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NetDocuments software can search through tens of millions of documents, provide logical organization of corporate-related documents in folders and subfolders, and control an unlimited number of versions--maintaining which is the official version and cleaning up older versions. A collaborative container allows documents to be shared with users...