In a nutshell, what we’re looking to do is to overcome the problems inherent in a folder-based system. Remember the days of trying to locate a physical file you dropped in the wrong folder in a physical filing cabinet. In fact, I still periodically do this with invoices and other bills that our government hasn’t quite certified as evidence for tax returns.

There goes a few hours…

But electronically, it’s not too much better either — we, like everyone else, have had many problems over the years with organizing and finding files with something like Windows Explorer. One of the biggest problems being that it’s exceptionally easy to ‘lose’ files and pretty hard and time consuming to find them again.

Well — with Benubird we are trying to overcome the problems by providing users with a smart-data based file system (some would call this properties or metadata-based). We’re hoping to allow our users (ourselves included) to easily ’smarten’ files with details such as title, author, subject, categories and tags and then use that information in the future to quickly retrieve the files using powerful filters or search.

We say that you can collect, organize and archive documents – ‘smartening’ - and then retrieve by search, tags and browsing. You could, if you wanted to, store all of your files in one Windows Explorer folder and just use Benubird to help you manage files.

Sounds pretty easy, we sure hope so…

Recently a friend asked me a simple question: what do you mean by personal document management? Since this concept is at the core of what we’re doing with Benubird, I thought I would quickly expand on it.

It’s fairly straightforward, ‘personal’ refers to the fact that the focus is on the individual user (i.e. you) and ‘document management’ refers to the fact that Benubird is all about helping you to efficiently organize the documents on your computer. You may have noticed that there are a lot of document management systems out there that focus on big corporations such as Hummingbird, Interwoven, and SharePoint etc.., but there are far fewer document management systems that just focus on you.

Well – we do, and that’s it… — pretty simple, eh?

Oh, btw — we do plan to pop up some slide-shows and demos in the next few weeks, and an alpha/beta version shortly afterwards.

Looks like it’s action stations over at Adobe — my good mate Don from PDFzone reports that sources tell him that the new Acrobat.com may enable document sharing direct from their own servers.

As Don says, it might be of interest to small business, but for large business — there’s always an element of distrust or at the very least anxiety about handing over the crown jewels for someone else to mind. With Adobe throwing out another bucket load of product names — Don talks about the next-gen Macromedia Breeze aka “Acrobat ConnectNow” riding on the coat-tails of an alleged Acrobat 9 release.

Whilst it’s always exciting to check out the next version of Acrobat – I am a little confused as to what “conducting real-time meetings on your desktop” has got to do with a PDF file. For the most part, it seems to me that Adobe is trying to leverage the Acrobat name in order to attract attention to its new product-line.

Is Acrobat quite so nimble? I’m not so sure anymore – what once used to be lightweight, easy and fast to distribute – and understand, is now becoming a monolith, trying to be all things to all people – perhaps approaching (in complexity) some of the Microsoft products that it lives alongside.

The CRE8 Conference for creative, marketing and communications professionals will be held between April 30 and May 1 at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida.

If you can drag yourself away from the fun and games for long enough you’ll find they’re running plenty of PDF related sessions.

The two PDF themes they’ll be focusing on are PDF User and PDF Technical. Topics include PDF File Format In-Depth, PDF Standards: News from the world of ISO, Acrobat Accessibility: Making your PDFs Comply with Section 508, 10 Years of Smart PDF and Secure Document Distribution with PDF, to name but a few.

Fittingly, given it’s location, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner will be giving the keynote speech.

I was chatting with a good friend of mine, Don Fluckinger, about storage and retrieval of his various pieces of content all over the web and throughout print publications.

First up, a quick intro to Don: If you’re a member of the PDF world, you’d have definitely encountered his writings at PDFzone, and probably caught up with him personally at various PDF industry events.

He writes for a plethora of print publications, web sites and blogs professionally as well for his own collection of personal blogs and the like. And that’s lucky, I can back this up with real-life testimony - you don’t win too many brownie points on a blind date for being only a PDF aficionado. Yep, Don is involved in way more than just PDF.

Don generates content in many diverse subject areas to “stay sharp, creatively,” as he puts it. A group of readers completely separate from the PDF world know him for articles he writes for hospital trade publications in the realm of nutrition, clinical research, and respiratory care. He also writes for Antiques Roadshow Insider, a newsletter connected to the popular American television show, and covers the breath and depth of American baseball cards dating to the 1860s as the editor of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, the 1,800 page annual published by F+W’s magazine Sports Collectors Digest.

Then there is his not-so-serious alter ego Mojo Flucke, Ph.D., a self-proclaimed doctorate in gratuitous adjective-olgy, who writes CD reviews at Bullz-Eye. Mojo also extols the virtues of “lost” old tunes at PopDose, a blog gang-written by a clique of about 20 writers.

He’s again on staff manning up the Nib Noise newsletter for fountain pen collectors along with his father-in-law Richard Binder. You’ll find a complete list of his writings at Mashable.

I guess you can see where I’m going here: Don generates masses of content in many different formats, some of it “stored” on paper and other pieces in a variety of forms electronically from Microsoft Word to PDF to HTML to email to Google Docs–to name a few.

So what about backup? Don does store his data in triple on-site and off-site backups, so we’re not talking a second 1.44mb floppy disk under the bed - he’s got a pretty reasonable plan for protecting his data.

Problems come about when you ask yourself, is it the right copy - “Oh damn, I edited a copy via email at an internet cafe”, and how would you retrieve it in the future - “Where did I store that again?”

So what does that mean for Don (me and likely you as well) - we just don’t have a real-world, practical method for managing intellectual property, writings, files, documents, information, “knowledge” - whatever you want to call it. You know, stuff from the print world, your RSS feeds, blog posts, office documents.

What we’re aiming to do with our product Benubird is to give you a way to do that - feed the ‘bird’ a folder of your content, or perhaps a link to a page on the web. Maybe some print pages to OCR. In short, whatever you want to throw at it.

Don asked me will the ‘bird’ be able to assist in the process of bagging and tagging his articles for long-term storage, probably more importantly — allow for them to be easily retrieved at a later date, regardless of format. For all sorts of reuse- perhaps “Don on DVD,” including the good, the bad, and the ugly content he’s cranked out over the last quarter century.

It’s a challenge, but that’s what we’ve got on the horizon.

Last year the inaugural PDF/A Conference was held in Stuttgart, Germany, and a healthy crowd of over 200 were in attendance. This year the conference has been moved to Amsterdam and will run from the 10th till the 11th of April.

Speakers include Leonard Rosenthol (Technical Standards Evangelist) and Dr. Jim King (PDF Architect) from Adobe Systems, as well as Stephen Levenson, the convener of the ISO PDF/A committee.

For anyone interested in long-term document management and archival, the session topics should be very interesting, they include: PDF/A 101, Migrating Archives to PDF/A, Scan to PDF/A with OCR and Archiving Digital Documents, plus much more.

For more information on the PDF/A Conference visit the PDF/A Competence Center.

Some percentage of my bills, invoices, receipts and other notes are in paper form, and the rest are electronic. At the moment as I see it you’ve got two choices:

1. You print everything and file it.
2. You scan everything and store it.

Well, in years gone by with the ratio of printed material to electronic material, the former would have made more sense, but now with the price of scanners becoming more reasonable, I’m going to proudly join the ever-growing masses of people choosing to digitize their paper documents.

Given that most people spend a significant amount of time using computers at work and home, this change makes sense. Why organize all of your important files offline, when you receive most of them electronically? Why waste paper and space by printing out your electronic documents, unless it’s really required?

If you are looking to “rip” your paper documents, to join your existing electronic documents, then a good place to start would be reading these two articles: What’s on Jason’s Hard Drive and 10 File Management Tips. The first article discusses how to scan, organize and backup documents and the second article focuses on how to organize electronic documents.

Digitizing and organizing all of your paper documents (as PDF files, of course!) might be a bit of work at first, but in the long run, it’ll pay off.

With the first release of Benubird just around the corner we think it’s time to start letting everyone know a little more about what we’re doing. So let’s get started:

What is Benubird?

Almost a year ago, after over a decade of frustration at not being able to find a number of important documents, we first hatched the idea of creating an easy-to-use personal document management system.

As we began to explore the idea further we realized that there was a real opening in the document management market for such a product. In demand was something that could quietly sit on your desktop and help you organize documents in such a way that you would never have to worry about losing them again.

In short, something that would be powerful, functionality wise, but still intuitive and easy-to-use from the perspective of a regular PC user.

Since that moment of frustration we have been hard at work developing this idea into a product called Benubird.

What’s our background?

Our official bios can be found here, but in summary, we’ve been closely involved with document-related technologies like PDF and electronic books since 1997.

You may be familiar with our previous efforts at Planet PDF, home of the PDF user community, and Nitro PDF.

Stay tuned…

Both Rowan and I will be putting ‘pen’ to paper on topics such as document management, PDF technology and best practices for archiving and sharing documents.