Doc Tracking: Track document opens & prints, control use

  Track Document Use

There is little that is so exciting as the subject of document tracking.  If you think it’s about as interesting as watching paint dry, then you’re wrong, and there it is.

Ever since the supermarkets discovered loyalty cards (pre-dates Google although they now do a splendid job tracking each and every web move that you make with them, and a rather large fortune selling that knowledge) knowing what users (aka consumers in some marketing thinking) are doing is valuable.

Just as a supermarket wants to know your buying habits and patterns so that they can punt to you things that you normally buy, they can also contrast your habits with similar people, see what else they bought, and see if it would appeal to you.

Now this can be good – you might like the other choices and it does save you the effort of thinking, or it can be bad if you blow this month’ s salary on crap it turns out you don’t either need or want.

But that is one side of document tracking.  If a seller knows how often his books are read (actually, opened, so it can be misleading, ‘cos how often have I opened a recipe book and then ignored it?) then he ‘knows’ how to target the kinds of books you might be interested in.

(It crosses my mind that this document tracking stuff may not work quite so well when I am reading War and Peace [Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky damn it], which, even if you don’t put it down, and you would have to be seriously strong if you didn’t, it is not a 5 minute wonder, but a most of this month epic.)

But document tracking for commercial purposes, whilst it mimics the supermarket tracking and web analysis of the search engines, is probably at a lower level than the element of document control and document tracking that the corporate enterprise would find useful.

  Enterprise Document Tracker

Now for the enterprise, document control is an essential.  Far too many internal documents contain information that is subject to this or that regulatory control, or is a secret that you seriously do not wish to find on a download site (just look at the US government and the Wikileaks fiasco where huge numbers of supposedly confidential documents ended up on the Internet, to see exactly what I mean about failure to implement document tracking and document control in any useful way).  Too little too late is their mantra.

For the corporate, document tracking – who exactly was authorized to see this, when (if ever) was it opened, can be amazingly useful information, especially once you understand that electronic evidence can be just as good as any other kind.

Imagine that, after some cock-up or other, someone is asked – did you see the instructions concerning the security of this document?  Be very careful, because with document tracking they can show that the document was at least opened, so they are entitled to come to the conclusion that it must either have been read or consciously ignored.  This already happens with email, so extending it is no big deal.

So document tracking is suddenly valuable.  And knowing which location it was opened at can be kind of interesting as well.  If top secret documents are getting opened from someone’s home rather a lot, it might suggest that they take way too much work home and need some helpful counseling (if you know what I mean) or using DRM to stop documents working outside of an office location.

In the corporate world, doc-tracking is therefore seriously interesting from many perspectives.  It complements document control.  If you don’t have document control, then you don’t have anything at all.