Compliance and records retention can be real pain points for businesses. Fortunately, companies like NextPage continue to deliver relief with the newest version of its Document Collaboration product, a managed, hosted service called NextPage 2 Document Retention. NextPage says that only 30 percent to 40 percent of documents end up in corporate repositories. Document Retention provides a solution to corporate ar NextPage says that only 30 percent to 40 percent of documents end up in corporate repositories. Document Retention provides a solution to corporate archival problems that will actually get used. Document Retention knows what documents are sitting on PCs and laptops, manages the clean-up of intermediate files, and stores the final version in corporate repository. Like Document Collaboration, Document Retention doesn’t rely on a central document management repository to function; instead, it uses a distributed architecture to work with users rather than against them. Because of its unique architecture, users create, edit, and share documents using the same tools and in the same way they always have. Meanwhile, Document Retention sits in the background, tracking actions on managed documents.Suppose you’re the project manager for a project. Once you’ve created the project in Document Retention, anyone on your team can enter documents into the project. If you create a Word or Excel document and e-mail it to others on the team, they might save it to a drive, edit it, and send it to others. All the while, Document Retention is tracking where each copy of the document ends up. At the end of the project, the project owner sends an e-mail through the system with a “clean up” action attached. The e-mail is automatically routed to anyone with a copy of the document. When the recipient clicks on the action, old versions are automatically cleaned up and the final version is saved in the corporation’s designated archive.NextPage 2 Document Retention includes a client piece that sends cues to the server about user actions. There are also “shared data services” that work with applications such as Lotus Domino, Groove, and shared drives on SMB file servers.Companies might understandably be concerned about sending data to a hosted service that could be used to sniff out corporate activities. NextPage uses a hashed tracking code for documents that uniquely identifies the document, even when its name and contents change, without sharing any detailed information about the document’s contents. NextPage 2 Document Retention Pricing: Base cost is $100/user/year with volume discounts (minimum price of $25,000) Verdict: NextPage 2 Document Retention provides a method for versioning, tracking, cleaning up, and archiving corporate documents that users will actually use. Technology Industry