The paperless office has been a topic of discussion for several years among consumers and businesses alike. The advent of social media networks, where vast numbers of people interact online in blogs and collaborative web pages such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, is creating new examples of how business can move online and leave paper behind.

The introduction of the personal computer to the business world in the 1980′s surprisingly increased the amount of paper being used, as it became easier than ever to create new documents for personal and business use. Even e-mail added to this indulgence of paper when workers printed e-mails to keep on file or refer to when creating a new document.

However, with blogs and social networking sites exploding in popularity in the early 2000s, computer users began communicating, interacting, and sharing work and creative ideas online without paper or e-mail. Businesses quickly took note and began to launch internal intranets for distributing information that previously would have been printed in a newsletter.

It’s now commonplace to download presentations, videos and documents to your computer, work on them and send them back to the company network in a new iterations. Businesses have also started online collaborative sandboxes and virtual whiteboards, where teams can work on a project together and see the contributions and changes that other team members are making as they are happening. The end result can be an online document that team members can download to their own computer or view online.

The interactive social media shift is underway and the paperless office, enabled by electronic documents that live completely online, is following rapidly. Like many critical parts of everyone’s life, being able to interact with data online promises to deliver services faster and more efficiently, in addition to saving paper, time and effort.

-The ScanSnap Team