Software applications have come a long way in meeting the needs of modern users. Rather than providing piecemeal solutions that offer only limited features, developers are now expected to build comprehensive platforms that deliver an end-to-end experience. For systems that manage digital documents, the ability to view and manipulate multiple file types natively, without forcing users to switch to an external program is a “must have” feature.
But building document viewing tools from scratch takes up valuable development resources and often pushes developers outside their areas of expertise. Fortunately, third-party software integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc are making it easy for these developers to quickly add features and capabilities that give their solutions an edge.
Director of Product Management at Accusoft
To learn more about how developers can implement flexible document viewing capabilities into their applications without compromising performance, we sat down with Mark Fears, Director of Product Management at Accusoft. He walks us through the importance of choosing the right viewing, collaboration, and capture tools and explains how PrizmDoc’s new Hybrid Viewing feature is making life easier for developers and end users alike.
Why has document viewing become an essential feature for so many applications?
Documents have been key to business for many years. For example, the first step in starting a business is creating a business plan. Document creation and viewing is the cornerstone of a business and integral to all aspects of operating a business. Moving
documents to digital formats provided a more efficient medium for creating, storing, accessing and repurposing documents. This is driving the need for business software applications to effectively utilize document viewing and manipulation.
The demand is growing at a rapid rate as PrizmDoc customers create new and innovative ways to manage, distribute, and access information in business documents. Today, PrizmDoc is used to view billions of documents per month with some PrizmDoc deployments supporting over one million document views per day and continues to grow.
How do document collaboration and capture tools provide additional value to users?
At a high level, it’s all about efficiency, which equals saving money. Businesses need to move fast while reducing costs. For collaboration, it’s about enabling two or more individuals to contribute to document creation or modification to gain agreement or produce something new. Collaboration improves the way a team or individual contributors work together and to solve problems.
Capturing information in a shared document like a contract, for example, protects all parties from liability, sets clear expectations, and ensures everyone knows what they are committing to before they begin working together. The main purpose of capturing is to be able to transform information from all sources into a format that can be distributed and shared. PrizmDoc allows users to capture and collaborate to create or modify documents that can be securely distributed and shared with others.
Why are more developers turning to third-party integrations instead of building document features in-house?
The main advantage of using third-party integrations is contracted support and ensuring your enterprise software has the latest security and improvement updates. When building software solutions in-house, there is a significant overhead cost associated with staffing and maintaining that software and that burden rests solely on an internal deployment.
Companies have learned over time (usually by hard experience) that they can’t afford the risk and hidden costs of in-house software development, which is why more corporations are turning to software companies with reputations and expertise in document lifecycle management solutions. Because Accusoft has hundreds of users with thousands of deployments, the overhead costs of software development and maintenance spread across many companies instead of one.
What are some important factors to keep in mind when selecting an integration partner?
When considering an integration, there are several factors to consider in order to determine whether it adds value to both existing and new customers. Firstly, it’s important to assess whether the integration provides new features and benefits to customers, and how easy it will be for them to take advantage of these benefits. This is crucial to serving existing customers and attracting new ones. Additionally, the
integration should be evaluated to determine whether it will open up new market opportunities, as expanding market share and generating new revenue is vital.
While protecting current revenue is an important consideration, it’s equally important to evaluate other factors that may not be immediately associated with ROI. These may include the partner’s industry experience, technology knowledge, and support, as well as their overall stability. It’s important to choose a partner who is invested in building a strong and lasting relationship, and who can bring valuable expertise and knowledge to the table. By carefully considering these factors, businesses can make informed decisions about which integrations will provide the most value to their customers and their bottom line.
It’s about identifying the business value of the integration and then understanding the willingness of this partner to work with you when you need it most. At Accusoft, we have decades of experience in the document lifecycle and a broad range of technologies to support key document lifecycle solutions.
PrizmDoc recently debuted a new Hybrid Viewing feature. Can you explain how it works from a technical standpoint?
PrizmDoc Viewer offers client-side PDF viewing functionality that reduces the load on the server by parsing and rendering PDF documents completely on the client. This means the server is freed up to handle more concurrent users and with most of the processing occurring on the client, the user experience is more akin to locally install software responsiveness.
Whenever a document is sent to the PrizmDoc server, the server determines whether or not the document is a PDF. If so, the PDF is sent directly to the viewing client because the client has the ability to render a PDF in the browser. If the document is not a PDF, the server will convert the document to a viewing format compatible with a web browser, SVG.
Along with client-side PDF viewing, there is a new pdf type of Viewing Package specifically designed for client-side PDF viewing. While existing Viewing Packages will work with client-side PDF viewing, the new package type can be generated faster and requires less storage. This also means that the customer can pre-convert all of their content so that when any document is requested for viewing, it will utilize the Viewing Package sending the PDF document directly to the client server.
This new architecture reduces server requirements for large deployments while providing a responsive user experience when viewing documents.
From a developer’s standpoint, what’s the biggest benefit of Hybrid Viewing?
It’s all about performance and cost savings. When we deployed Hybrid Viewing in Accusoft’s own PrizmDoc cloud deployment, we immediately saw a reduction in server requirements. In the Accusoft cloud, we deploy a cluster of AWS servers. Within hours after turning Hybrid Viewing we began to see a drop in server load and the number of servers required to support the volume of documents being processed. We were able to reduce the number of servers and our server costs within days.
Customers will also be able to add workload since the majority of document processing is occurring locally which allows developer applications to scale usage cost-effectively.
How can end users benefit from applications that leverage the Hybrid Viewing feature?
With the addition of Hybrid Viewing, Accusoft has reduced costs, in some cases up to 30%, of PrizmDoc deployments while dramatically increasing performance. So we are working to decrease cost while increasing productivity for our customers and their users.
From the end user’s perspective, they will have a more responsive experience when viewing documents. Since Hybrid Viewing combines the best of both centralized and distributed computing, viewing documents in the PrizmDoc Viewer feels more like using a locally installed application rather than a web viewing experience because page scrolling and jumping between pages occurs instantaneously. That improvement in performance comes from doing all that processing work locally on their computer and not on a remote server in a cloud.
How can people learn more about PrizmDoc?
To find out more about how to implement powerful viewing and document management tools into your application with PrizmDoc, visit the Accusoft website at www.Accusoft.com.
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