Technical FAQs

Why am I unable to obtain a license using the License Manager?

One possibility is that you have strict firewall settings that are preventing our License Manager from connecting with licensing.accusoft.com, our licensing server. In order to connect with licensing.accusoft.com, you’ll have to make an exception in your firewall for our License Manager so that it can connect to licensing.accusoft.com on port 80 for http and port 443 for https.

In PrizmDoc, why do I fail to load/convert Excel documents with the error “Exception from HRESULT: 0x800AC472”?

The error message Exception from HRESULT: 0x800AC472 is usually associated with a failure involving an Excel document, found in the MsOfficeConverter.log. Below are some known triggers of it:

If the user is logged in as "SYSTEM", "LocalSystem", or any other non-user-account variant, this will cause PrizmDoc to fail when using MSO services. This is expected behavior when working with Microsoft Office documents in PrizmDoc. Please see step 6 of the Windows Installation documentation regarding this:

http://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#windows-installation.html

"Specify the login account (account name and password) that PrizmDoc Server will run under. If you are using the Microsoft Office (MSO) Conversion add-on, please make sure that the "login account" is a real user account with Administrator rights. Running PrizmDoc under the LocalSystem user or another Microsoft Windows integrated service account is not supported for this option."

It’s also crucial that the copy of Microsoft Office on the system has been activated. A not-licensed, not-activated, expired, or trial license will all cause Microsoft Office to not work with PrizmDoc.

More information: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/windows-requirements.html

"The installed copy of Microsoft Office must be activated in order for PrizmDoc’s Microsoft Office Conversion Service to work properly. Not licensed, not activated, an expired or trial version of Microsoft Office will not work with PrizmDoc."

Your default printer must be the Microsoft XPS Document Writer when working with Excel documents in PrizmDoc. Specifying another printer could possibly lead to this exception.

More information: http://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/natively-render-mso-documents.html

"The Microsoft Office Conversion Service requires the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer driver to be installed for the best conversion performance and rendering fidelity of MS Excel documents"

Ensure the Print Spooler service is started and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer is the default printer.

There is a known issue with version 13.3 of PrizmDoc where completely blank Excel files are not loadable in the Viewer. They will fail to load and throw the aforementioned HRESULT exception. This has been fixed in PrizmDoc version 13.6.

In short, please set up the PrizmDoc service correctly to run with a real user account, ensure the copy of Microsoft Office has been activated, and make sure the default printer is set to "Microsoft XPS Document Writer", then restart the service. This should fix this particular issue in most cases.

For more reading on considerations that Microsoft recommends when running their client-side MSO applications on the server, see this article:

Considerations for server-side Automation of Office

We are planning to upgrade our PrizmDoc Server and PrizmDoc Client to the latest major version. What is the best practice for doing so?

For best results, you will want to follow the instructions below to ensure the cleanest upgrade of the newest version:

NOTE: Before starting, make a backup of the following configuration files for use as reference when re-configuring your new version installation. This should be done before the PrizmDoc installer is run, as all configuration files will be replaced with new ones (resetting them to their default configuration).

• Prizm Server Configuration: prizm\prizm-services-config.yml

• Prizm Client Configuration (Windows): prizm\pas\pcc.win.yml

• Prizm Client Configuration (Linux): /usr/share/prizm/pas/pcc.nix.yml

• ServiceHost Configuration: prizm\PCCIS\ServiceHost\pcc.config

How To:

1. Uninstall the previous version of PrizmDoc Server and PrizmDoc Client. Be sure to delete all PrizmDoc folders that are still present. For Windows you can Find PrizmDoc Server and Prizm Client under Add/Remove Programs. For Linux, please follow instructions below for uninstall instructions.

Linux Prizm/PAS Service Uninstall:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#linux-uninstall-prizmdoc-serve.html

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/v13.10/HTML/webframe.html#pas-linux-uninstallation.html

2. Download the latest version of PrizmDoc for your operating system from https://www.accusoft.com/products/prizmdoc-suite/prizmdoc-viewer-builds/

3. Install PrizmDoc Server first and then the PrizmDoc Client.

4. At the end of the server installation, the install may request a reboot.

5. Make a backup of your new configuration files as listed above.

6. Modify each of the new configuration files and make the same changes as you did in the older configuration files.

NOTE: Do not just replace the new configuration files with the old version configuration files, as new configurations may have been introduced in the new version and they would be lost.

7. Restart the Prizm Services and Prizm Application Services to ensure the newly configured file changes take affect.

NOTE: If either service fails to start with an error after modifying the configuration files, replace the configuration files with the original copy of the configuration files and try making the changes again.

NOTE: If you are using viewing packages and have an existing database, we provide additional scripts in the \prizm\pas\db folder to modify your existing database. For example, upgrading from PrizmDoc 12.x to PrizmDoc 13.x we provide an additional script addTenantId to add a new field to one of the existing tables.

For reporting purposes, we want to rename the markup layer JSON files to help identify which tenant made the markup. For example:

c1fea5868607402c1b664272e5b82aeb7fff7390_0_0hg91gTqSCeg_P9B2Ko7BaH-YxkaazjH.json

rename to:

accusoft_c1fea5868607402c1b664272e5b82aeb7fff7390_0_0hg91gTqSCeg_P9B2Ko7BaH-YxkaazjH.json.

Is this possible?

The actual filename for an annotation .json file contains an encrypted value of the file path and document name. This is what is used to associate the JSON markup layer file with the document.

If you make changes to the first part of the file, PrizmDoc will no longer be able to associate those markups to the actual file.

As a alternative, you can set up a separate PAS instance for each tenant, which will provide a different markup layer for each tenant.

Or you can programmatically handle the markups and store them specifically for each tenant. The following articles outline our Markup JSON specifications:

• PrizmDoc Markup JSON specification:
  https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#markup-json-specification.html
• Use the JSON Markup Schema: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#marks-json-schema-usage.html