Technical FAQs

Question

I am receiving a 401 Unauthorized when trying to use PrizmDoc Cloud. What could be the issue?

Answer

This error is likely the result of neglecting to specify your API key.

To fix this, specify your API key in the headers of your request to create a viewing session.

Question

How do I store and retrieve documents in subdirectories of the configured documents directory in PrizmDoc PAS?

Answer

You can retrieve documents from subdirectories when dealing with local files. Simply pass the subfolder in the fileName parameter when creating the viewing session. You can test this by manually placing a document inside a subfolder and making the following POST request:

`http://localhost:3000/ViewingSession`

    {
        "source": {
            "type": "document"
            "fileName": "folder/document.pdf"
        }
    }

TAMPA, Fla. – On September 22, 2020, Accusoft announced its latest SDK, ImageGear PDF. This integration enables developers to add a variety of PDF functionalities into an application.

“We are proud to add ImageGear PDF as the latest addition to our product portfolio,” says Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft. “We recognized a need in the market for a more robust PDF solution that developers could use to enhance their products. Using our proprietary technology, I knew we could bridge that gap.”

ImageGear PDF gives end-users the ability to merge multiple PDFs, split a PDF into multiple PDFs, rearrange pages within a PDF, add pages or remove pages in a PDF, and more. The SDK adds programmatic annotation capabilities as well as compression, signature, comparison, and data capture.

“ImageGear PDF is a great tool for developers looking to enhance their application,” says Mark Hansen, Sr. Product Manager of SDKs. “Accusoft has a variety of different PDF solutions, but we wanted to add a more robust SDK that solves PDF pain points more efficiently.”

ImageGear PDF is available with an optical character recognition (OCR) add-on feature, which programmers can use to search for specific characters within a document, highlight different sections, and markup the output for easier viewing and collaboration. To learn more about ImageGear PDF, please visit our website at accusoft.com/products/imagegear-collection/imagegear-pdf/.

About Accusoft:

Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.

Question

How can I enable content encryption in PrizmDoc Viewer?

Answer

First, you need to enable content encryption on the PrizmDoc Server in the central configuration file. To do this, find the viewing.contentEncryption.enabled section and change the value to true. Save the changes to the file and restart the PrizmDoc services for the change to take effect.

The file paths for the central configuration file are:

Linux: /usr/share/prizm/prizm-services-config.yml
Windows: C:\Prizm\prizm-services-config.yml

Next, you need to enable content encryption in the Viewer. To do this, in the index page of your viewer (Default.aspx in C#, index.php in the PHP sample, index.html, etc.), provide the encryption option in the viewer options parameter as follows so that the Viewer can handle encrypted data:

function buildViewerOptions() {
    ...
    var optionsOverride = args.pop(); // always last arg
    var options = {
        ...
        encryption: true
    };
    var combinedOptions = _.extend(optionsOverride, options);
    embedViewer(combinedOptions);
}

For more in-depth information on enabling content encryption in PrizmDoc, please refer to our documentation here.

 
View this introduction to PrizmDoc and the benefits it can deliver for your web-based application. In this webinar, you will learn:

  • About PrizmDoc’s capabilities for document viewing, conversion, search, annotation, redaction, editing, and its many other document processing functions
  • The benefits of integrating this industry-leading collection of REST APIs into your application
  • How others have benefitted from integrating PrizmDoc into their applications
  • How easy it is for you to get started with PrizmDoc

January 17, 2024 – Tampa, FL – Accusoft, a software company specializing in industry-leading secure document viewing, processing, and automation technologies for integration into Enterprise Content Management solutions, announced the latest release of PrizmDoc today. The latest version now includes AI for Personally Identifiable Information Detection and Redaction.

“Enhanced data security and improved regulatory compliance are very important to our customers, particularly in the Legal, Insurance, and Financial Services industries,” said Steve Wilson, Accusoft’s Chief Product Officer. “This newest version of PrizmDoc makes meeting these requirements easier.”

AI for Personally Identifiable Information in PrizmDoc: Features and Benefits

The new PrizmDoc AI for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Detection and Redaction module allows end users to search and detect PII in a document. This provides:

  • The page number where the information is located
  • The ability to see the specific related text
  • What type of PII the AI has identified
  • An identification confidence score for each item

Once reviewed, end users can easily redact the information with a click of a button, or this process can be automated by using APIs.

Software developers can access this functionality using APIs to create workflow automation and enable user interface tools to provide functionality to end users.

PrizmDoc’s newest feature removes the need for end users to manually scan documents trying to identify PII for redaction, reducing bottlenecks and delays, and saving companies a significant amount of time.

Accusoft’s Chief Operating Officer Megan Brooks added: “This release marks a distinct milestone for Accusoft and PrizmDoc. Enhancing PrizmDoc with AI gives our customers a unique capability that allows them to differentiate their ECM solutions from the competition. As we stay close to our partners, the market, and the evolution of AI as it impacts the Document Management industry, we look forward to delivering more innovative feature enhancements to our customers.”

Learn more about PrizmDoc or to schedule a demo of the new PII features

About Accusoft

Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in document processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve the most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including Docubee and PrizmDoc are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version releases, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com

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Few industries have been impacted by the proliferation of digital technology than the financial services sector. In fact, it’s one of the few markets where the average consumer can easily observe how much has changed in a short amount of time. Many people haven’t even set foot inside a bank for years, and millions pay all of their bills exclusively online. According to the US Federal Reserve, personal checks declined from 58.8 percent of non-cash payments in 2000 to just 8.3 percent in 2018. Both of these trends are driven by the increased convenience of FinTech applications, and the same changes have impacted the lending industry, as well.

What Is FinTech Lending?

Since the 2008 financial crisis, a new breed of lenders has become a disruptive force in the banking sector. Unburdened by the cumbersome infrastructure that makes large financial institutions slow to adapt to change, FinTech lenders utilize the latest technology to deliver a more responsive, personalized, and transparent lending experience to consumers. These innovative startups have combined easy-to-access digital platforms with sophisticated data analytics to streamline the lending process and deliver funds to borrowers much faster than could be accomplished with traditional loans.

Borrowers, it seems, have been quick to embrace this alternative source of lending. From 2013 to 2018, FinTech companies increased their share of the personal loan market from a mere five percent to thirty-eight percent. That rapid growth is a result of increased penetration into the digital marketplace and more flexible credit scoring that allows FinTech lenders to assess risk and approve loans more effectively. 

In the early days of the industry, most FinTech lenders still relied upon traditional FICO credit scores when evaluating a borrower’s potential to repay loans. Over time, however, they have used a variety of alternative scoring mechanisms driven by data collection algorithms to create a more dynamic picture of a borrower’s credit status. Between 2007 and 2015, for instance, the correlation between FICO scores and the rating system used by one prominent peer-to-peer FinTech lender declined from 80 percent to just 35 percent.

The “Tech” Behind FinTech Lending

The loan adjustment algorithms working under the hood of FinTech lending applications are incredibly sophisticated, but they need good data for fast, accurate underwriting. While traditional lenders focus on predictable data points like income, debt payments, and assets, the digital nature of FinTech applications allows them to go much more granular. By gathering insights from other customer applications, internet searches, and even geolocation data, they can create a more complex profile of each customer, which then allows them to structure loans and other financial products that meet their specific needs while also protecting the lender to unnecessary risk.

This new approach to lending has helped FinTech applications to cut down the “time to yes” on credit decisions from the three to five weeks commonly seen from traditional banks to as little as five minutes. Even more critically, they can use digital funding to deliver cash to borrowers in less than 24 hours compared to the typical lender’s three month response time.

Improving “Time to Yes” on Credit Decisions

In addition to deploying more sophisticated risk adjustment algorithms to assess credit worthiness, there are some additional ways that FinTech lenders can continue to improve performance and efficiency.

Embrace Paperless Automation

The first and most obvious step they can take is by eliminating paper forms from the application process whenever possible. One of the reasons why banks and other financial services organizations move so slowly is due to the time it takes to fill out, fax, scan, and review physical documents. Not only are these forms inefficient, but they’re also prone to clerical errors when an applicant’s data needs to be transferred from the form into a database or application. By digitizing the application process wherever possible and automating data capture, FinTech lenders can significantly cut down on processing times and eliminate the human errors that so often create additional delays.

Increase Document Management Versatility

Shifting to an emphasis on digital documentation brings another complication along with it because there are a variety of file formats used throughout the financial industry. Some documents need to be in a specific format for compliance purposes, and if customers are submitting files through a FinTech lending platform, they could be using multiple different file types. 

In order to streamline processing, FinTech applications need to be able to easily convert a wide range of file types into a few key formats that work best with their processing workflows. That means FinTech developers will need to integrate powerful document conversion tools into their software to ensure that they can avoid any troublesome incompatibility issues during loan processing.

Enhance Data Capture Capabilities

Although FinTech lenders are developing incredible algorithms capable of analyzing massive amounts of data to shorten credit application times, they are still dependent upon the information made available to them. That means developers need to implement data capture tools that can pull key data from a variety of sources and compile it into an easily searchable format. 

Optical character recognition (OCR) engines can quickly extract information for any number of documents and images to create searchable files that FinTech software can quickly process as needed. For hand-printed documents scanned into digital format, intelligent character recognition (ICR) tools can be deployed just as effectively, allowing FinTech lenders to gather data from a wide variety of sources.

Expand FinTech Lending Capabilities with APIs and SDKs

One of the easiest ways for FinTech developers to quickly build lending-friendly features into their applications is to leverage API and SDK integrations. Rather than building new functionality from scratch, they can instead take advantage of existing, proven solutions to enhance their applications. This allows them to keep the focus on the core differentiators of their FinTech lending platform, allowing them to process and approve loans faster while minimizing potential risk.

Accusoft’s collection of API and SDK integrations provide powerful viewing and processing capabilities when it comes to FinTech workflows. Whether you need to convert multiple file types quickly, clean up document images, or perform OCR data capture, Accusoft has the solution to unlocking your FinTech lending application’s potential.

Question

I am trying to retrieve documents and files to view in PrizmDoc Viewer. The files are located in a NAS device. The file server is available via an HTTP link but I would prefer not to use the HTTP put method.

Answer

A NAS device is short for Network Attached Storage. Typically, to access these devices would be no different than a shared network drive from a server.

You can setup Prizm Application Services (PAS) to point to a NAS device, if there are actual file shares set up on that device. Also, a key note to remember is that both PrizmDoc and PAS should be running with a domain id which has full access to that share so that the services can access the files when called.

For instance, you have a folder on the NAS device called PrizmFolders and it is shared with a network drive share of \mynasdevice\PrizmFolders. You can modify the pcc.win.yml file to point to that root folder by updating the document.path as outlined below. Keep in mind that the backslashes have to be escaped so you will need an extra backslash for each backslash in the path:

documents.path:"\\\\mynasdevice\\PrizmFolders"

Once this is done, when posting a viewing session through PAS, you can simply specify the subfolder\filename. For instance, if there was a folder called northregion and a file called metrics.pdf (\mynasdevice\PrizmFolders\northregion\metrics.pdf) you would be able to specify northregeion\metrics.pdf in the post command.

Question

I would like to be able to query my PrizmDoc Server for all documents currently in a state of processing. I want to be able to do this to determine if a document is “hanging” during conversion, to determine my system’s efficiency (My RAM and CPU are at X% with ten documents converting), or for other tasks. This is currently possible for individual processes if you know the process ID. Is this possible for all processes?

Answer

The current version of PrizmDoc does not have an API to determine if any file is currently converting on PrizmDoc Server. PrizmDoc provides viewingPackageCreator, contentConverter, redactionCreator, and markupBurner APIs that report the status of a specific process, and whether it is in progress or not. However, it is currently necessary to know a specific processId to obtain that information.

There is an active Feature Request for this item available for viewing here.