Technical FAQs

Question

How do I ensure temp files are deleted when closing ImageGear .NET?

Answer

All PDF objects are based on underlying low-level PDF objects that are not controlled by .NET resource manager and garbage collector. Because of this, each PDF object that is created from scratch should be explicitly disposed of using that object’s Dispose() method.

Also, any ImGearPDEContent object obtained from ImGearPDFPage should be released using the ImGearPDFPage.ReleaseContent() in all cases.

This should cause all temp files to be cleared when the application is closed.

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Question

How do I ensure temp files are deleted when closing ImageGear .NET?

Answer

All PDF objects are based on underlying low-level PDF objects that are not controlled by .NET resource manager and garbage collector. Because of this, each PDF object that is created from scratch should be explicitly disposed of using that object’s Dispose() method.

Also, any ImGearPDEContent object obtained from ImGearPDFPage should be released using the ImGearPDFPage.ReleaseContent() in all cases.

This should cause all temp files to be cleared when the application is closed.

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InsurTech SDK

The insurance market is booming. As noted by research firm Deloitte, the property and casualty (P&C) sector saw a massive income uptick in 2018 and steady growth last year that’s predicted to carry forward through 2020. To help manage the influx of new clients and handle more claims, many firms are spending on insurance technology (insurtech) — digital services and solutions that make it possible to reduce error rates and enhance operational efficiency. InsurTech SDKs are important components of this transformation.

Both in-house insurtech solutions and third-party platforms often excel in specific areas but come up short in others, putting insurance firms at risk of writing off potential gains. While solution switching and ground-floor rebuilds offer one route to success, there’s another option that’s more custom to your business needs: software development kits (SDKs). Here’s a look at three top SDKs that offer customized functionality potential.

FormSuite for Structured Forms: Solving for Data Capture

Time is money. The faster insurance companies accurately complete and file documents, the greater their revenue potential. And as noted by KPMG, the need for speed is more pressing than ever. Many insurance sectors have seen substantial increases in both claims and new applications as the COVID-19 crisis evolves. 

As a result, accurate and agile forms processing is critical to keep up with demand. If current insurance software can’t quickly capture forms data, recognize standard form fields, and let users easily create standard form libraries, policy processing falls behind.

FormSuite for Structured Forms makes it easy for developers to build in form identification and data capture that includes comprehensive form field detection with OCR, ICR, and OMR functionality and the ability to automatically identify scanned forms and match them to existing templates.

ImageGear for .NET and C/C++: Simplifying Conversion

Conversion is critical for insurance firms. Depending on the type and complexity of insurance claims, companies are often dealing with everything from Word documents for initial client assessments and .GIF or .JPG images of existing damage to contractor-specific PDFs or spreadsheets that detail necessary materials, time, and labor costs. The result? A mash-up of multiple file types that forces adjusters to spend valuable time searching for specific data instead of helping clients get their claims process up and running. This makes it difficult to recognize value from emerging digital initiatives. 

Accusoft’s ImageGear for .NET and ImageGear for C/C++ empower developers to integrate enterprise-class file viewing, annotation, conversion, and image processing functions into existing applications, allowing staff to both quickly collaborate on key tasks and find essential data across a single, easy-to-search document.

 

ImageGear: Streamlining PDF Capabilities

While insurance technology offers substantive opportunities for end-users to capture, convert, and retain data, this technology can also come with the challenge of increased complexity. According to recent research from PWC, for example, firms looking to capitalize on insurtech potential must be prepared to rapidly develop new product offerings and embrace the expectations. 

As a result, companies need applications that streamline current functions and allow them to focus on creating cutting-edge solutions. For example, PDF is a file format that is still used by enterprises worldwide to maintain document format consistency and maximize security. When it comes to converting multiple files into a PDF, software can be expensive and introduce data security issues. 

This can all be solved with an SDK like ImageGear, which makes it possible to integrate the total PDF package into any document management application, both reducing overall complexity and freeing up time for staff to work on new insurance initiatives.

Insurtech forms the framework of functional futures in policy applications, claims processing, and compliance reporting, but existing software systems may not provide the complete capability set companies need to make the most of digital deployments. These top SDKs offer insurance IT teams the ability to integrate key services, improve speed, and boost security at scale. Learn more about Accusoft’s SDKs at www.accusoft.com/products. 

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Question

I am trying to perform OCR on a PDF created from a scanned document. I need to rasterize the PDF page before importing the page into the recognition engine. When rasterizing the PDF page I want to set the bit depth of the generated page to be equal to the bit depth of the embedded image so I may use better compression methods for 1-bit and 8-bit images.

ImGearPDFPage.DIB.BitDepth will always return 24 for the bit depth of a PDF. Is there a way to detect the bit depth based on the PDF’s embedded content?

Answer

To do this:

  1. Use the ImGearPDFPage.GetContent() function to get the elements stored in the PDF page.
  2. Then loop through these elements and check if they are of the type ImGearPDEImage.
  3. Convert the image to an ImGearPage and find it’s bit depth.
  4. Use the highest bit depth detected from the images as the bit depth when rasterizing the page.

The code below demonstrates how to do detect the bit depth of a PDF page for all pages in a PDF document, perform OCR, and save the output while using compression.

private static void Recognize(ImGearRecognition engine, string sourceFile, ImGearPDFDocument doc)
    {
        using (ImGearPDFDocument outDoc = new ImGearPDFDocument())
        {
            // Import pages
            foreach (ImGearPDFPage pdfPage in doc.Pages)
            {
                int highestBitDepth = 0;
                ImGearPDEContent pdeContent = pdfPage.GetContent();
                int contentLength = pdeContent.ElementCount;
                for (int i = 0; i < contentLength; i++)
                {
                    ImGearPDEElement el = pdeContent.GetElement(i);
                    if (el is ImGearPDEImage)
                    {
                        //create an imGearPage from the embedded image and find its bit depth
                        int bitDepth = (el as ImGearPDEImage).ToImGearPage().DIB.BitDepth; 
                        if (bitDepth > highestBitDepth)
                        {
                            highestBitDepth = bitDepth;
                        }
                    }
                }
                if(highestBitDepth == 0)
                {
                    //if no images found in document or the images are embedded deeper in containers we set to a default bitDepth of 24 to be safe
                    highestBitDepth = 24;
                }
                ImGearRasterPage rasterPage = pdfPage.Rasterize(highestBitDepth, 200, 200);
                using (ImGearRecPage recogPage = engine.ImportPage(rasterPage))
                {
                    recogPage.Image.Preprocess();
                    recogPage.Recognize();
                    ImGearRecPDFOutputOptions options = new ImGearRecPDFOutputOptions() { VisibleImage = true, VisibleText = false, OptimizeForPdfa = true, ImageCompression = ImGearCompressions.AUTO, UseUnicodeText = false };
                    recogPage.CreatePDFPage(outDoc, options);
                }
            }
            outDoc.SaveCompressed(sourceFile + ".result.pdf");
        }
    }

For the compression type, I would recommend setting it to AUTO. AUTO will set the compression type depending on the image’s bit depth. The compression types that AUTO uses for each bit depth are: 

  • 1 Bit Per Pixel – ImGearCompressions.CCITT_G4
  • 8 Bits Per Pixel – ImGearCompressions.DEFLATE
  • 24 Bits Per Pixel – ImGearCompressions.JPEG

Disclaimer: This may not work for all PDF documents due to some PDF’s structure. If you’re unfamiliar with how PDF content is structured, we have an explanation in our documentation. The above implementation of this only checks one layer into the PDF, so if there were containers that had images embedded in them, then it will not detect them.

However, this should work for documents created by scanners, as the scanned image should be embedded in the first PDF layer. If you have more complex documents, you could write a recursive function that goes through the layers of the PDF to find the images.

The above code will set the bit depth to 24 if it wasn’t able to detect any images in the first layer, just to be on the safe side.

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For over 30 years, Accusoft has developed groundbreaking digital imaging technology that has revolutionized the way applications manage and process content. From high-resolution image compression and file format conversion to data extraction and barcode recognition, Accusoft technology can be found in some of the most sophisticated and widely used software in the world. The company’s enduring success is built upon a combination of patented engineering innovations and key strategic acquisitions.

Humble Beginnings and Early Success

The origins of Accusoft go back to the late 1980s, when founder and CEO Jack Berlin got a hands-on look at one of the first digital cameras at a trade show and developed an interest in the nascent technology.

“I just fell in love with it and wanted to get involved in digital imaging,” he recalls. That desire led Berlin to found Pegasus Imaging Corporation in September of 1991. “It started as a hobby, but it became serious pretty fast.”

The company quickly found its niche selling innovative image compression and decompression technology that software developers could incorporate into their applications. Over the next decade, Pegasus Imaging made a name for itself thanks to advancements in lossy and lossless JPEG compression that were adopted by leading photo imaging companies such as Kodak, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Konica Minolta.

In 1998, Pegasus Imaging expanded into medical imaging with the groundbreaking PICTools Medical SDK. The company quickly made a splash in the market by solving the infamous “DICOM bug” associated with the Cornell codec, an open-source codec frequently used for lossless JPEG compression. Pegasus Imaging’s engineers were able to identify why the codec rendered some images unreadable after decompression and provide a means of both compressing images safely and decompressing files once thought to be corrupted beyond repair. That ability to quickly solve imaging problems helped make PICTools Medical a major success with some of the world’s largest medical technology companies, including GE Healthcare, McKesson, Philips Medical Systems, Siemens Medical Solutions, and Toshiba.

Evolution and Expansion

Although Pegasus Imaging enjoyed a great deal of success in its first decade, Berlin knew the company needed to grow if it was going to retain a competitive edge in the 21st century.

“The challenge with the technology business is you have to improve it or lose it,” he says. “You don’t get to sell the same product ten years later. You have to continue to innovate.”

The early 2000s saw Pegasus Imaging embark on a series of acquisitions that helped expand its business and continue pushing the boundaries of innovating in digital imaging. Each merger involved a strategic consideration of how it would position the company to evolve to meet the complex challenges of the future.

“People typically want to buy growth, but we look at it differently,” Berlin says. “We’re a big believer that the reason to buy companies is their customers, their products, and their people. Products are worth nothing without their people.”

In 2004, Pegasus Imaging acquired TMSSequoia, which had developed the most sophisticated structured forms processing and document image cleanup technology in the world. The people behind that technology, however, proved even more valuable to the growing company, contributing to the development of several proprietary innovations over the years that followed. Their ongoing contributions can be seen in products like FormSuite, which remains an industry leader in forms processing technology.

The TMSSequoia acquisition, along with the development of its lightning fast ImagXpress toolkit, set Pegasus Imaging on the path to becoming a much bigger player in the document imaging market. Its next major acquisition came in 2008 with the purchase of AccuSoft, a Massachusetts-based imaging software company best known for its powerful ImageGear SDK. No sooner had the deal closed, then Pegasus Imaging expanded once again by acquiring the UK-based Tasman Software, which had developed groundbreaking barcode recognition technology that would eventually be incorporated into the popular Barcode Xpress SDK product.

Over the course of just a few years, Pegasus Imaging had greatly expanded its portfolio of document imaging and processing solutions by strategically identifying the technology and engineering talent that could fuel the company’s growth. To Berlin, making the most of those acquisition opportunities are critical to sustained success in a competitive industry:

“It’s grow or die. We’re up against larger and larger competitors. Consolidation gives you market share and economies of scale. If profitability goes up, you can invest in new product development, marketing, and growth.”

In 2009, Pegasus Imaging changed its name to Accusoft Pegasus to rebrand the company as a key player to watch in the document imaging and processing industry.

Integration and Innovation

The acquisition of AccuSoft expanded the company’s market share and expertise, but it also created a new challenge for the engineering team. AccuSoft’s ImageGear SDK frequently competed directly with Pegasus Imaging’s ImagXpress. While there was no question that the newly rebranded Accusoft Pegasus would continue to support customers using these products, strategic decisions had to be made about their respective futures.

As the team evaluated each product, it quickly became clear they were the result of very different approaches to software development.

“ImagXpress was much easier to use, but it didn’t have all the platforms and features of ImageGear,” Berlin recalls. “Their idea was to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the product, and if somebody complained, fix it. Pegasus wanted to make everything perfect and add features very slowly. I think there was a happy medium there somewhere.”

ImageGear’s ability to support multiple platforms and the rapid development of modern compilers eventually made it a more attractive SDK for developers, but the Accusoft Pegasus team incorporated the best features of ImagXpress into it to make ImageGear an even better product. Throughout the integration, the company put new processes into place to strike a balance between speed and perfection. Product management structures were also established to improve feedback loops, lay down feature roadmaps, and keep to development timelines without compromising quality.

All of these lessons would prove invaluable when Accusoft Pegasus acquired Adeptol in 2011 and added the company’s AJAX Document Viewer to its portfolio. While Adeptol’s browser-based viewing technology was undoubtedly innovative and correctly predicted what future web applications would require from viewing integrations, the product itself was Flash-based. In addition to being a proprietary technology, Flash contained multiple security vulnerabilities and was already on the decline by 2011.

The Accusoft Pegasus team got to work rebuilding the viewer using HTML5, making it much easier for developers to incorporate viewing features into web-based applications. As the new product took shape, it also allowed the company to expand into the growing market for cloud-based API integration products. Released as Prizm Content Connect in 2012, the HTML5 viewer would be rebranded in 2016 as PrizmDoc.

30 Years of Growth and Innovation

In 2012, Accusoft Pegasus rebranded once again to become Accusoft. Today, the company remains a pillar of the tech community in Tampa, FL even as it strives to expand its business globally. In 2021, Accusoft celebrated its 30th anniversary, a significant milestone for a privately held, employee-owned corporation that began as a hobby.

For Berlin, those humble origins and the long journey to success are what make a company like Accusoft special.

“It’s not just dollars and cents, but a sense of pride and competitiveness,” he says. “It stops being about money at some decimal point. It’s about the people and the legacy and seeing what you can do. We give back a lot to our community. I really enjoy that. We participate in our community, both in tech forums and charity drives and work days. If we cease being Accusoft or cease being Accusoft in Tampa, FL, that’s gone.”

Accusoft and Snowbound Join Forces

That same sense of pride and passion was shared by Simon Wieczner, President, CEO, and co-founder of Snowbound Software. Established in 1996, Snowbound first made a name for itself in the document imaging market with the RasterMaster conversion and imaging SDK. RasterMaster supports hundreds of formats and uses proprietary technology to quickly convert, archive, and display files in high resolution without loss of fidelity.

As two of the leading innovators in document imaging integrations, Snowbound and Accusoft routinely found themselves competing for the same customers over the years. “We were competitors, but not fierce competitors,” Wieczner recalls. “We would mostly run into each other at trade shows and talk about the market.”

Berlin first floated the idea of merging the two companies around 2015, but it wasn’t until much later that acquisition conversations turned serious. With so much money being invested in the tech industry over the previous decade, Snowbound had already received substantial interest from potential buyers, but most of the offers didn’t sit well with Wieczner.

“There’s been a craze over the last few years of growth equity companies looking for SDK companies,” he says. “They were offering good dollars, but without understanding our technology. So there was a little bit of distrust on my part. Some actually wanted to outsource everything and that would totally destroy the company.”

Many potential suitors were primarily interested in incorporating Snowbound’s technology into their own products rather than supporting existing customers and continuing to sell into the market. As conversations with Accusoft continued to progress, Wieczner realized that he’d already found the ideal acquisition partner.

“Accusoft understood the market, what our company did, and how we could fit together,” he says. “That’s why we felt ready to move on together.”

“Both Simon and I are passionate about the success of the company,” Berlin says. “It’s what small business people do. We tend to worship entrepreneurs that get in, build a shell, and get out with a billion dollars, but I don’t know if they’re fulfilled because there’s such fulfillment in seeing what you’ve built accomplish something.”

In late 2022, the companies moved ahead with a deal that saw Accusoft acquire Snowbound. The merger brings Snowbound’s RasterMaster® and VirtualViewer® products into the portfolio of Accusoft solutions:

  • RasterMaster®: A Java-based conversion and imaging SDK, RasterMaster can be incorporated into applications for all computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac. The SDK supports hundreds of document types through its proprietary format library and provides a variety of document imaging tools, such as annotations, redactions, OCR, text extraction, and image cleanup.
  • PrizmDoc® for Java, formerly VirtualViewer®: Developed to meet the demanding needs of the banking industry, PrizmDoc® for Java is an HTML5-based viewer that can be easily incorporated into web applications to allow users to view, annotate, and redact documents and images from any platform, anywhere. PrizmDoc® for Java’s library of APIs and out-of-the-box connectors for popular ECM applications (including Alfresco, IBM, and Pegasystems) make it a powerful tool for developers looking to quickly integrate advanced document workflow capabilities.

The Future

In keeping with Accusoft’s long history of strategic acquisitions, the Snowbound merger brings with it an influx of new customers, new technology, and new talent into the Accusoft family. Those resources will help the company to continue investing in innovation to compete in an increasingly high-stakes market.

“It’s a real challenge to incorporate other companies and take that risk, but they’ve done well with it,” Wieczner says. “We were deliberate in selecting an organization with a leadership team and product portfolio that would continue to grow, develop, and nurture what we have built at Snowbound.”

With three decades of experience and success to draw upon, Accusoft is better positioned than ever to meet the evolving needs of its customers and deliver a new generation of document imaging products powered by groundbreaking technology.

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Organized each year by ALM, LegalTech is one of the most important events for the legal industry. The conference brings together a broad variety of experienced legal professionals and innovative LegalTech providers to highlight the business, regulatory, technology, and talent trends in the market. In previous years, LegalTech was held in New York City and attended by more than 8000 people.

LegalTech 2021 Is Now Legalweek(year)

This year, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the organizers to take a different approach. The first decision involved shifting LegalTech from an in-person conference to a fully virtual event in order to protect the health of both attendees and organizers. While many industry events have made a similar transition, the LegalTech team went a step further by breaking the conference into a series of five interactive virtual events held over the course of 2021. This new virtual series was dubbed Legalweek(year) and aims to provide legal professionals with a powerful resource for working through an unprecedented era.

“This decision was made to address the needs of our legal community during these trying times of COVID-19 and to provide the type of innovative education, solutions, and connections that is so crucial to legal leaders,” said ALM’s Mark Fried. “The 2021 series will set the stage for a resurgence in the legal sector and a big ‘Welcome Back’ to attendees for our in-person Legalweek event (in 2022).”

The first virtual Legalweek(year) event is scheduled for February 2-4, 2021 and will feature bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams, legal AI expert Josua Walker, and former New Jersey governor and federal prosecutor Chris Christie as keynote speakers. Attendees will not only be able to participate remotely, but they will also have an additional six months worth of on-demand access to virtual content following each event.

Visit the Accusoft Legalweek(year) Virtual Booth

As a longtime sponsor of LegalTech, Accusoft is proud to participate in this groundbreaking series of virtual events. The conference has historically been a great opportunity for us to speak directly with the independent software vendors and legal IT professionals about the latest industry trends and LegalTech applications. 

This year, we’ll be hosting a “virtual booth” through the Legalweek(year) event site. Whether you’re a developer looking to solve a particular software challenge or a project manager building an in-house solution for your firm, you’ll find plenty of resources and support at the Accusoft booth. Read through our numerous case studies and LegalTech whitepapers or schedule a meeting with one of our product specialists to learn more about our SDK and API integrations for legal software. You can even chat with someone in real time if you need a quick answer!

After completing registration, Legalweek(year) attendees can access the Accusoft virtual booth during the event simply by logging into their account.

Visit the Accusoft Virtual Booth

Our LegalTech Solutions

Accusoft’s combination of content processing and conversion integrations help today’s innovative LegalTech applications reach their full potential. As law firms and legal departments incorporate more technology into their everyday operations, they need software tools capable of automating workflows, simplifying eDiscovery, and facilitating secure collaboration.

PrizmDoc Viewer

Our feature-rich HTML5 document viewer allows users to seamlessly view a variety of document and image files within their secure web application. Thanks to PrizmDoc Viewer’s powerful REST APIs, developers can provide additional functionality, such as annotations and redactions, that is essential for legal organizations.

PrizmDoc Editor

In addition to allowing users to edit DOCX files within the secure confines of their LegalTech applications, PrizmDoc Editor’s automated document assembly features streamlines the contract creation process to improve efficiency and accuracy. Documents can be assembled programmatically, incorporating commonly used or specific clauses, special language, and client data to eliminate “cut and paste” errors. Once documents are assembled, PrizmDoc Editor’s sharing tools allow firms to control access and ensure that everyone is working from the same up-to-date version.

ImageGear

With the ability to read, convert, and compress a wide range of files, our ImageGear SDK integration provides LegalTech applications with the tools they need to manage almost any type of file collected during the eDiscovery process. Powerful optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities allow ImageGear to read a wide variety of languages from around the world and convert scanned documents into searchable plain text or PDF files.

LegalTech in 2021 and Beyond

As legal organizations continue to make strides toward achieving true digital transformation, they will need versatile LegalTech applications capable of adapting along with them. Accusoft’s family of SDK and API integrations can help developers leverage the power of their innovative software tools and free up resources to focus on improving their core capabilities.

We hope you’ll join us at Legalweek(year) on February 2-4, 2021. Our booth will be available throughout the virtual event, so stop by to find out how Accusoft can help you realize the potential of your LegalTech applications.

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As part of our ongoing commitment to supporting the LegalTech industry in its effort to transform the processes used by law firms and legal departments, Accusoft recently sponsored an educational webinar in conjunction with Law.com entitled “Build or Buy? Learning Which Is Best for Your Firm or Department.” Hosted by Zach Warren, editor-in-chief of Legaltech News, the webinar featured Neeraj Rajpal, CIO of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, and Kelly Wehbi, Head of Product at Gravity Stack, a subsidiary of the Reed Smith law firm. 

Together, the panelists brought two unique perspectives to the ongoing “build vs buy” debate, both from the software vendors who provide LegalTech solutions and the decision makers working at the legal firms who make difficult decisions regarding technology solutions.

Build vs Buy: The Choices Before the Decision

Both Rajpal and Wehbi agree that any decision involving building or buying technology solutions has to begin with defining the problem a firm needs to solve. Regardless of whether you’re working with an independent legal firm or a legal department within a larger organization, it’s critical to understand the business problem, existing pain points, and potential value of a solution.

“When you start asking the right questions,” Raijpal notes, “you sometimes come across a situation where the requirements are not very clearly defined and that is a big red flag to me because when requirements are not defined, you’re not solving anything.”

Wehbi shares that concern about the requirements gathering process, pointing out that things tend to go wrong when firms fail to consider both the scope and magnitude of the challenge they’re trying to overcome. “Organizations can struggle a lot when they jump a little too quickly to a solution or to thinking about just what the return would be on a potential new product or service offered.”

It’s also critical to make sure that the firm is willing to accept some degree of change. If existing business processes are unclear or if no one is willing to consider changing how they work, then no amount of technology is going to make a difference. Understanding the culture of the firm and securing the buy-in from leadership is absolutely critical to making any technology integration succeed whether you’re buying a solution or building one from scratch. 

The Pros and Cons of Building LegalTech Solutions

For an organization that has the resources, methodologies, and skill sets necessary to develop a solution that’s specifically designed to meet its unique requirements, building can be a great decision. The key advantage here is that it focuses specifically on the firm’s processes and user pain points, allowing developers to design a solution that is much more targeted than an “off-the-shelf” product.

Benefits of Building

  • Applications can be customized to your exact specifications, allowing them to better address your specific business needs.
  • Since you manage the solution from end to end, you retain much more control in terms of application features and functionality, how data is managed, and access security.
  • Developing a specialized solution creates room for innovative technology that can provide a competitive edge.
  • A custom-built solution presents fewer integration challenges, especially when it comes to interfacing with legacy systems used by many legal organizations.

Risks of Building

  • Building a new solution from the ground up requires a great deal of time and resources that might be better spent elsewhere.
  • Investing in custom software creates substantial technical debt that must be maintained over time and could create integration problems in the future when additional upgrades are required.
  • If the new solution doesn’t contribute enough to the bottom line to justify the cost of operations, it could lead to negative economies of scale that make it difficult for the firm to grow its business.

The Pros and Cons of Buying LegalTech Solutions

Not every organization has the development resources to build a customized solution from the ground up. If they’re not ready to make that capital investment, a cloud-based offering may be better suited to their needs. Leveraging a proven, ready-to-launch SaaS solution offers a number of advantages, but could impact how the company makes technology decisions in the future.

Benefits of Buying

  • Since SaaS services are usually cheaper and easier to implement, they are often the best option for companies with limited IT resources.
  • Cloud solutions are good for solving common technology problems that smaller firms face.
  • Already-live functionality means SaaS solutions can be implemented on a faster time frame.
  • The cloud vendor handles all building and maintenance costs associated with the platform.
  • Since the vendor sets up workflows and integrations as well as troubleshooting, your internal team is freed up to focus on other tasks.

Risks of Buying

  • Off-the-shelf solutions offer less customization and control over infrastructure and data.
  • Even industry-specific SaaS solutions are built for a general market in mind, so their features may not solve your firm’s unique requirements.
  • Since the vendor manages security, customers have less oversight over how their sensitive data is managed.
  • Working with a SaaS provider exposes firms to market risk. If the vendor goes out of business or sunsets a product, it may be difficult to repatriate data or transition to another provider.

When to Build

For firms with the development resources that are already using in-house document management solutions to streamline processes, SDK and API integrations are often the best way to enhance functionality. Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Suite leverages REST APIs and advanced HTML controls to provide powerful document viewing, conversion, editing, and assembly capabilities to web-based applications. Our SDK integrations also allow developers to build the functionality they need directly into their software at the code level.

Document Assembly

Law firms need automation solutions that allow them to easily create and manage multi-part, multi-stage contracts. Thanks to Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Editor, legal teams can rapidly identify and assemble sections of pre-existing text into new content that is both editable and searchable. PrizmDoc Editor integrates securely into existing applications and delivers in-browser support to help lawyers assemble assets without resorting to risky external dependencies.

Case Management

LegalTech applications can manage and review cases much more efficiently by integrating data capture, file conversion, and optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities. The ImageGear SDK helps legal teams access case data in a variety of formats without the need for downloading additional files or relying on third-party viewing applications. It can also convert multiple file types into secure and searchable PDF/A documents, making it easy to tag files with client numbers, names, and other identifiable information. Thanks to PDF/A functionality, ImageGear ensures that firms can stay on the right side of federal regulations.

eDiscovery

The rapid transition to predominantly digital documents has fundamentally altered the way legal organizations approach the discovery process. Innovative eDiscovery processes can streamline case management while also protecting client interests. In order to implement these strategies effectively, firms need applications that provide extensive file format support and search functionality as well as redaction and digital rights management (DRM) tools capable of protecting client privacy. PrizmDoc Viewer delivers these features along with scalable annotation capabilities that make it easier for collaborators to proofread, review, and make comments to case files without creating version confusion. As an end-to-end eDiscovery toolkit, our HTML5 viewer also includes whitelabeling support so it can be fully integrated into your application’s branding.

When to Buy

For smaller legal teams looking for broad functionality without development hassles or a new firm taking its first steps toward document automation, it often makes more sense to implement a bundled, buy-in solution like Accusoft’s Docubee SaaS platform.

Document Completion

Docubee makes document management easy with drag and drop data routing. Users can quickly create legal contracts, route the appropriate data to documents, deliver contracts for approval, and facilitate signing with secure eSignature technology. 

Customized Templates

With Docubee, legal teams can create customized document templates and manage them on a section-by-section basis. Individual clauses can be added or removed as needed, allowing attorneys to repurpose document templates instead of creating them from scratch for every client. 

End-to-End Support

Two-way communication support helps firms to build better dockets and negotiate more effectively. Documents can be updated automatically and version controls ensure that everyone is always looking at the most up-to-date version of a contract. Docubee also allows users to prioritize key tasks with collaborative redlining and notification tools.

Long-Term Storage and Security

Docubee stores data for up to six years to meet eDiscovery requirements. To better protect client privacy and meet changing compliance requirements, firms can also set destruction dates for contracts, templates, and case files. Docubee is SOC2 compliant, featuring multi-layer encryption to keep data under tight lock and key.

Hear the Full Conversation

To hear the full webinar and learn more about how legal firms make the difficult choice between building or buying their next technology solution, sign up now to get access to an on-demand recording of the event. If you’re ready to learn more about how Accusoft technology is helping to power innovation in the legal industry by delivering the latest in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions, visit our legal industry solutions page or contact us today to speak to one of our product experts.

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Question

During the installation of ImageGear for .NET (v23.4 and above), the installer reaches out to Microsoft’s site to download the VC++ redistributable and .NET packages. Which one(s) does it download?

Answer

The ImageGear for .NET installer places the following redistributables onto a system:

In addition to this, the following .NET framework versions are installed:

  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.x
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

So, if a system already has all of these installed on it, this should prevent the installer from trying to reach out to download them.

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TAMPA, Fla. – Accusoft, the leader in document and imaging solutions for developers, is proud to announce its beta release testing program, which provides participants with real-time access to its latest product developments.

Customer input is a key factor in Accusoft’s mission to build better software integrations that deliver functionality like OCR, image cleanup, forms processing, file manipulation, and viewing solutions. Thanks to the new beta program, participants will get early access to brand new products and have the opportunity to provide feedback on the latest features for existing products. Developers can also customize what types of betas they would like to opt into so they can focus on products most relevant to their business.

“Our previous betas for PrizmDoc Editor and PrizmDoc Cells were extremely beneficial for everyone involved, “ says Mark Hansen, Product Manager. “Our team received rapid feedback that helped make our products better, while participants had the opportunity to shape those products to meet their specific requirements.”

By signing up for the beta program now, you can participate in the active beta for PrizmDoc Forms integration, which will allow you to repurpose (or use) your PDF forms to easily create, customize, and deploy as web forms anywhere. You’ll also be the first to know about new product offerings and have the ability to opt into beta releases for Accusoft’s existing products, such as ImageGear, FormSuite for Structured Forms, and PrizmDoc Suite.

To learn more about Accusoft’s exciting new beta program, please visit our website at https://www.accusoft.com/company/customers/beta-release-program.

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.

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