Discovering PrizmDoc Editor: An Interview with Steve Wilson by ProgrammableWeb

Businesses operate on process, and processes aren’t always easy to define. That’s why workflow management is often a complex challenge to solve. Many organizations face the task of mapping out workflows that incorporate every step in the process accurately.

Often times that involves collaborating on documents, emailing revisions, and losing track of what version is final. That doesn’t even cover the security risks involved if the documents have sensitive information. Document management solutions help solve those problems, but they don’t always provide exactly what companies need.

APIs make it possible to solve for dilemmas like these inside your own application. Instead of spending time and money to migrate content into another document management solution, APIs make it possible to outsource functionality – not switch applications. This is a big deal for organizations that need document viewing, editing, redaction, and approval capabilities.

Our PrizmDoc Suite APIs enable existing solutions to enhance current capabilities with advanced document processing functionality. Steve Wilson, VP of Product at Accusoft, spoke with ProgrammableWeb about these solutions in more detail on their podcast, Developers Rock.

“Accusoft is the technology behind the scenes. We provide white labeled solutions that allow other people to accelerate their project, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We save them development time. That’s always been our bread and butter. That’s where we’ve landed with document management as well, based on the needs of our customers,” says Wilson.

In the podcast, Wilson discussed the newest addition to the PrizmDoc Suite, PrizmDoc Editor. Host David Berlind, Editor and Chief of ProgrammableWeb, was intrigued by its origination. The idea for PrizmDoc Editor originally came from an Accusoft pain point. The company needed a way to streamline customer renewals and discovered a gap in the market for the efficiency it desired.

“With over one thousand customers, processing renewals can be a real pain without a streamlined process, especially when it happens every year. Each one of our customer contract documents went through a strenuous process of email, redlining, and comparison,” said Wilson. “We would essentially create the contract in a word processor, email it to the client, go through the redlining process, and hope that the version we download from our last email thread is the correct one. We had to compare everything to make sure,” he recalls.

After testing out various open source solutions, the company decided they needed something more custom for their needs. The products they were testing weren’t scalable enough, which presented a challenge and an opportunity for growth. Accusoft’s team of engineers came together quickly, and a developer created PrizmDoc Editor during a weekend hackathon project.

“I didn’t like this open source solution we were testing. It kept falling down. With the load our customers were putting on our system, there just wasn’t a way to scale it in a manageable and efficient way,” said Michael Irigoyen, Senior Software Engineer.

“He thought he could do a better job over the weekend, and over several weekends he did. Michael built a great proof of concept, brought it back to the management team, and we gave him the green light to build a minimally viable product,” remembers Wilson. “It started through our own workflow solution to expose customers to its capabilities. It’s since evolved into what it is today. PrizmDoc Editor is now the product that other customers can consume in their own document management system to provide that same functionality we provided for our clients and our sales team.”

PrizmDoc Editor is a secure document assembly and editing solution used by developers to deliver in-browser document creation and editing functionality to their users. With white-label capabilities and a customizable interface, this powerful document editor easily integrates with collaboration platforms such as CRM, CMS, and more for a seamless user experience. Learn more about the PrizmDoc Suite and all of its capabilities today.

To listen to the full podcast or read the full interview transcript, please visit ProgrammableWeb.