Technical FAQs for "PrizmDoc Cloud"

 

PII Detection and Redaction

The landscape of legal content management is undergoing a transformative change, thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). Legal entities, burdened by the immense volumes of sensitive data they handle daily, are finding respite in AI-driven solutions for managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

By leveraging the innovative benefits of AI-enabled integrations, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can improve the case management, eDiscovery, and practice management software solutions they provide to law firms by securely identifying and redacting PII more efficiently than ever.

Navigating the Data Deluge with AI

Legal practices are inundated with vast quantities of PII, encompassing sensitive documents, client records, and case-related information. The manual management and protection of such extensive and intricate data pose a significant challenge.

AI technology is revolutionizing this process by automating the identification and categorization of PII within large datasets. This minimizes the risk of oversight or human error. Machine learning algorithms, integral to these AI systems, adapt to evolving data structures, ensuring comprehensive and up-to-date protection.

Ensuring Compliance with AI

Software applications used in the legal sector are tightly bound by various data protection regulations. Ensuring adherence to these complex and ever-evolving regulations is a daunting task for legal professionals.

AI solutions are adept at automating compliance checks, significantly reducing the burden on legal practices. These tools assist in adhering to the specific requirements of different data protection regulations, minimizing the risk of legal repercussions.

Revolutionizing Document Review and Redaction with AI

The manual review and redaction of sensitive information in legal documents are not only error-prone but also extremely time-consuming.

AI-powered tools are transforming this landscape by automatically identifying and redacting PII. This not only enhances accuracy and efficiency but also maintains the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Introducing PrizmDoc’s AI Capabilities

As we look towards the future, it’s exciting to introduce PrizmDoc’s new AI capabilities in identifying and flagging PII within documents. PrizmDoc’s AI stands out in its ability to identify sensitive or non-compliant content. Its functionality, accessible via APIs, enables the creation of workflow automations that are both efficient and secure.

Moreover, PrizmDoc offers user interface tools that extend AI functionality to end-users, making it more accessible and practical in everyday legal practice.

The Multifold Benefits of PrizmDoc AI for PII

Incorporating PrizmDoc’s AI capabilities into legal content management systems can lead to a multitude of benefits:

  • Reduced bottlenecks and faster decision-making processes.
  • Improved efficiency in handling and managing legal documents.
  • Enhanced data security, protecting sensitive client information.
  • Improved compliance with regulatory standards.
  • Overall enhancement in the quality and reliability of legal services.

The integration of AI in legal content management, especially with tools like PrizmDoc, is not just a step toward innovation; it’s a leap toward a more efficient, secure, and compliant legal practice. As technology continues to evolve, it’s clear that AI will play a crucial role in shaping the future of legal data management.

 

In the finance industry, managing and securing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a task of paramount importance, given the stringent regulatory landscape and the vast volumes of sensitive customer data handled daily. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in financial content management systems is a game-changer, offering a more efficient, secure, and compliant way of handling PII.

By utilizing AI-powered integrations, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and large financial institutions developing in-house solutions can transform the way their applications protect private information in the finance sector.

Tackling Regulatory Compliance with AI

The finance sector operates under a complex regulatory framework with compliance standards specifically tailored to the protection of PII. Traditional manual approaches to adhering to these regulations are not only time-consuming but also fraught with the potential for human error.

AI steps in as a crucial tool for ensuring compliance. By automating the process of compliance checks, AI reduces manual workload and minimizes the risk of non-compliance, thereby safeguarding financial institutions against potential legal and financial penalties.

Managing Massive Data Volumes

Financial institutions are custodians of enormous volumes of customer data. Manually identifying and securing every piece of PII in this vast data ocean is an uphill task.

Here, AI becomes indispensable. With its capacity to process and analyze large datasets efficiently, AI, through machine learning algorithms, can swiftly identify and categorize PII. This provides a scalable and accurate solution to manage and protect large volumes of financial data.

Securing PII in Complex Ecosystems

The finance industry relies on intricate, interconnected systems, with PII often being shared among various entities. Ensuring the security of this data across such a multifaceted ecosystem is challenging.

AI technologies offer a unified approach to PII protection. By implementing consistent security protocols across various financial systems, AI ensures a holistic and integrated strategy to safeguard sensitive information.

Introducing PrizmDoc’s AI Capabilities in Finance

As the finance industry evolves, it’s crucial to introduce innovative solutions like PrizmDoc’s new AI capabilities. Combined with PrizmDoc’s industry-leading redaction features, these automation tools stand at the forefront of identifying and flagging sensitive or non-compliant content within financial documents.

User Friendly Functionality

PrizmDoc’s AI functionalities are accessible via APIs, allowing for the creation of workflow automations that are both efficient and secure. Additionally, user interface tools extend AI functionality to end users, making it a practical tool in everyday financial operations.

Streamlined Workflows

Incorporating PrizmDoc’s AI into financial content management systems transforms the landscape of financial operations. This technology streamlines workflows, significantly reducing operational bottlenecks and paving the way for faster and more effective decision-making processes. Additionally, it significantly improves the efficiency of handling and managing financial documents.

Enhanced Security

A key aspect of PrizmDoc’s AI is its enhancement of data security, a critical factor in protecting sensitive customer information. This integration plays a pivotal role in ensuring improved compliance with regulatory standards, a vital requirement in the finance sector. Above all, it elevates the overall quality and reliability of financial services.

PrizmDoc AI Redaction Keeps PII Secure for Financial Applications 

The integration of AI in financial content management systems, especially with advanced tools like PrizmDoc, marks a substantial stride towards more efficient, secure, and compliant financial practices. As technological advancements continue at a rapid pace, the role of AI in reshaping the future of financial data management is becoming increasingly prominent and indispensable. By incorporating PrizmDoc’s AI capabilities into their FinTech applications, developers can manage documents more efficiently without putting PII at risk.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is becoming increasingly adopted across various industries, a trend that shows no signs of slowing. Its meteoric rise in ubiquity in such a short timespan has spawned the creation of numerous automation vendors, eager to get a piece of the pie. With all the stiff competition, comes continuous improvements to the quality of RPA services provided, as well as a constant demand for new features and updates. Because of this, most RPA solutions offer a little bit of everything, but if your workflow demands handling documents and extracting data quickly and accurately, then a traditional forms processing solution is your best bet.

The good news is that most RPA solutions are easy enough to work with and robust enough to be able to integrate almost any third-party entity into your automated workflow; and we already know that Accusoft’s FormSuite is the king of structured forms processing. So to get the best of both worlds, here we’ll demonstrate how we can combine the forms processing that FormSuite provides with an automated business process implemented using UiPath.

And the best part is… NO CODING REQUIRED! Now before we get into the project itself, let’s set up the scenario that we are automating.

The Scenario

Meet Todd.

He’s fresh out of college with a degree in finance and is now the newest victim… I mean, intern… at TLL, Totally Legit Loans LLC: A legitimate loan establishment for legitimate people. As assistant to the loan officer, Todd is responsible for:

  1. Sorting stacks of loan application papers that have been filled out by potential clients into three piles. These piles are for automobile loans, business loans, and student loans.
  2. Scanning each pile of applications onto his work computer. (TLL is in the process of going paperless).
  3. Reading each loan application and typing the applicant info into TLL’s very old (but totally legit) third party credit checking software, RiskE. Unfortunately, since there are three different kinds of loans he can encounter, there are three separate software programs he must interact with that correspond to each type of loan: RiskE Auto, RiskE Business, and RiskE Student.
  4. After entering the applicant data, Todd must click the submit button. RiskE will show whether the applicant should be approved or denied a loan.
  5. Todd then has to rename the file of each scanned application on his computer. The name should contain the loan application type, the applicant’s name, and whether they were approved or denied.
  6. Finally, Todd has to sort the renamed files into separate “Approved” and “Denied” folders on his computer to be reviewed by the loan officer.

Yikes. Between the sorting, scanning, data entry, and file management, it looks like Todd has a lot of boring, tedious work on his plate. Let’s help him out.

What You’ll Need

  1. FormSuite 5: Download and install the latest version for free right here. Make sure the installation goes to the default location. This should be C:\Users\Public\Documents\Accusoft
  2. UiPath Community edition: Sign up for an account and install the software. Follow the instructions to download the UiPath Studio application. I used version 2019.8.0 when making this project but slightly older or newer versions should also work fine.
  3. The project materials, which can be downloaded here.

I’m also going to assume that…

  1. You are somewhat familiar with a typical forms processing workflow and FormSuite. If not, you can check out Accusoft’s forms processing overview. We’ll specifically be using the FormAssist GUI application that comes with the FormSuite installer. This will handle all of the forms processing stuff for this exercise.
  2. You are familiar with what RPA is and what its used for. If not, you can check out our blog Introduction to RPA.
  3. You are familiar with basic programming concepts such as flow of control, conditionals, loops, variables, etc.

How To Run the Project

  1. Open UiPath Studio and open the project.josn file found in LoanApplication\LoanBot.
  2. Near the bottom of UiPath Studio, click the Arguments tab and change the ProjectRoot argument’s default value to the path of where you unzipped your LoanApplications Folder.
  3. Click the start button at the top left.
  4. The project will start and open up the FormAssist application first. Once it has settled, it will be waiting for new image files to appear in LoanApplication\Incoming. You can copy some images from LoanApplication\FormSet\FilledImages into the Incoming folder and those files will be processed.

Download the rest of my article for a step-by-step breakdown of the automation and a detailed description of the project materials.

HTML to PDF in C#

Project Goal:
Create a command line program in C# that can upload a HTML file to the PrizmDoc cloud server, issue a conversion command, and download the converted PDF file upon completion.

Project Goal:

Need to programmatically convert HTML into PDF files? Going from one format to the next can be troublesome, and maintaining the correct layout and styles in the final document is often a complex challenge.

PrizmDoc API handles file type conversions smoothly and with no hassle. No installation, no servers to set up. Just use the API to upload a file and have it converted for you. For this demonstration, we’ll be creating a C# program that just requires the Newtonsoft.JSON package (which can be acquired via NuGet).


PreRequisites

Before we get started, there’s a few steps to take. First, register for your own Accusoft PrizmDoc Cloud services account. Your account will come with a free trial.

Once your account is set up, copy the API key. This will be used to authenticate your requests to the PrizmDoc server:

API key

This demo will require the use of Newtonsoft.json package. If we’re using Visual Studio, just add this package to your project via the NuGet Package Manager:

JSON-Package


The HTML To PDF Conversion Process

Converting a file using PrizmDoc servers is a 4 step process:

    1. Upload: Upload the file to the server. We’re not making this a permanent part of the file portal – just putting it in temporarily while PrizmDoc does the work. When the file is uploaded, PrizmDoc returns a JSON response with internal file ID and an affinity token – we need both for the next step, which is conversion. See the PrizmDoc documentation on the Work Files API for more details ( http://help.accusoft.com/SAAS/pcc-for-acs/work-files.html#get-data ) .

 

    1. Convert: Issue the conversion command on the uploaded file. Using the file ID returned from the Upload stage, our software orders PrizmDoc to convert that file to one of the supported file formats listed on the PrizmDoc documentation page. In this demo, we’ll just be converting an HTML file to PDF – but this program can be modified for a number of other file formats. Once a conversion process has started, the Conversion API provides a ProcessID that can be used to check the status of the conversion process.
      The Content Conversion API documentation provides more details on how the process works ( http://help.accusoft.com/SAAS/pcc-for-acs/webframe.html#content-conversion-service.html ) .

 

    1. Status: Until the conversion process is complete, we don’t want to try to download a file that doesn’t exist. The Content Conversion API as listed above also provides the current status of the file conversion with a ProcessID. Once the file conversion is complete, the Content Conversion API provides a new FileID of the converted file.

 

  1. Download: Using the same Work File API with our new File ID and affinity token, we can now download the file.

And with that, let’s get coding!


HTML to PDF C# Code Sample

Here’s the C# code you’ll need to convert HTML to PDF using PrizmDoc. You can jump right into the code and run with it, or keep scrolling for a detailed walk through of the code and how it works.

Download Zip File

 

HTML to PDF C# Code Analysis

 

Step 0: Setting Up Our Class

In the sample project, there are a few housekeeping items to work through. The first is setting up the use of our API key. If you’ve downloaded our sample project, then edit the file config.json and insert your PrizmDoc API key like this:

In our sample project, the actual work is being driven by our PrizmDocConvert class. The first thing we do when generating the class is set the API key:

In our sample program, the API Key is read from our config.json file:


 

Step 1: Upload

The first part of our process is to Upload our file to the PrizmDoc server. Our member function really just needs one thing – the name of the file to upload, and it will return a JSON.Net JObject with the results:

The Work File API uses the POST command to upload the file, and requires the following headers:

The method uses the WebClient object to perform our uploading. So we set up the Work File API URI, and set our headers:

Then, read our file into a Byte object, and upload it to the PrizmDoc server using a POST command. The Work API will return a JSON response, which we can then parse for the next steps. In this case, we’ll upload an HTML file:


 

Step 2: Convert

Our uploaded file is sitting on the PrizmDoc server, all happy and content. But we want more than that – we want to convert it! In the last phase, the Work API returned a JSON file to us. Let’s peek inside:

If you’re familiar with JSON, then this should be simple enough. In our test application, we can snag the two fields we care about (the fileId and the affinityToken) with our JSON.Net objects. Our sample code uses another function to call our Upload method, but the final result is a JSON object with the Work File API results:

Now it’s time for the Content Conversion API to come into play. This API call requires a JSON file be posted with the details of what file is to be converted.

In this case, we’ll use our new method Convert to utilize that API with three parameters: the affinityToken, the fileID, and the format to convert to (which defaults to pdf):

We already covered how to add the headers to the WebClient object, so we won’t belabor the point. These are the required headers:

  • Content-Type: The type of file, in this case “application/json”
  • Accusoft-Affinity-Token: The Affinity Token we received from the Work File Upload
  • Acs-api-key: The API key

And our new URI will be “https://api.accusoft.com/v2/contentConverters”.

Our Convert request is in the form of a JSON file. We could submit requests for multiple files to be converted, but this demo will just focus on the one. Here’s the format of the JSON request:

Our method generates the JSON file this way.

There’s a lot of whitespace here, but it helps make clear what nodes of the JSON file belong to which parts.

All that’s left is to POST the JSON string:

The conversion process is started! But until it’s complete, we can’t download our completed file. So we need to request the Status until the conversion is complete.

For that, we need to know what the ProcessID is. The Content Conversion API returns a JSON file, of which the most important thing we need is the processID:


 

Step 3: Status

The Content Conversion API allows us to track the status of a conversion using the ProcessId returned from our Convert request. The URL is the same, with one major difference:

This is very important – this is a GET command, but don’t try to use the WebClient QueryString.Add member to add the processId. Your URI will not look like this:

It must look like this:

For example, a processID of ahidasf7894 would give use a URI of:

With that, let’s look at our ConvertStatus method, which will query the PrizmDoc server via the Content Conversion API. This API will return another JSON file for us to parse:

Our headers in this case are similar to before:

  • Accusoft-Affinity-Token
  • acs-api-key

That’s it – since this is just a GET, and the Content Conversion API is getting the processId from the URI we request from, we just need to submit the request and return the JSON file:

Here’s a sample JSON file that will be returned:

What we’re looking for is for the “state” field to return “complete”. The sample code uses a 30 second wait timer after each Convert Status request. Once it sees the conversion is complete, it snags the new fileId that will be used to download the file:

And here’s the JSON file that returns the result we need:

Perfect. All that’s left is to extract the fileId:

Note that a Conversion Request can generate multiple files. For example, converting a multipage document into a series of image files. For more details, see the Content Conversion API documentation.

All that’s left now is to download our converted file with the Work File API.


 

Step 4: Download

We’re back where we started – the Work File API. This time, instead of uploading a file, we’re going to download the processed file. The URI is the same as before, with one change – the fileId of the file we’re downloading:

For our Download Work File method, we set up the method this way. The only new parameter is the outfile – this will be the name of the file we save the converted file to:

We use the same headers as in our Convert Status request:

  • Accusoft-Affinity-Token
  • acs-api-key

 

Since this is a Get command, we just submit the request and pipe the results out to our file:

And with that, our program is complete! Here’s the results. In this case, the method calls are set to be verbose to track progression, but feel free to edit the program to your liking:

Sample Code

The converted document will retain images, lists, links, and other formatting and elements:

Tampa PDF

This program sample is just converting a simple HTML file – but if we were converting something like a Microsoft Word document, the results would be the same – a perfectly created PDF file. In fact, PrizmDoc uses Microsoft Word to process the Word Document conversion to have the highest possible fidelity.