Advanced Rendering – 10 key features your enterprise needs

Variable substitution

This feature can be used to substitute user-defined variables as well as metadata associated with the rendering request. Variables can be used in rule conditions (such as if “${Document_Status}” = Draft then add a Watermark) and in the transformation settings (such as Watermark text = ${Document Status}”). The latter allows adding metadata information to the PDF as text on the pages. Users can add information such as document status, version and last modified date, and provide context for the person viewing the PDF without them having access to the business system (such as SharePoint, for example).

By leveraging these capabilities, IT departments are able to easily configure Adlib Transform system components as well as the rendering settings themselves without the need for complex custom code. 

Much like silly putty, we stretch, adapt and transform our platform so your IT department doesn’t have to.

5. Tools that enable compliance

Document compliance across industries

No industry is safe from the ever-increasing requirement to be compliant to some sort of regulatory body, act or process. External document compliance examples include Sarbanes-Oxley, regulatory publishing, long-term content retention, and an endless array of acronyms from FDA to FINRA to SEC to NARA. ISO even has standards for PDF!

In addition to these external compliance requirements, enterprise organizations often also have internal document compliance requirements, regulating the way users should deal with everything from legal documents and financial statements to logos, trademarks, brand messaging, disclaimers and email signatures. With multiple layers of compliance flying about, it’s inevitable that IT will be fielding many service requests for helping end users to ensure all hyperlinks are consistently blue or that all archived material be saved as PDF/A.

Using tools to automate document compliance

Because Adlib Transform solution integrates directly with leading ECM, PLM and Workflow solutions, it can address many of the top challenges IT managers and professionals deal with when it comes to adhering to document compliance regulations. Moreover, Adlib Transform can automate many processes, so end users can be assured that their rendered documents already meet the compliance requirements of their business unit, workgroup or industry.

A number of compliance-related issues that Adlib Transform can automate include:

• Archiving business records in regulatory PDF and PDF/A formats
• Securing and protecting important information with security settings
• Automating validation of custom compliance attributes such as page margins
• Adding enhancements such as watermarks, headers, footers and hyperlinks
• Making document navigation easier with tables of contents and bookmarks
• Enhancing scanned documents and images with Optical Character Recognition technology to make them searchable

The combination of Adlib Transform with an existing business system tackles these challenges by automating business processes to adhere to compliance policies, not only streamlining workflows, but also removing the risk and costs associated with error-prone human intervention. Standardizing on PDF ensures you can secure and protect the document integrity and provide indefinite content preservation through the use of specialized archiving formats.

6. Monitoring and alerting systems

Monitoring and alerting to achieve service-level agreements

Enterprise systems are vast and complex with many moving parts – hardware, software, databases, networking – each of these components can fail at one point or another, which can cause loss of service unless high availability architecture is in place (as is with Adlib). Even with high availability, a component failure can sometimes prevent the system from achieving its required service-level agreement. IT administrators need tools that help them to be proactive and resolve component failures before they impact users and processes.

Using a monitoring daemon

To help IT professionals in enterprise organizations better manage their systems, Adlib Transform provides built-in monitoring and highly configurable alerting to help keep the system healthy and always available. Each platform component sends a signal – like a heartbeat – to the system database at regular intervals, letting the system know that it is alive, well and kicking. A monitoring daemon is actively checking whether any component has stopped sending heartbeats. If a component heartbeat is older than expected, the component is marked in alarm state and an alert is sent to IT via email. Multiple alerts can be sent on an interval basis for the same component, and an email can also be sent when the component comes back online.

The subject, content and email address of the email alert are configurable through the Adlib management console. The email contains all of the information about the particular component that has failed, including component type, component name, computer name, number of heartbeats and last heartbeat date and time, so that IT has all of the information at their fingertips. Custom content can also be added to the email, such as a link to the console where IT can find more information on the alert.

Adlib’s management console

The management console provides a dashboard-like graphical overview of the system and indicates which components are in alarm status. A list view is available to filter and sort issues based on component type and status. Component alarms can be acknowledged individually once the IT administrator has investigated the issue and has a plan of action. This allows them to easily distinguish new alarms from older ones.

7. Reporting tools

The need for system performance reporting

Job processing times can vary greatly due to the type of job that is being processed. For example, performing Optical Character Recognition on a 12-page scanned document takes significantly more CPU resources than it does to combine 3 separate files into one PDF document. In addition, the demand on the Adlib Transform system can be bursty at times, which makes it difficult to predict the system size required to meet end users’ expectations.

Adlib’s reporting tools

Adlib Transform provides a number of reports that help IT departments to better manage their systems:

• System load:
  This report collects the average load on the complete system as well as on each transformation engine. The load can be reported hourly, daily or weekly, allowing IT to identify the periods of greatest demand and any bottlenecks occurring in the system. By analyzing the periods of peak demand, IT can detect whether the system sizing is accurate.
• Job processing time:
  This report provides the time the system takes to complete a job, as well as the source of the job and the date and time it was submitted. This allows IT to confirm if the system is achieving the service-level agreement (SLA) commitment, along with the times the system did not meet the SLA. This data is also useful for calculating the charge-back cost for the system usage to the various business units.
• Job volume:
  This report provides the number of jobs processed by the complete system, in addition to jobs processed by each transformation engine. The jobs processed can be reported hourly, daily or weekly, providing IT with the information to assist in sizing the system and perform capacity planning.
• Job success:
  This report provides the percentage of jobs that completed successfully for each time interval – hourly, daily or weekly – so IT can identify if the system is failing, and to what degree.

Additional reports

With the help of our Professional Services team, a number of additional reports can also be added to Adlib to meet various organizational needs. All reports allow for filtering and sorting the information to allow users to narrow down the information they need. In addition, all report data can be exported to Microsoft Excel for further analysis and reporting. This information can be used to determine things such as the percentage of system usage by business unit and to support the business case for system capacity planning.

Adlib’s system reporting provides the necessary information to enable IT to optimally manage the application with little effort and ensure committed service performance.

8. Central platform management

Using a highly configurable system

How often do your business requirements change? If you’re part of an enterprise, it’s likely the answer to that is “all the time!” How quickly can you adapt your business systems and applications to meet these changes? Having a platform that is highly configurable simplifies meeting your evolving needs, and so does having a platform you can manage centrally.

A number of issues and opportunities surrounding document conversion are found in enterprises today:

• Job processing requirements can vary significantly throughout the enterprise
• Content transformation can be CPU intensive and require multiple servers to meet the enterprise’s throughput needs
• Document rendering is often part of mission-critical applications and is architected for high availability

Metadata-driven rules engine

In order to work with some of these requirements, Adlib Transform incorporates a rules engine to define conditions to resolve how Adlib system components are configured, and how content transformation jobs are processed. This allows for a high degree of settings re-use, which in turn reduces system configuration and testing effort.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you want to add a header to all of your rendered PDF documents. In some cases you want the header font to be 10 points, and in other cases you want it to be 15 points. This can be triggered from any job metadata, such as the document status for example. This scenario requires 2 rules:
1. The first default rule defines all header settings having the text font size set to 10 points.
2. You have the option to add a second instance to specify a condition to make the header font size 15 points.

Having the ability to define settings under different conditions can significantly reduce the number of settings, which makes it easier to change when needed.

 

Platform component configuration

Let’s look at another example, this time relating to the platform component configuration. Say you’ve deployed Adlib and you need to add an additional transformation engine to meet the increased demand of your enterprise. The only thing the IT administrator would need to do is to add the new engine to the environment. The rest of the rules would already be configured from the first transformation engine.

 

Adding high availability architecture

Similarly, let’s say that you need to add a connector to provide the architecture with high availability. The only thing the IT administrator needs to do here is to add the connector identifier to the rule condition that is used for the redundant connector. This eliminates the need to redefine all settings for the new connector and also guarantees that both connectors are configured the same. By minimizing the number of repeated settings, it becomes very easy to change the component configurations.

 

 

9. Systems that require low day-to-day maintenance

Performing daily system checks

Today’s IT departments have more and more systems to manage, and less and less people to manage them. As a result, you want systems that require as little day-to-day work as possible. Adlib enables IT departments across industries to manage and maintain the business-critical application with only a few important touch points. If the following activities can be performed on a daily basis, your system will be purring away. A few minutes a day is all it takes.

• Confirm all system components are running:
  It’s important to do this simple check even though the Adlib platform automatically executes component monitoring and failure alerting. For example, if a component was stopped manually by IT staff but was not restarted due to day-to-day distractions, this would be a good way to catch that mistake. The Adlib Transform system status page enables IT to review the status of every component in the system in a few seconds, as the list can be easily filtered and sorted.
• Confirm job processing time:
  This activity helps IT to ensure that the system is achieving the job processing time in the service-level agreement (SLA) commitment. SLA is one of the most common ways to measure system performance. It can be negatively affected if new lines of business are added to a system that has a high volume of jobs or long-running jobs. Adlib’s job processing time report provides the processing time for every job that is initiated. Jobs that take longer than the SLA can be easily filtered in the list. The list can also be sorted by processing time to determine any deviation from the committed SLA.
• Confirm job success rate:
  This helps to ensure that the system is processing jobs as expected. Adlib’s job success report provides the percentage of jobs that have completed successfully. There are various reasons why a job may fail, such as password-protected security or file corruption. In addition, Adlib solution often integrates with applications used to create the document; if the application has failed or is otherwise unavailable, the corresponding job will fail as well. This information is logged in the system with the job. It’s important to correct failed applications in order to achieve a high job success rate.

 

10. Tools that enable collaboration and sharing

Sharing and collaboration across the enterprise

Sharing and collaboration are a big part of the workplace. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and it’s almost impossible to succeed on your own. As a result, enterprise applications need to enable users to share and collaborate with one another. Having an enterprise application that forces business groups or end users to work in siloes leads to a loss of efficiency when it comes to document-centric processes. A lack of sharing and collaboration can lead to slower workflows, more expensive resources, and an inefficient use of time.

There are a number of ways sharing and collaboration can work in an enterprise organization, and a number of ways it can be enhanced by Adlib enterprise software:

1. Shared service:
   A business-critical application can be deployed as a shared service, so that multiple departments and business units who have document conversion requirements are able to take advantage of Adlib Transform software. This allows IT departments to manage one transformation system as opposed to many.
   
   Adlib delivered as a shared service can add significant value to an organization by addressing multiple ECM systems, multiple departmental requirements, and multiple rendering tool consolidation. The benefits of a shared services approach to Adlib Transform include document consistency through automated workflow and increased end user productivity, as well as IT-specific benefits in terms of cost reduction through vendor consolidation, network/computing resource optimization and improved service-level agreement maintenance.
   
   Providing a common rendering platform which delivers high fidelity output and integrates into most ECM environments can reduce IT costs and shift IT from a mere cost-center to an organizational value-add. Administrators can respond quickly to system issues via the web-based management console, so that end users can expect a reliable and high success rate conversion every time.
   
   
2. Internal collaboration:
   Organizations where collaboration and sharing are required internally can be facilitated with Adlib. This allows for reduced expenses for native authoring applications and storage space for paper files or large file sizes.
   
   Giving employees in different departments the ability to share documents without issue is an important feature of Adlib Transform. When considering the amount of divergent file formats used throughout an enterprise today, including varying legacy file formats, the need for native authoring applications grows if sharing and collaboration is required. However, rendering files to PDF negates the need for installing various native authoring applications, and as a result, reduces costs for additional software licenses and installation time.
   
   
3. External collaboration:
   Certain business environments require sharing and collaboration with external partners, vendors and consumers, which can be made easier with Adlib solution. In addition to reducing expenses for native authoring applications, organizations can save time and resources by not having to deal with hard copies or file compatibility issues.
   
   Many organizations set up portals to use with external clients, where users can upload files into document management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint. Using Adlib Transform enterprise software, organizations can automate the processing of incoming documents. New content can trigger a SharePoint workflow to convert the content to PDF and notify the appropriate employees of the submission to initiate next steps. Because the content is already in PDF format, there are no issues with file compatibility or document fidelity. Global organizations often have a high volume of documents coming in from external sources. Automating the conversion through enterprise software reduces costs of manual processes and enhances the ability to share and collaborate.

Ending on a high note

Each organization has a multitude of unique requirements (many of which fall into the categories we’ve covered) that are constantly changing and evolving. Adlib is highly involved with our customers’ needs, adapting and advancing our product to fit new requirements.

 

Learning about enterprise software

Adlib Transform software takes document-to-PDF conversion to the next level. If any of the above features are important to you, I encourage you to check out this eBook which details how organizations can improve business process efficiency with the right document conversion software.