Advanced Rendering is really gaining traction across multiple industries that deal with hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of documents a day. Industries from the Life Sciences to Financial Services, from Government to Manufacturing, are finding the features of Advanced Rendering to be useful in helping reduce costs and time in document-centric processes.
There are probably hundreds of reasons why organizations require Advanced Rendering in the first place, but they ultimately fall into two main categories:
1. Many enterprise organizations use multiple ECM systems. For example, Engineering uses OpenText for archiving, Marketing uses DropBox for their collateral, Customer Service uses Microsoft SharePoint for collaboration, and Finance processes billing and invoices in IBM FileNet. In fact, according to Forrester “70% of larger organizations have two or more ECM/Document Management/Records Management systems and 29% have four or more.” Not only that, but organizations often use other Workflow, ERP or PLM systems in addition to their ECMs. That’s a lot of different systems that don’t always communicate well with each other, but could all use Advanced Rendering services.
2. Document transformation demand for one or more point-solutions typically causes backlogs in one system, while there is an abundance in capacity in another system, even though both environments perform similar tasks. By combining the investment in each environment into a single but larger conversion solution, rendering demand is better balanced across the organization, resulting in a smaller overall investment while better servicing the peaks and valleys of the organization. There is a significant cost-savings opportunity to be had.
Here is a list of 10 things enterprise organizations need most out of their document conversion platform.
When it comes to business-critical applications and software, increasing scalability is possible to a limited degree by increasing the investment in the hardware the solution runs on. For example, some increase in scalability will be seen by using a faster processor, more memory and faster disk access, but there’s a finite limit to how far you can scale a single server.
In order to be truly scalable, software must be able to operate on multiple servers. The enterprise can add additional servers to meet processing demand as it grows over time. In theory, 2 servers would double the capacity of 1 server, and 4 servers would quadruple the capacity of 1 server. In reality, however, each new server only provides a percentage of performance of the original server. Why? The overhead of managing the multiple server environments and the demand that is placed on them takes up the rest of the performance space.
Let’s look at an example: say a global Life Sciences organization is rendering documents in their research department, and the demands are increasing each week. Their current solution isn’t able to handle the workload, and they need to look at a more scalable solution. If their current single server is able to process 100 units of work, then they might expect that 2 servers would be able to process 200 units of work, and if they had 10 servers then they would be able to process 1000 units of work. Unfortunately, the effort to manage the distribution of work consumes a portion of each server’s capability, and the additional server isn’t able to take on the demands the Life Sciences organization thought it would. The increased overhead diminishes the increase in overall capacity.
Generally, a common consideration for overhead is around 10% of capacity per server. So if we assume 100 units of work per day for the first server, with a 10% overhead for each additional server, then the overall capacity of 10 servers will be 550 units of work, or only 55% of the expected capacity. That is a lot of capacity lost to managing overhead! The green line in the graph below is what you’ll get with this model, while the purple line is what you would expect to get. There is a lot of discrepancy, which will result in an unhappy Life Sciences organization!
What happens when you remove the overhead associated with managing multiple servers by placing the responsibility with a dedicated management server? You achieve more efficient scalability.
Let’s say this Life Sciences organization did just that. Now, they use software that is designed for enterprise scalability – so it’s being used by the research department, plus every other department in the organization. By using a dedicated management server, the overhead has been reduced to 0.2% from the 10% they previously experienced. So with 10 servers, they can process 991 units of work per day, and achieve 99.1% of the expected capacity. That sounds a lot better than 55%, doesn’t it?
Adlib’s architecture is designed for high volume environments where scalability is a must. This means it’s simple to add additional servers, and the overhead for managing the load across servers is minimal. We achieve linear scalability, much like the second graph up there.
When you’re looking to deploy multiple servers for fault tolerance and high availability, you also get the added benefit of deploying in an Active-Active fashion. It’s common industry practice to utilize a failover cluster approach when you have an Active-Inactive deployment, where one server is in production and use, and if it fails, then the backup server will take its place. This has two main disadvantages: backup hardware is rarely utilized so you have an inefficient use of available resources, and the mechanism for switching servers needs to be periodically tested to ensure it will continue to work if it’s ever needed.
However, since we use Active-Active deployment, both the primary and secondary servers are always in use. This has several benefits: the capacity is increased, and the mechanism to distribute workload across available resources is constantly utilized. This makes it easy to apply patches and OS updates to one server while the other continues to function normally, and no special provisions or switching needs to take place.
When you’re investing in business-critical applications and software, always consider the scalability as a necessary factor for success. Ask yourself the following questions:
Dealing with downtime in the enterprise
What is the cost to your organization when your critical business application is down or unusable? We’ve heard lots of different scenarios from our customers, but many estimate the cost of not being able to render documents into high-quality PDFs at $100,000 an hour or more.
When it comes down to it, a lot is at stake if documents can’t be rendered as required:
A Life Sciences organization must delay its submission to the FDA when the PDF document is not created, costing them up to $1 million in revenue per day.
A Financial Services institution loses business to its competitors when they can’t produce insurance quotes in PDFs when the system is down or has a slower response time than its competitors.
A Government agency loses personnel time when PDFs cannot be properly rendered to fulfill public service requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) regulation
It is because of critical business reasons like these that Adlib supports high availability in our Transform solution. Let’s face it, the IT infrastructures in large organizations are getting more and more complex, with multiple moving and interdependent parts. This can result in multiple points of failure.
By eliminating all single points of failure, it’s possible to minimize unscheduled system downtown, thereby maintaining or increasing the productivity in an enterprise.
Adlib achieves high availability by supporting redundancy for all software components in the system. However, it’s not advisable to have a redundant node idle until a failover occurs because of the costs of maintaining the hardware, power supply and real estate. Adlib counteracts this by implanting a support for redundancy using an Active-Active deployment, so that all nodes are always active and share the load. If one node fails, then the system still provides the service.
The Adlib components send a signal to the system database – kind of like a heartbeat – and components that share the same function monitor each other’s heartbeats. When one heartbeat stops, another component takes over the task within a few seconds. Some of our customers have told us that if IT doesn’t respond to an end user’s service request within 3 minutes, there will be a follow up, many times in the form of an angry phone call. This can all be avoided with high availability software. Alerts can be configured to notify IT once a component failure occurs, and they can take action to bring the system up to full capacity.
Delivering a high availability solution isn’t easy. It is about more than just quality code, system stability and product robustness. External factors such as hardware failure and environmental disasters also need to be considered. And while load balancing is important, it just helps to distribute work, but doesn’t guarantee that work isn’t lost. Delivering a high availability solution means that you have to deploy software that can be architected to detect and eliminate all single points of failure. Components work as a team, and if one fails, the others have its back.
The mean time to repair (MRRT) is also an important factor to consider when deploying enterprise-wide software. Typically, critical business systems require 99.99% availability, which results in only 52 minutes of allowable downtime a year. Adlib has made this recovery easier by storing all of the configuration data in the system database. Provisioning a new node is as simple as installing the component software and defining the database connection for it.
Enterprise organizations can improve efficiency and optimize document-centric processes by integrating a common, shared Adlib Transform system directly into their existing business systems. Majority of Larger organizations tend to use from 2 to 5 ECM/Document Management/Records Management systems. That is a lot of different cogs working together in an enterprise. The best way to help an organization maintain or increase efficiency would be to come in as another cog, integrating directly with existing infrastructure.
Adlib Transform provides enterprise organizations with a variety of flexible options to make integration with existing business systems as simple as possible. Adlib integrates directly with Enterprise Content Management, Product Lifecycle Management and Workflow solutions like IBM FileNet, Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText Content Suite, Nintex K2 and Dassault ENOVIA.
Integration is as simple as installing the connector and incorporating triggers to initiate content transformation within the business process. In most cases, the business system user interface allows end users to make ad hoc document conversion requests using Adlib’s technology. The end users are rarely aware of the complex back-end process in place to produce high-fidelity PDF documents using Adlib technology. This spares IT from training end users to use a new system and saves themselves from learning to manage a new technology.
In instances where Adlib doesn’t have an existing connector for your business system, we use a Connector Framework that simplifies the integration development with the assistance of our Professional Services team. The Connector Framework is Java-based and can therefore operate on any platform. It allows your enterprise to leverage the platform capabilities such as the Process Manager, which monitors and automatically restarts components that have stopped working unexpectedly, sending alerts of failed connectors.
Adlib also provides a standards-based web services interface, which delivers rapid integration with a high degree of flexibility to connect virtually any system with Adlib Transform. The developer doesn’t need to understand the business process to build the integration, and the business administrator (who is responsible for configuring the Adlib system to meet the enterprise needs) doesn’t need to be familiar with the integration. This option simplifies the process of integration greatly.
When we built Adlib Transform, we incorporated a number of capabilities into our platform that reduce the need for IT maintenance and integration costs, but that also increase your ability to adapt and change the product to suit your business environment. Our goal was to eliminate the need to develop custom code to meet your Advanced Rendering needs. By doing so, we help enterprise organizations to reach new heights of business process efficiency.
We’ve included a number of capabilities into our system that make it a highly configurable platform:
Download our eBook Advanced Rendering
Included in this eBook:
- Why Advanced Rendering is important
- Responding to the Data Explosion
- Rendering Content to PDF
- Exploring the Range of Rendering Options
- Tackling the Content Issues that Arise with Rendering
- Defining Advanced Rendering
- Putting Advanced Rendering to Work Throughout the Document Lifecycle Process
- Using Advanced Rendering to Improve ROI
- Increasing Business Process Efficiency with Adlib’s Advanced Rendering Software
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Transform provides a number of reports that help IT departments to better manage their systems:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.