It’s hard to imagine any single item that could please a web
developer, an IT infrastructure manager, and an end user all at once.
Ice cream or a good joke excepted, anything that makes one of these
people happy usually makes at least one of the others miserable.
Tighten
security to please the infrastructure maven, and you’ve made extra work
for the developer and possibly compromised the user’s experience. Amp
up the user experience and you’ve created bandwidth problems for the
infrastructure maven and, again, more work for the web developer.
(Everything makes more work for the web developer.)
The
magnificent, often unrealized potential of the Cloud is that it can
solve some problems in ways that make life at least a little easier for
all parties. This small miracle happens most often when the problem is
small (though nagging nonetheless) and the cloud solution is narrowly
scoped to solve that problem and no other.
A cloud-based
document viewer that can be embedded in a web page supplies an ideal
example. Given a large and growing array of document file types and an
imperative to make everything and anything web-accessible, developers
wanting to deliver a seamless user experience have no easy solution.
They cannot entirely count on users to have software installed that can
display anything other than HTML, flat text and a handful of other file
types.
Developers can simply require that any document
for web publication not already stored in a common format be converted
-- at the cost of time (compounded by every subsequent change to the
document), software licensing and often display quality. Or they can
compromise the user experience by publishing files in their native
formats and leaving the user to scramble for a program to display them.
A
cloud-based document viewer capable of displaying pretty much any
document file type in a browser -- with nothing required on the client
except a browser with Flash or HTML5 -- provides users with seamless
access to nearly any document in high fidelity, makes little extra
coding work for the developer (while erasing other tasks, such as
conversion), and takes the infrastructure manager out of the picture
altogether. If that solution is free, even more people get happy, like
purchasing managers and CIOs.
The wide range of ways one
cloud-based viewer is being used illustrates its versatility. One
customer uses it to show visitors very large CAD files, while another
uses it to display the documents forum users have attached to their
messages. A website for a program to curb childhood obesity uses it to
display Powerpoint slides of active kids, and a job portal uses it to
display uploaded resumes to recruiters.
Those customers are all using Prizm Cloud,
Accusoft’s freshly released, cloud-based, embeddable document viewer.
It’s not the only such viewer available, but it offers some advantages
over the other options. Because it is based on the versatile Prizm Content Connect
server-based viewer, it inherits that product’s ability to display more
than 300 different file types -- far more than competitors -- to ensure
that users will be able to see almost any document a site can throw at
them. And unlike competitors, it does not require that the documents be
uploaded anyplace first -- the viewer displays them right from the
developer’s server, saving the time and trouble of uploading and making
any changes to the file immediately available to anyone.
It’s
easy to use for web developers -- so easy, in fact, that it’s also used
by bloggers, WordPress site creators, and other less-technical users.
After all, if a thing can make web developers, infrastructure managers
and users happy all at once, who can guess how many other people the
thing might please?
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