What Is a Zero Footprint Viewer and How Can It Benefit You?

It used to be that opening a Word document required an appropriate program on your machine. You also had to download the whole document before you were able to access the information, then load up the program to view the file. This approach works fine when you are only dealing with one document type on one machine, but now the number of file formats, devices, phones, tablets, and computers commonly used is growing exponentially, and you want to access all of your information in all formats seamlessly across all of your machines.

A zero footprint viewer changes the game. It loads and integrates documents within a browser to allow you to see your file without the fuss. With a zero footprint viewer, there is no install or download required - all you need to access a document is any web browser.

Why do you care? Behold, the benefits:

• Zero Installs: No applications, plug-ins or applets necessary
• Zero Requirements: Type of browser, version, location, machine, device, software, hardware - all of that becomes irrelevant
• Zero Maintenance: No machine-specific software, so no need to maintain or upgrade any machine to access your information - everything is controlled by the central server
• Zero Loading Time: Works like YouTube - you don't have to wait for the whole video to load before you watch

To be sure, zero footprint viewers aren't perfect. The host needs powerful enough servers installed and set up to provide users with the documents, for example, which requires plenty of work server-side.

But that's an inevitable trade-off: server-side work for user-side ease.

Prizm Content Connect is a zero footprint viewer with the flexible support for all server platforms and over 300 file formats. Curious and want to learn more? Check out our white paper on the benefits of a zero footprint viewer.

Source: http://blog.accusoft.com/posts/2012/july/what-is-a-zero-footprint-viewer-and-how-can-it-benefit-you.html