• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Documentum Annotations – TSG View of the different solutions

You are here: Home / Alfresco / Documentum Annotations – TSG View of the different solutions

October 8, 2009

With the upgrade to D6.5, many of our clients are reconsidering their annotation choices.  This blog post will address some of the annotation product choices based on our experience, as well as our internal development efforts on our Free Viewer Tool that is based on a thin client with Adobe Flex and support for viewing and basic annotation capabilities.

Definition –this entry is referring to “annotation” as a mark-up “layer” on top of the document.  Redline changes (like Word track changes) are embedded in the Word file and is not the focus of this entry.

Thick Client or Thin Client

One of the first decision points when choosing an annotation tool is between a thick or thin client.  Early annotation tools required a client side component for client/server capabilities.  With browser-based annotation tools, annotations might rely on either a client side plug in or an applet.  For Documentum, client components are required for Brava (applet), Annodocs and Documentum Annotation Services (Adobe Acrobat).  Snowbound offers versions that don’t require a client component or have an applet based approach.  Our Free Viewer only requires Adobe Flash to be installed on the client.  With a thin client approach, the image (not the entire file) is sent to the client.  This could be a substantial performance improvement when viewing large files.  Also, thin client approach provides for additional security since the file is never passed to the client.

TSG Thoughts – We are usually recommending the thin client to improve performance and security while reducing IT support costs particularly when extending the application to outside third parties.

Native Document Annotations or PDF-only

One approach would be to allow the mark-up layer to view on top of any type of file format.  Snowbound and Brava both support this type of annotation.  Another approach would be to turn everything into PDF and only allow mark-ups on top of the PDF.  This approach is required by Adobe and Annodocs although supported by Brava and Snowbound as well.

TSG Thoughts – Many of our clients have had difficulty with the native document approach not due to fault of the vendor but due to the constantly evolving and backward compatible native file formats.  For our free viewer, we are only supporting PDF or TIFF.

Annotation Capabilities

With all annotation tools, the amount of graphic options (circle, arrow, highlight, underscore….) can confuse the user and blur the line between annotations and redlines.  Also, one major user complaint is that annotations can be buried on subsequent pages and users will have to flip to them to find them.  Annotation tools should highlight/bookmark annotations when viewing the document to avoid having the user flip through every page looking for annotations.

TSG Thoughts – We lean toward simple annotations for basic markup to reduce training costs and markup/review time.

Upgrade/Changing Considerations

It is important to understand that every annotation tool typically stores it’s annotations in a proprietary format making it difficult to change annotation tools.  When changing annotation tools, the existing annotations must be deleted or reformatted.

TSG Thoughts – For our Free Viewer, we have targeted Adobe’s new XFDF for mark-up to be compatible with Adobe as well as Documentum Annotation Services.

Filed Under: Alfresco, Documentum, Product Suite, R&D, Tech Tip

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Documentum Transformation Services (DTS) – Alternative Approaches with Adobe LiveCycle and OpenOffice
  • Documentum Open Source Software
  • Auto-Numbering Content in Alfresco
  • Documentum Client for Outlook, Notes Connector, iPhone and other thoughts on Content Management and Email
  • Documentum Migration – OpenMigrate for both large migrations and ongoing capture
  • Microsoft Teams integration and the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer for Document Review
  • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Offline Annotation for Efficient Review
  • Redaction for AWS, Alfresco, Documentum and Hadoop – Bulk Redaction upon Ingestion or Migration
  • Suggested Redactions for Documentum, Alfresco or Hadoop using OpenRedact
  • ECM Roadmap – Thoughts on Planning for the Future

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT