Clients often struggle with adding simple annotation capabilities to Documentum or Alfresco. Brava, PDF Annotation Services, Snowbound and Annodoc are all solutions we see regularly at clients. Issues with these solutions include:
- Price – per user licensing can be difficult to justify for casual or external users.
- Support – most tools require a client side component that can be difficult to deploy or support.
Based on client requests, TSG has developed a dramatically different solution.. OpenAnnotate is a free thin client tool that allows users to review and annotate PDF documents directly within their web browser.
Summary of OpenAnnotate Key Features:
- No Client Machine Dependencies
Thin Client viewer allows users to view and annotate documents directly in their browsers without dependencies on Adobe Reader or other viewing applications.
- Leverages Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems
TSG’s OpenContent Web Services are utilized to store and retrieve annotations from an Enterprise Content Management system of your choice (i.e. Documentum, Alfresco, SharePoint, etc.)
- Secures Document Distribution
Users only have access to image renditions of individual document pages preventing them from downloading an entire document and distributing it outside of the managing application.
- Powered by Adobe LiveCycle Transformation Engine
TSG’s OpenContent Web Services are utilized to request document image renditions from either Adobe LiveCycle or an Open Source transformation engine.
- Integrates with Documentum Webtop – View Demo
A Documentum Webtop Connector is available allowing users to review documents directly from Webtop. OpenAnnotate will even display annotations originally generated using Documentum PDF Annotation Services.
OpenAnnotate also has the ability to integrate with TSG’s High Performance Interface (HPI) designed to run on an Enterprise Content Management system of your choice.
- No Licensing Costs
TSG does not charge a licensing fee to use OpenAnnotate.
Under the Hood:
OpenAnnotate leverages Adobe LiveCycle or other Open Source software to transform PDF documents into image files that can be viewed within a web browser. Google Web Toolkit is utilized to provide an interactive user interface for annotating. Additionally, OpenAnnotate integrates with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems through TSG’s OpenContent Web Services, allowing OpenAnnotate to store and retrieve annotations without being tied to one specific ECM platform. OpenAnnotate reads and saves annotations in Adobe’s standard XFDF format, so annotations are compatible with all other tools leveraging XFDF, including Documentum’s PDF Annotation Services.
Solutions looks good. But not able to find the Freedownload anywhere..
Please keep download link available to users.
Yogesh – OpenAnnotate and our other Open Source offerings are available from our website:
https://www.tsgrp.com/misc/SourceCode.jsp
You can also click the download image on the right hand side of the OpenAnnotate page on our site.
George
Do anybody have installation and configuratin notes for OpenAnnotate
Thanks for your interest in OpenAnnotate! At this time, OpenAnnotate cannot be utilized as a standalone product – it must be invoked by another Documentum or Alfresco client tool. For example – Active Wizard or HPI. If you’re using Documentum, you can also check out the Webtop connector from our downloads page (linked above in my previous comment) as another example.
As for installation of OpenAnnotate itself, it’s just a WAR file, so it can be installed like any other J2EE web application. Hope this helps.
George
Does it work on TIFF Images and is there a connector to Documentum taskspace 6.7?
OpenAnnotate currently works by converting PDFs to PNG images. The conversion can be done with either Adobe LiveCycle or ImageMagick. We would just need to write an adapter to convert TIFF images to PNG to get OA to work for your use case.
We have a connector for Webtop 6.7, but we do not have a TaskSpace connector. We would add it to the product if one of our clients has the need to annotate from TaskSpace.
Hi
Is there any document on how can we use this WAR file to leverage the PDF annotation in browser.
Thanks Manoj
Manoj – The OpenAnnotate.war is deployed like any other web application. Both the OpenAnnotate.war and OpenContent.war must be deployed. If you plan on using the webtop customizations, those must also be deployed to your existing webtop application deployment.
Allen
Thanks for the reply.
Is there any example Hello World!! type example which I can refer to get the hanf of this tool.
Thanks Mano
Snowbound Software Html5 viewer has no client side component. It runs in the browser. It also supports hundreds of formats.
Is the software still free for use and free for download? Are there variations such as free and non-free Alfresco-commercial version…? Thanks for clarifying!
David, OpenAnnotate is now the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer and is available via subscription. You can learn more here: https://www.alfresco.com/ecm-software/alfresco-enterprise-viewer
Also – just a quick note, this post is rather old (2010). While OpenAnnotate was free for use/download at the time, TSG switched to a subscription license mode for OpenAnnotate in 2017.