OpenAnnotate is now Alfresco Enterprise Viewer

Alfresco Introduces High-Speed, Secure Enterprise Viewer for Real-Time Collaborative Annotation and Redaction

• Two to Five times faster than typical viewing options from browsers and PDF.js for large documents
• Real-time collaboration on annotations (with support for the PDF XFDF standard)
• Sensitive information protection with content encoding, audit trails, watermarks, and both pattern and ad hoc redaction (enabling compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, PCI/PHI, FOIA, etc.)
• All popular web browsers supported with HTML5 (e.g., Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, and Safari)

BOSTON, MA. – April 28, 2020 – Alfresco Software, an open source, content services provider today announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise Viewer, a modern, HTML5 browser-based, viewing, collaborative annotation and redaction product. The Alfresco Enterprise Viewer enables users to view content (documents, images, audio, and video), and collaborate in real-time on annotations and redactions using powerful editing tools and chat windows. Combined with the Alfresco Digital Business Platform, users will significantly improve their productivity and efficiency, while the organization can increase their overall information security and content management effectiveness.

Optimized for high speed and secure viewing, the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer browser-based approach is particularly well-suited for remote workers and inconsistent network bandwidth. Alfresco’s Chief Product Officer, Tony Grout, noted that “organizations need to support different work environments for their employees and external users, including support for remote working. It has become increasingly critical to deliver a consistent, secure and high speed user viewing experience to maintain or improve productivity and efficiency, regardless of content type (documents, images, audio, and/or video) or content size.” 

The Alfresco Enterprise Viewer can be two to five times faster for viewing large documents than typical browser viewing options and PDF.js Javascript libraries. This industry-leading document viewing performance is accomplished by dividing the documents into small encoded sections for transmission, which enables very fast first page viewing. This approach has the added security benefit of circumventing the possibility of any readable components remaining in the browser cache unlike typical document download approaches.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Founder Deep Analysis, added: “As more organizations are coming to terms with the reality of remote working, secure viewing of confidential and sensitive content is coming top of mind. Few enterprise collaboration tools have been designed to meet strict security needs, particularly when it comes to editing, reviewing, redacting and annotating documents online.”

Additionally, for security, the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer supports the addition of watermarks during viewing to discourage ‘screen grabs’ while users view documents. Extensive audit trails maintain a record of all content viewing and associated activity, and includes a controlled printing capability – all of this managed by the Alfresco Digital Business Platform. 

Tony Grout added: “Using the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer, multiple users can securely view and collaborate on content at the same time, see their colleagues online, work on editing and annotating a document together, and discuss the document in a chat window.”

The Alfresco Enterprise Viewer provides collaborative annotation allowing users to see each other’s annotations, in real time, as the annotations are created. Other features include predefined stamps (approved, rejected, or user-defined…), document manipulation tools (delete, rotate, re-order), geometric annotation tools (arrows, free text, and rectangles), ‘Sticky notes’, plus those supported in Adobe Acrobat. By leveraging the PDF XFDF standard, annotations can be downloaded and viewed offline with additional annotations added offline and then uploaded back to the online viewer.

About Alfresco

Alfresco Software, Inc. (“Alfresco”) is a commercial, open source software company that builds and markets a cloud-native, process, content and governance intensive Digital Business Platform. It is a single, integrated platform built from the ground up by Alfresco and is used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco is used by more than 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Delta Dental, Liberty Mutual, LexisNexis,  Pitney Bowes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NASA, RBC Capital Markets and the US Navy Department. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and operations in Atlanta, GA., Maidenhead and London, UK, and Sydney, Australia. For more information about Alfresco, please visit http://www.alfresco.com.