Interactive Documents
We use the term 'interactive documents' to indicate a specific aspect of document creation. The interactivity takes place between the user and the document system. There are various types of interactivity:
- prompting for additional data, which the system cannot retrieve from the database
- prompting for paragraph selection
- prompting for additional free text
- approval and editing in preview mode etc.
The business context
TerminologyThe opposite of an intercative document system is the completely automated production, also referred to as unattended document production. This can be large numbers of documents, which we call high volume batch. In other cases we talk about a document server for on-demand document generation which is better suited for generating single documents in real time because the document application stays in memory, which minimises the time for loading. By the way, in this context we detect an increased demand for Web Services-based implementations because of the standardised interfaces. |
The main reasons for organisations to invest in an interactive document system are:
- the centralised content- and version managment of the templates and content elements (logos, paragraphs, signatures etc.), and
- the requirement to enforce their Corporate Identity - or even multiple ones if you think of multi-labelled products.
Interface to centralised production environment
We often get the request to integrate the output of the interactive document system into the centralised document production workflows. For instance to use the centralised Output Management infrastructure for archiving, printing, postal optimisation and insertion. Not only does this save on production and postage costs but it also gives you a chance to improve your customer service by combining the documents for one customer into one envelope per day.
