Systems that create documents in an automated fashion promised to reduce the hours people spent on repetitive document creation tasks that could easily be done by computers, such as creating quotes, reports, etc…. However, it soon became apparent that an automated system could not easily create all aspects of a document without a costly, complex, inflexible program orchestrating the process. If humans were able to author the parts of a document that an automated system had trouble with, the overall process for creating the document could take much less time than if humans alone were involved and could be much less complex than if just a computer system were creating the document.
Traditionally the technical challenge in creating a combined automated and human document authoring process has been making sure than the computer system did not overwrite any human edits to the document while making authoring experience for the human authors as intuitive as possible. The docBlock Ascend enables this usage scenario by virtualizing documents. Virtual documents are physically broken up into separate document parts. Because each document part can have unique security and concurrency control, a content manager can easily designate which document parts should be edited by humans and which document parts are expected to be created by an automated system. As document parts are updated by their respective authors, human or computer system, the docBlock Ascend compiles all updates into the finished document.
In addition to a simple authoring process for humans and simple automated document part creation program, the docBlock implementation of the combined automated and human document authoring usage scenario makes it easy to incorporate ongoing revisions to the final document. Because the virtual document parts exist for the life of the virtual document, any author, human or computer system can make updates to its part of the virtual document without the risk of overwriting another author’s edit.
Read more about advanced document management usage scenarios that docBlock Ascend virtual documents enables on the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 platforms:
Download the Enhancing SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents black paper (registration required). The black paper discusses several key document management usage scenarios enabled through docBlock Ascend's virtual document enhancements to the SharePoint platform.
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For more information on the docBlock Ascend, please download the docBlock Ascend product brochure or contact sales@blackbladeinc.com / +1-703-260-1111. See the docBlock Ascend in action by scheduling a live web demo, or attend a public webinar, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm EST.