Many corporations have vast technical PDF documents that they want to make available to their customers. Many of these documents are sensitive, high value docs that should have restricted access. In addition, these documents also include vector diagrams, images, and internal links that render poorly in HTML.

Currently many corporate document sites have 2 versions of their technical docs - PDF for offline use, and HTML for online use. The PDF provides the high quality presentation that the documents require, the HTML provides the searching, navigation and quick online access that is convenient to their customers.

Goals

• Reduce conversion costs and loss of data and provide one format for customer access.
• Allow customers to search and reference large, multi-megabyte documents without having to download huge documents to their machines.
• Allow input and display of corporate defined metadata per document.
• Provide documents with high quality presentation - keeping all technical diagrams intact.
• Allow access only to users that have purchased a membership to the corporate document site.
• Let customers cut and paste text from documents.
• Keep internal document links intact.
• Add searching and categorization of documents for easy customer access.

Solution

The solution will be a custom implementation of matterCast Publishing Server. Out of the box, this gives us support for the document catalog with custom metadata, user membership, custom branding, document searching, and categorization.

In order to display high-quality documents with vector graphics and images, we will choose SVG as the format for the online site. Publishing Server comes with matterCast SVG Server built in. This will give us the PDF quality presentation that we're looking for in our online solution and negates the need to download large documents.

The additional work that goes into this solution is to define the branded layout of the corporate document site and customize Publishing Server to display and navigate the documents as required.

Benefits

Publishing Server provided an all in one solution for this problem. This allowed us to be up and running in a matter of days and completely integrated in a matter of weeks. The automated conversion of PDF documents to SVG documents using SVG Imprint allows us to publish content in minutes and work with the Publishing Server administration module to define all the metadata and categorization of the content that is needed. Our cost per document for deployment and distribution is cut dramatically.

Publishing Server's component based architecture and separate model/view/controller architecture allowed us to rapidly brand and customize the display of the site. We were able to completely match the requirements for catalog display and site behavior.

To learn more, contact sales@mattercast.com