A new cloud-based software solution from Compart solves the problem of opening files in unfamiliar formats.
It’s one of the calls your tech support people just love to get. A customer’s IT contact calls because someone in their office clicked on a file they just received, only to have the computer throw back a message to the effect of, “Please select an application to open this file.” Since the name of the file in question includes a totally unfamiliar three- or four-letter acronym, the IT specialist is hard- pressed about what to do. Of course, the nature of life is that the person who sent the file is unavailable or traveling, so your customer is sitting on a file they need to open but can’t. It may be a statement, an engineering drawing, or an image that someone at your customer’s office just has to see. But since they can’t do that, they call their IT person, who calls you, because your company just sold them six state-of-the-art printers. Therefore, it must be something your people did, never mind that the printers you provided have nothing to do with the files your customer can’t open.
Fortunately, there is a solution. DocBridge Document Viewer is a new cloud-based software solution from Compart, a German company that has been developing high-end software for transactional and direct-mail users for a couple of decades. DocBridge Document Viewer allows users to open and view a wide variety of documents with just a few clicks. The application lets users view, rotate, and zoom documents of any size or length, and look at multiple documents at the same time. The easiest way to envision it is to think of a document in DocBridge Document Viewer like a PDF being viewed in Acrobat Reader, except you have no idea of how the document was created—and it really doesn’t matter. I took a look at the free software trial that’s available at www.compart.com/en-US/docbridge-document-viewer-software-trial. It showed how a bunch of files—including some formats I’d never heard of—could be viewed, even on my 10-year-old iMac. This was pretty cool; sometimes, my geek genes can be impressed.
Start Making Sense
The value of seeing everything comes out in smoothing or streamlining workflows. For example, with DocBridge Document Viewer, a claims adjuster in an insurance company for which you support a couple dozen copiers and printers can view claim documents directly on their screen, regardless of the format of the document. Even information created in some specialized applications can be viewed without the installation of the creating software.
Or consider a city or town employee compiling images of maps showing the placement of roads and water drainage in a new housing development. The images are supposed to be part of a presentation to a planning committee, but some street names are incorrect, making the maps confusing. By seeing the maps, the employee can specify the changes to the engineer who created the plan and clarify the street names for the planning committee. Or perhaps the customer is a law firm with 31 of your machines where some maps are critical to a lawsuit about groundwater safety, but the maps provided by the state government arrived in a unique format. Your customer—the law firm—must be able to read them. And you can make it possible.
Something Unexpected
Such scenarios probably don’t come up every day, but the needs still arise and having an easily implemented solution to offer can make you a hero to your customers. Even though many organizations use document sharing tools such as Office 365, Slack, Open Docs, and others, something unexpected often sneaks in. Maybe it’s an AFP file from a mainframe or a newer file format that hasn’t yet made its way onto systems at the local level. No matter the original source, the chances are good that DocBridge Document Viewer’s familiarity with 70 different image and page formats can come to the rescue. And, when used in conjunction with Compart’s DocBridge Conversion Hub, about 40 more data formats can be displayed for the user, including those in modern smartphone image formats. That’s especially important these days when a smartphone is in everyone’s pocket and is the tool of choice for fast image capture.
According to Compart, viewer implementation is a matter of a single installation on a central company server. Users can then access the application directly from their workstation via a browser. This eliminates the time-consuming and cost-intensive maintenance of a desktop application and boosts security because confidential files do not have to be copied or downloaded by employees to their desktop computers or laptops. The only downside is that users can’t print or edit within the application unless they also have additional Compart software. However, a user can take a screen capture of a page shown in DocBridge and incorporate it into a new document as an image. I tried this and it worked fine. On the upside, neither your customers’ IT people nor your own tech teams have to maintain the software.
DocBridge Document Viewer looks like a tool that makes a lot of sense these days, especially when software and file formats seem to be expanding rather than contracting. This software is worth a look if you have customers who run up against unfamiliar file formats that slow down the work they do. And as a dealer, we all know having a solution to a problem makes your dealership a more valuable resource.
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