Vuzit today unveiled new document management software capabilities that help companies take advantage of Vuzit’s unique combination of document publishing software and analytics in formulating a social media framework that includes document publishing and integration into the company’s existing web services environment.  This will allow companies to transform their web site into a strategic social media asset that can be used to enable real-time communications to employees, stakeholders and customers to inform, to attract new clients, and to make better decisions for sustained competitive advantage.

In today’s demanding environment, the web presence is often the most important and most visible face to customers, constituents, distributors, suppliers, and employees.  Recent findings from The State of Inbound Marketing report that “Social media is the fastest growing category in lead generation budgets and are ranked as lowest cost lead-generation channel.”  This indicates that an encompassing social media strategy is key to becoming a leading business of the future. To meet these challenges, Vuzit is focused on helping businesses by offering document publishing capabilities that integrate into the web marketing system.

Vuzit DocuPub for Social Publishing is a document publishing solution for marketers to distribute their content in a real-time mode to reduce costs, build buzz and drive web traffic. It unifies the management of all your marketing and resource pages such as: company news, press releases, publications, success stories, white papers and more.  Vuzit’s new DocuPub software helps companies derive insight and value from the analytics collected for each document and make marketing and business decisions based on the facts. This level of document analytics is not readily available from other document management offerings.

The latest DocuPub offering addresses the growing need for document publishing and real-time distribution to social communities such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. It also complements existing web marketing solutions created specifically to meet the needs of the marketplace.  Please contact us at info@vuzit.com and we will send you an information packet and additional material to get started.

We would all prefer it if this never happens, however, responsible developers should always plan for the worst.  As Seth Godin points out in his post All storms are perfect: “Just because a storm is perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have anticipated it.”

We just published a document that describes best practices for disaster recovery and graceful degradation.  We hope that this helps you with your disaster planning and recovery efforts.  If you have any questions about it, then please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Enterprise Cloud Computing by Chris Cera (CTO Vuzit) and David Brussin (CEO Monetate) from Vuzit LLC on Vimeo.

Cloud Computing is changing all businesses that use or manage information technology, so most technology professionals are evaluating cloud resources within the context of their business. It’s often difficult to discern the benefits and business impact of cloud resources given the amount of hype and media attention. The panelists will discuss the benefits, risks, and cost considerations when deploying cloud resources. They will also discuss the cloud-based solutions they have implemented, and draw distinctions between traditional on-premise and co-location deployment options. The goal of the panel is to help the business understand the implications of deploying cloud resources by giving a fresh perspective on old problems.

Link: Documents-as-a-Service

We recommend that you subscribe to our email newsletter or RSS feed for additional reading.  If you like these topics, then you might also like Francois Ragnet from Xerox who writes about industry trends and challanges in The Future of Documents.

One major addition to the developer section is a Vuzit integration tutorial video.  In this video, we show you how to quickly integrate the Vuzit DocuPub Platform into both the back-end and front-end of a web application.  Ruby on Rails is used in the example, but the process just as simple in any programming language.

Additional developer highlights of the DocuPub Platform include:

• Document Analytics
• Document Search Engine
• Digital Watermarks
• Mobile Devices
• Document Previews
• Image Server

Check out the new Developer Community portal today.

Now try any Vuzit DocuPub Platform account free for 60 days with no credit card or other obligation

Several new document viewing, control and analytics features have been added to Vuzit’s 100% AJAX online document viewer and DocuPub Platform this past year and we’d like for as many people as possible to try them.

Just visit the Pricing page on our website, select the account type that is right for you, and click the “Free Trial” link. No payment information is necessary. If you like what you see, become a paid subscriber or upgrade your account at any time during the trial. If Vuzit is not right for you, we will close your account after your trial ends.

Features you get with a Basic account:

• Upload documents into a secure account and manage in our web-based dashboard
• Embed a 100% AJAX document viewer into your web site or blog to share your documents
• Access to Vuzit’s developer tools, documentation and sample code

Choose this account for your own personal website or blog and if your document storage needs are less than 5 MB.

Features you get with a Starter account:

• All of the features above, plus…
• Keyword search in your documents
• Technical support from Vuzit engineers via email

Chose this account for your personal website, blog, or non-profit website when you need a bit more support from Vuzit and up to 500 MB of document storage.

Features you get with a Premium account:

• All of the features above, plus…
• SSL encryption for all your document uploads and downloads

Chose this account for your small business website or web application where secure document transmission is critical and when you need up to 1 GB of document storage.

Features you get with the Enterprise On-Demand account:

• All of the features above, plus…
• Brand our 100% AJAX document viewer for with your own logo
• Quickly upload or delete high document volumes with batch file processing
• Allow access to a few pages in a document with Document Previews
• Deter screenshots and track who prints PDFs with Digital Watermarks
• Track who reads your documents when and how with detailed Document Analytics

Examples of these features another can be found in our Demo Gallery.

Choose this account type if you are looking to sell documents online and want customers to see previews of available content, use documents as part of your company’s content marketing strategy and want to measure document effectiveness, or are a SaaS application provider that serves up documents or records to your customers online and need a lightweight embedded document viewer than can provision online document access rights and privileges.

If you have any questions, contact us at (215) 821-7004 or info@vuzit.com.

Do you know who is actually reading the documents you post online?

Do you need to control access to sensitive documents and reports? How do you know who is accessing those documents and when? Do you use white papers, case studies, data sheets and other content marketing materials to generate leads and provide customer service? If so, then you are losing valuable data on how those documents are being utilized by your intended audiences… until now.

Vuzit is excited to announce the availability of new document analytics functionally in its DocuPub Platform.

The ability to track detailed online document reading statistics has been difficult until the arrival of Vuzit’s new offering. Web analytics software vendors, such as Google Analytics, can only capture data on when a PDF file is downloaded from a website. Vuzit tracks 12 different document usage statistics, including document downloads, by individual document, page and user for 40 document types including:

1. Type of document request (i.e. new document or new page)
2. Name of requested document
3. Date document was read
4. Time of day document was read
5. Which pages of the document were navigated
6. How long was each page viewed
7. What zoom levels were used
8. Number of document downloads
9. IP address and geographic location of who requested the document
10. URL of the referring site or web page
11. What browser was used to view the document
12. Custom values (i.e. username)

IT departments can leverage this functionality to add security and auditing capabilities to sensitive documents and reports. Content marketers and e-publishers can use document analytics to generate leads, better understand document effectiveness and track document popularity.

The detailed analytics can be accessed via the Analytics tab on the web dashboard in a DocuPub Platform account. The full range of analytics reporting, including the ability to export statistics, is included in the Enterprise On-Demand account. Starter and Premium accounts offer limited analytics data. Get a free, no-obligation trial of the analytics feature for 60 days with an Enterprise On-Demand account.

More information about Vuzit’s document analytics can be found in the following places:

Document Analytics Developer Page

DocuPub Platform Analytics product page

Vuzit Document Viewer Demo Gallery

Since this is new functionality, Vuzit welcomes any feedback and suggestions regarding how we can improve the document analytics functionality we are providing. Remember to sign up for your free, no-obligation trial of the DocuPub Platform today and try this powerful new functionality for yourself.

Apparently the folks at Salesforce.com found our quote pretty interesting because they used it in a presentation given at Dreamforce 2009 called “Dreamforce 2009 Platform State of the Union.”

In the presentation Salesforce.com makes the case that cloud computing is no longer on the “bleeding edge” and that mainstream businesses are adopting it. The slide deck also includes several additional interesting statistics on cloud computing adoption including a Gartner estimate that the cloud services market will reach over $150 billion by 2013 and that 37% of firms are replacing current on-premise systems with SaaS.

Vuzit is naturally an advocate of cloud-based computing, as it is the primary way we offer our online document viewer and DocuPub Platform. Using SaaS business applications also helps us run our business more efficiently and enables us to focus more resources on our product and our customers.

Are you concerned about your digital content getting stolen?

Most businesses that produce content have this concern.  Vuzit can now place identifiable information within the Vuzit online document viewer, and also on  downloaded PDF files.  This way if there is a security breach, you can identify the person or party that was originally served the document.

You can see a live demo of Vuzit’s Ajax document viewer with a digital watermark in our developer community documentation.  You can also directly inspect a watermarked PDF file that we created using our watermarking web service.

The digital watermarks developer documentation explains how to get started implementing digital watermarking into your application.  Developers can access the watermarking features with a simple Javascript API parameter, or using the Web Service API to download a watermarked document directly.  This feature is available to all Enterprise On-Demand accounts.

We are excited to see how developers start using this new feature!  As always, please contact us directly with any questions, or leave us feedback in our support forum.

At this time it takes approximately 1 hour for the search index to update and for documents to then be searchable. Vuzit will follow up separately with specific customers who may be affected by intermittent keyword search availability. Vuzit continues to work on improving the performance of this important and valuable feature.

If you are a Starter, Premium, or Enterprise On-Demand account holder and have further questions about keyword search functionality, please contact Vuzit via the technical support email address found in your account on the Dashboard page.

Vuzit can be used for more than an online PDF viewer. There are a number of business processes and departments that can benefit from web-based document viewing and document control. For example, finance departments can reduce days to pay by sending invoices, statements and bills via a private URL for easy online document viewing and document tracking.

Human resource departments can receive resumes and cover letters in 40 different file types but review, share and track these documents in a single online document viewer for faster review and processing.

Sales professionals can protect proposals and price quotations by sending these documents via a private URL which can be tracked and revoked after the deadline for approving the proposal or price quote has expired.

Selling e-books and other documents online? Safely allow prospective buyers to preview documents for sale and then chose whether to allow them to download or only view the document online after purchase.

These are just a few examples. More are listed in the Solutions section.

Last, but not least, we’ve made it easier to try the Enterprise On-Demand edition of the Vuzit DocuPub Platform with a risk free, money back guaranteed 30 day trial. Now you can try all the feature available in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform free for 30 days. For an updated list of what you get with each account type and to sign up, visit the Pricing page.

Selling ebooks or documents in your online marketplace and want to provide prospective buyers with a sample of the document for sale? Then check out the Document Preview API in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform.

The Document Preview API allows a few pages of a document to be previewed in the Vuzit Document Viewer before allowing access to every page of the document. Upon purchasing the document or authenticating to your website per your specifications, the complete version of the document can then be accessed within the Vuzit Document Viewer or as a downloadable version of the document.

The Document Viewer API is part of the Javascript API and is available to customers with an Enterprise On-Demand account.

Vuzit has been using several SaaS applications where information is stored in the cloud for years, including Salesforce.com for CRM, Quickbooks Online for finances, Fogbugz for issue tracking, Basecamp for project management, Yammer for communication and more. This is in addition to building, deploying and storing our software and data with  Amazon Web Services.

With each of these applications we have experienced excellent reliability, security and availability. As good, if not better, than our experiences with internal IT departments at the large organizations from where we came before forming Vuzit.

Those that commented on the article beg to differ about the importance and/or security of cloud computing. This has not been Vuzit’s experience. What about yours?

Check out the full article at http://bit.ly/2BdiCK.

Vuzit just released a developer code library for the Java programming language called VuzitJava. The VuzitJava library allows developers to directly access the Vuzit Web Service API to automate the upload, download and removal of documents within the Vuzit DocuPub Platform. You can use this library through any Java enabled language such as Scala, Jython and Groovy.

As with our other code libraries it’s just a couple lines of code to perform any action. Here’s an example:

com.vuzit.Service.setPublicKey("PUBLIC_KEY");  
com.vuzit.Service.setPrivateKey("PRIVATE_KEY"); 

String path = "c:/path/to/document.pdf";
com.vuzit.Document doc = com.vuzit.Document.upload(path);

System.out.println("Document id: " + doc.getId());

Getting Started

To get up and running you download VuzitJava and add the JAR to your project. You can see detailed instructions on the official VuzitJava wiki.

Below are some other helpful links for getting started:

• Download
• Introduction and setup
• Code examples
• API Reference

Do you have VuzitJava in my Programming Language?

Right now we support the following programming languages:

• Javascript – (tutorial)
• Microsoft .NET Framework and Mono
• PHP
• Ruby
• Command-line (for any programming language)

If you’re interested in a library for your programming language then let us know. If you want to try to write your own then also let us know and we’ll do everything we can to help you build it. The language on our short list is Python.

Cloud computing and providers such as AWS make Vuzit and so many other businesses possible today. The Vuzit DocuPub Platform is a multi-tenant SaaS system optimized for the AWS cloud computing infrastructure. It allows our customers to scale up document storage and document processing bandwidth within minutes to meet demand without disrupting real-time production. Vuzit uses AWS EC2 for document processing and AWS S3 for secure document storage. In addition to offering document processing and storage in a shared cloud computing environment, Vuzit offers dedicated AWS instances to certain enterprise customers with unique security and/or bandwidth needs. We could not provide this level of flexibility, reliability, scalability and security to our customers as such an affordable price without AWS. To learn more about AWS security processes, check out their whitepaper, “Amazon Web Services Overview of Security Processes.”

Having AWS offer additional co-marketing, education, community networking and support as part of a Solution Providers Program, and a growing list of companies becoming members, continues to validate cloud computing as a viable elastic IT infrastructure.

We just more than doubled our server hardware to deal with this problem, and are still in the process of migrating our databases. We will send out an update as soon as the problem is resolved. We appreciate your patience. -Chris (CTO)

Update 1: Search is currently back up and running. We are still batch processing the documents that have been submitted since we had the issue.

Update 2: Search has been brought down again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This allows PDF Download users to click on a PDF document and choose to quickly read it online in their browser while maintaining all the original document formatting. You can then chose to download the PDF to save or print it.

Vuzit is very excited about this partnership with NitroPDF because it showcases the multi-tenant SaaS architecture of the DocuPub Platform. In beta testing document conversions only took a few seconds for thousands of documents a day. In addition, NitroPDF is very innovative in helping customers view documents online in response to marketplace demands. Read the full press release at http://bit.ly/4gRTe9.

PDF Download is available at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636.

Vuzit CEO and founder, Brent Matzelle visited 32 students in Temple University’s “Introduction to Information Science and Technology” class on Friday October 2^nd. This class is the first that Information Science & Technology majors take and Professor Wendy Urban likes to bring in several speakers during the semester so that her students can learn about job opportunities and other areas of the major that they might like to explore.

Brent shared with the class his experience after college working in the IT industry with a computer science degree as well as his motivations, challenges and successes while starting his own company. After Brent’s talk, the students wrote blog posts about their impressions. Many were intrigued by the idea of starting a business and wrote that they planned to pursue business and/or entrepreneurship classes as part of their studies. Other students commented that after hearing Brent’s speech they felt empowered about their future career options and how by studying information technology they can a make an impact in the business world.

On October 5, Vuzit’s CTO, Chris Cera, participated on panel called, “How to Start a Startup Community” at Innovation Philadelphia’s Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit. Chris is on the board of Philly Startup Leaders (PSL), an organization of entrepreneurs dedicated to helping other entrepreneurs realize their dreams by providing networking, support and other resources. The panel shared with conference attendees how PSL got off the ground as well as insights on how several other grassroots organizations got their start.

New features include:

• Print PDF– Convert non-PDF document types to PDF files for downloading and printing
• Image File Format Support– PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP
• Web Services APIs– Upload, delete, and retrieve document information for application integration via PHP and Ruby client libraries
• Vuzit.Net Library for Microsoft .NET– Upload and manage documents directly from any .NET application; language support includes C#, Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), JavaScript (JScript.NET), LUA, Pascal and Python
• Enhanced Dashboard User Interface– Manage documents and debug applications faster and more easily
• MySQL Database Support–The world’s most popular open source database

Increasingly online document viewing is being integrated into digital marketplaces, social networking sites and enterprise web applications such as CRM, personal finance and document management to improve access to documents online while also maintaining control over them.

The Vuzit DocuPub Platform On-Premise Edition version 2.5 is currently available and represents Vuzit’s continued commitment to bringing enterprise-quality document viewing products to market while reducing development and maintenance costs. Inquiries should be directed to info@vuzit.com or 215-966-6010.

Read the full press release at: http://bit.ly/jpLhA