PDF as a Service: More than a fad but a way forward
The Bundledocs team recently hosted a ILTA product webinar and we wanted to provide an additional avenue to recap some of the highlights as well as access the recording in it’s entirety.
Bundledocs was born in the cloud to provide solutions for bundling and binding. Over the last five years or so, especially as the industry’s move to the cloud has accelerated, there’s been a greater need to access and leverage the most popular PDF functions via an integrated cloud service.
Key to Bundledocs’ success in binding and bundling over the years has been the ability to manipulate, edit, and annotate the PDF content within the Bundle or Binder. This PDF functionality described as easy to use and just right in functionality by Bundledocs clients’ has forced Bundledocs to offer ‘’PDF editing’’ as a service , meaning its applicable either inside or outside of the Bundle ( i.e. against a single PDF document). Simply stated “PDF as Service” is the delivery of the most popular PDF functions via an Integrated Cloud Service.
Useful Context
According to recent ILTA Technology Survey data, 50% of law firm documents are already residing in the cloud via a cloud-based document management system, with the trend to exceed “90% cloud” within five years. On the contrary, within the last five years, there has been zero change around PDF editing. The same providers are delivering the same legacy functionality so the gap between where documents are localized and where they're going to be addressed via PDF is glaring.
Leading up to ILTACON 2022, Bundledocs asked conference attendees to take a 1-minute survey to help us better understand ILTA members’ PDF editing and binding practices, as well as most used features. We know the UK and Asia-Pacific markets needs and requirements well but wanted to reach out directly to US firms as part of our conference discovery mission.
Of the 57 respondents (thanks again to everyone for making time to help us with this!), 25% consider PDF editing/binding tools as part of a ‘cloud first’ strategy. Surprising to us, 42% said they did not know how this functionality figures into their cloud strategy.
In the UK and Australia, we have seen a surge in cloud adoption around document bundling and now PDF editing so are keen to engage with US and Canadian firms to share best practices and lessons learned around the cloud and the ‘PDF as a Service’ trend … hence the recent webinar. interesting was feedback we received regarding “most widely used features in a PDF Editor after viewing”. Top five responses included:
Splitting/combining/manipulating PDF files (91%)
OCR of PDF files (73%)
Annotating and redacting PDF files (69%)
Converting files to Word or other (69%)
Text editing (42%)
What stood out was the popularity of OCR as part of PDF editing process for firms in the US and Canada. This indicates that users want fully searchable access to the published PDF content and similar functions as part of their document production workflow, and primarily use products they own for core functionality.
Based on this research feedback and what we’ve heard in our numerous conversations with law firm users, our mission, basically, is to address this and position ourselves as a cloud service around PDF.
If you are interested in seeing PDF-as-a-Service at work, please check out our recent webinar including a live demo and related discussion.