Workflow Automation Software

Millennia Group Blog

My PDFs are Dazed and Confused

One of the core principles that Millennia Group advocates and adheres to is that the official copy of a digital document should be a singular unit.  What this means is that the digital version, a PDF in most cases, should contain only one document.  What our users encounter, and sometimes want, is a different story.

A user may receive a single PDF from an external party that contains many documents.  The other situation is where the user receives multiple PDFs that together comprise a single document.  In one case the file needs to be split and in the other case, the files need to be merged.  Here are some examples of why this principle of a singular unit makes sense when your PDFs are dazed and confused.    

Many users will receive a single, giant PDF that contains upwards of 1,000 pages and 50 documents for a transaction closing.  Search is complicated because a user either needs to know the document exists in the PDF or they need to use the full text search capabilities to find it.  And then try sharing just one of those 50 documents with another user, it’s quite an effort to split the one document out of the whole PDF.

The other frequently encountered situation is that a document is so large that it could not all be scanned as one document.  We see that the document is then scanned as Part 1 and Part 2 or the main document as one PDF and each exhibit as PDFs.  It is not efficient to work with and have to open multiple documents to get the whole picture.  It is also imperative to keep all parts together so a user doesn’t mistakenly believe they have the whole story when they don’t.

On the flip side, we understand that the users of our document management system want to make it easy to send information to others.  Users want to gather up the documents they want and merge them into a single PDF that they can email out.  Or the users want to (gasp!) print out multiple documents all at once.

It’s all about making life easier for the users and giving them the flexibility that they want.  Of course, that means that your document management solution needs to have these split and merge functions.  Or the users need to be trained how to use the functionality in Adobe Acrobat so they can manage these tasks outside of the document management system.  Either way, the requirement is flexibility and the end result is optimal efficiency.

Millennia Group provides flexible workflow and document management solutions to optimize your users efficiency.  www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, (630) 279-0577