Building Server Side Document Generation Solutions
If you are building your own Server-Side Document generation solution, I can only give you one advice: STOP!!!
Projects in which new business applications are built or legacy applications are renewed often have an underestimated requirement: a document composition solution. Organizations want to be able to generate documents on the fly, usually starting with MS-Word documents. With today’s architecture requirements in mind, a must have on the requirements list is that this must be a server-side solution.
I and my colleagues have often run into projects where partners did serious efforts in trying to build such a solution themselves - even using Microsoft’s new Word 2007 XML formats, rendering documents appears to be a very complex task.
Issues with server side document generation:
- Word simply was never designed as a server-based program – this means that there are a lot of peculiarities and issues that you have your way through to get this stable
- Difficulties to integrate document composition in their business application
- Very, very poor performance – specially for batch document generation
- Using complex, nested data requires a lot of programming and makes solutions very inflexible (no way business users can manage this)
- Server side printing appears to be a tough, slow and hard to manage process
- Templates become very complex to manage
So, building server-side document generation solutions appears to be more difficult than most companies judge at first instance.
Having said that, I have not even talked about:
- Dependency on the developer – if he leaves, nobody knows how to maintain the solution
- Maintenance: documents tend to change very often – a very technical solution usually does not allow this.
- Other requirements come up later, like the need for PDF and e-mail production, scripted document distribution, integration in DMS systems and SharePoint. What happens when the next version of MS Office arrives?
- Oh no, now users want to interact with the system to provide information that is not in the database!
- Last but most certainly not least: how to manage the process of template and document content management?
And all that whilst there are standard, out of the box solutions like our ITP that can automate all these tasks – and many, many more. And that at a price level that will compete with the cost of developing a server-side document generation solution yourself… So, STOP working on that project and START investigating our standard solutions!
A few useful links on server-based document generation:
A generic presentation on our correspondence generation solution; another one on template management. Here is more information on Server Based Word Composition.
Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions