Accusoft's Blog

It’s hard to imagine any single item that could please a web developer, an IT infrastructure manager, and an end user all at once. Ice cream or a good joke excepted, anything that makes one of these people happy usually makes at least one of the others miserable.

Tighten security to please the infrastructure maven, and you’ve made extra work for the developer and possibly compromised the user’s experience. Amp up the user experience and you’ve created bandwidth problems for the infrastructure maven and, again, more work for the web developer. (Everything makes more work for the web developer.)

Read more to see how a cloud document viewer makes everybody happy.

Accusoft representatives showing off the Prizm Content Connect document viewer for Flash and HTML5, the FormSuite forms processing toolkit, and the Barcode Xpress software development kit will rub elbows with Pulitzer winner Bob Woodward, author and scientist Michio Kaku, and author and social media expert Charlene Li at the ACORD LOMA Forum, May 6-8 in Las Vegas. Woodward will deliver the keynote, and Kaku and Li are featured speakers.

Read more to see what will be appearing at ACORD LOMA.

A preference for native file formats in eDiscovery – the electronic exchange of information in the discovery process in litigation – is now nearly the norm, despite some resistance in years past. When electronically stored information (ESI) is preserved throughout the discovery process in its native format, all potentially relevant information – including searchable text, annotations, and metadata – is preserved as well, and is readily available to sharp legal eyes and to the growing array of eDiscovery analysis tools.

Of those tools, one of the most talked-about today is predictive coding, the application of artificial intelligence and workflow processes to keyword search, filter, and sample eDiscovery content to identify what’s most relevant to the case, in order to make the process quicker and less labor-intensive. Critics say predictive coding amounts to replacing a lawyer’s experienced eyes and judgment with inferior programming, while proponents argue that it’s not only faster (hence cheaper), but also less likely to miss something small and important, when applied smartly. Although the jury is still out and challenges remain, recent word from federal and state benches points to growing acceptance of predictive coding, especially in cases involving thousands or millions of pages of discovery.

Read more to learn about predictive coding.

When Jigoro Kanō established the martial arts style Judo in 1882, he did so after several years of training under various other methodologies. Ju (“pliancy”) and Do(“the way”) roughly translate into “the gentle way.” The revolutionary aspect of his new form of martial arts was kuzushi, or off-balancing, a way of using an opponent’s weight to leverage the execution of one’s technique. In this evolution, Kanō found his motto: “The maximum efficiency with minimal effort.”

The leveraging of existing assets to accomplish sophisticated results with minimal effort has its place within technology implementations, and Microsoft SharePoint certainly lends enough weight to the equation to gain a significant amount of leverage in your execution. Leveraging that weight effectively is the key to successful execution in SharePoint, and that’s one of the many reasons I’m so enthusiastic about our Prizm Content Connect platform when it’s integrated with SharePoint, a scenario that’s...

Read more to learn how to maximize Sharepoint efficiency.

Are there security advantages to an alternate viewer, for example Prizm Content Connect or Prizm Cloud Connect?

Security is on everyone’s mind these days, and if it isn’t it should be.  It is certainly on Oracle’s mind as they have had a lot of Java vulnerabilities reported in the last few months. Microsoft also released their largest ever Patch Tuesday to address 57 different vulnerabilities in some of their top products.  Both of these companies are top tier vendors and have millions of installed applications.  Having that kind of install base makes them prime targets.  A reasonable question then might be “Are there security advantages if I went with someone else?”  I’ll explore this question in relation to PDF and document viewers.

The first thing to realize about a “PDF vulnerability” or a “Word vulnerability” is that this is actually shorthand for “A vulnerability in application X when acting on files of type Y” where Y happens to be a PDF or Word document.  An in-the-wild exploit that uses a PDF vulnerability must target a specific application, usually Adobe Acrobat Reader, and usually it targets a specific version.  This means that if you are viewing a malicious PDF targeted at Adobe Acrobat Reader with Prizm Content Connect, or Prizm Cloud Connect then this file will most likely fail to render instead of running malicious code.  This is not a new idea, this is Security through Minority.  This is the idea that an attacker has limited time and is trying to extract maximum value out of that time and so they will target the most widespread applications.  While this might be true in the general case, it might not be true in the targeted case.  The number one prediction from Kaspersky Lab’s Security Bulletin 2012 is that targeted attacks and cyber-espionage are on the rise, so it’s something to consider.

Read more on limiting security risks with a document viewer.