dox42: The Way To Improve Our Output Management

The digital strategy of the Canton of Jura targets an optimization of the internal processes and the implementation of innovating technologies. This strategy serves to replace one main goal: The reduction of paper in our work.

At the beginning of this project, we tried to generate documents using out-of-the –box functionalities of the EMS system (SharePoint). And it worked well as we just merged dates, Booleans or text field without enrichment or complex design.

But as soon as we wanted to upgrade our multiple lines field to rich text editor, we were facing issues in the document generation because the native quickparts were really limited and did not manage complex HTML rendering. Our partner suggested to use an output management system to improve our publishing process and to simplify the adjustment of templates in the backend. This way, we now produce a Word model which manages complex parts such as conditional paragraphs, default values or advanced merging patterns.

Some other limitations were solved by the usage of Visual Basic with the embedded code editor.

For now we have separated the design part and the datasource part. It allows us to be autonomous when we want to change the display of these documents. We also have the possibility to design more templates depending on our needs. And when more is needed we know that we have our partner’s support to implement it.

For those reasons I definitely recommend the product dox42 and the company behind it with their high quality partners.