Part 3: The Value Of Zero

Everyone is familiar with many of the viewers recommended in the enterprise content management space today — primarily because they're the viewers many of us use everyday. Microsoft Windows Picture and Fax Viewer or MS Office Document Imaging for TIFFs, Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF, and MS Office for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The MS Document Viewer comes with Windows, though sometimes it's hard to find; Adobe Reader is a free download that often is already on your system; and what Windows system doesn't have MS Office? Actually, if it doesn't, you can download free viewers for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly from Microsoft. Given the fact that you're getting the PDF and Word readers directly from the developer, they're powerful, as good as a reader for those documents can be, and they're free — what can be better than that? That's why your friendly ECM system salesperson will tell you that viewing stored documents is no problem — "Just launch your favorite viewer."

If you're worried about your users editing a document, Adobe Reader doesn't permit it for most situations, and you can also get a free MS Word viewer that does not allow editing. Just make sure that your users don't have MS Office or Adobe Acrobat Standard installed, because these applications will allow editing if the documents in question aren't locked.

So where is this article heading? What's wrong with going with the name brands? As always, one solution doesn't fit all. If you have only one kind of document in your repository, perhaps TIFFs, one standard viewer that everyone can adopt may work. But what if you have two types of documents, or even three or more? Then it can get complicated. You'll to have install three different viewers and then train your personnel on all three products. This isn't trivial. Each product operates differently. Annotations have different feature sets and abilities, forcing your users to remember what features can be used with which viewer. Furthermore, if someone else uses the annotations for review, that person has to have the appropriate, compatible viewer as well.