Groupdocs library for document viewing- A review

Introduction

This is my first review for a third party application package, and hopefully by the end of this one may find it as useful to integrate and implement the GroupDocs java libraries as our team did.

To begin, we are currently developing a DMS application that is expected to handle terabytes of data and million plus records of meta-data. Thus, our application and the document viewer needs to be stable, and efficiently handle multiple file requests. We explored a few options but finally decided to go with the GroupDocs libraries.

Our need

Our current DMS application only displays pdf files to the user. In order to allow a simple document view within any browser, it is generally preferred to use the native adobe plugin to render the pdf document view within the browser iframe. Our development team implemented a PHP-based solution that relies on the pdf.js library to render such pdf documents. This library is open-source derived, and very simple to integrate for document rendering. The only limitation that we found (apart from showing only standard pdfs) was that it is not supported by legacy browsers such as IE 6 – 8, an enterprise favourite, and challenge to any developer.

So here is where we started exploring an alternative for pdf.js Enter GroupDocs. While the core requirement was to display pdf files, we also wanted to extend the view feature to other file types such as word, excel, images including tiff files. Obviously, we needed a single unified viewer that would support the versatile file types.

Features we have come to like

The GroupDocs java library is a wonderful addition to our DMS solution. Apart from the multiple file format support, it doesn’t take up much load on the browser level. This makes it ideal for a low-bandwidth environment where network resources are not stretched.

The user interface is nice to look at out-of-the box, and our team didn’t have that much of a challenge integrating the code with our DMS solution. A few tweaks here and there, and it was all done. A word of appreciation on the documentation available for the integration, it helps a lot to have an easy reference document if there is any need at all before contacting the support. We actually never had to raise a support call during the entire process.

Another positive is that GroupDocs supports IE 8 out of the box. This was a good relief, since it was extremely challenging to make pdf.js render in IE 8. Apart from all modern IE versions and Chrome, Firefox, the GroupDocs viewer also supports multiple mobile browsers we tested making the document viewer a good choice for going to the smaller screen sizes.

Another nifty feature is that of search within the document being viewed. If the file has searchable text, then the search box returns all the matches when searching a string-text. Our DMS solution converts several scanned documents into searchable pdfs. The in-document search is a very good feature to have here.

Annotation

Once we saw the GroupDocs Annotation library in action, we decided it had to be a part of our DMS. It was a no-brainer really. The rich annotation features it provides is a good addition to market to prospective clients. The annotation features on the front end are very user friendly, however, it does take time to get everything working flawlessly from the coding aspect. Our development team again relied heavily on the documentation and got most things working without any additional help.

In conclusion

This is our first time working with GroupDocs and by and large we have had a super experience integrating this wonderful package. If you’re in the market for libraries to give your document viewing and annotation needs, GroupDocs should be at the top of your list.