Home → Using LincDoc 3.0 → LincDoc Overview → What's new in 3.0
There are many new features in LincDoc 3.0 that greatly improve the entire LincDoc experience. At the highest level the new features can be broken down into two main areas, usability and administration. In the usability camp, LincDoc 3.0 introduces LincDoc Mobile offline. This offers enhanced usability by allowing users to complete, sign, and synchronize forms in an offline mode. No longer do you need a 3/4G (or WiFi) connection to harness the power to LincDoc. This re-architecture will enable LincDoc to be quickly customized to meet the changing demands of our customers.
Build all your forms online as usual, but then enable mobile usage. This unlocks the power of LincDoc's new framework. Next, download and install the Offline iPad app and you're ready to go. Point your app to your LincDoc server and the app will take care of the rest. The app will download all mobile forms and instantly convert them to a native iPad application. Once downloaded, you can now disconnect from your network and start processing forms.
This is great for any mobile worker that needs to do any data gathering in the field. From generating sales quotes or contracts that can be signed on the spot, to healthcare workers dealing with patients in their homes. LincDoc Mobile provides the same user guided interface and signing capability, without requiring a network connection. Once the user gets back to the office they can easily synchronize the generated documents to the LincDoc server for further processing.
When we saw the first prototypes of this feature we all said ... "Dang, that's really cool!". DANG is a computer language interpreter that allows you to build a condition for your form that is evaluated by LincDoc, and then based on the result executes a particular action. This replaces the need for any custom scripting as required in earlier LincDoc releases. DANG is controlled by a sophisticated user interface that walks you through the details, and prevents "shoot yourself in the foot" situations that can easily arise in traditional scripting methods.
Need an easy way to do an email workflow for approval of a form? Enter LincDoc Actions. Actions are steps executed based on a certain condition of a field (or fields) or form being true. The conditions are configured within DANG and executed at certain times of form processing.
It is now trivial to add custom buttons to any form; each button is completely configurable to perform any set of actions desired. So for example, the "submit" button can send an email, save the document to the database, display an alert message, or whatever other actions you want.
LincDoc now allows you to setup multiple repositories that documents and data are written to, and pulled from when using LincDoc's search capability.
LincDoc now has a more robust user and group administration interface, even more tightly integrated with Microsoft Active Directory when using the AD Integration module.
Create your fields one time and reuse them across all your similar forms. Using the new Global Fields Interface allows an administrator to create a field (or field name pattern) with all attributes related to that field. When importing a new PDF or Word document into LincDoc, LincDoc will compare the field names in the document with the global fields and then apply all attributes to those fields. The result is much faster and more accurate forms setup.
We've created a tool we call the "Magic Button": it is a custom button that installs into the Laserfiche toolbar. By simply selecting any LincDoc-generated document in Laserfiche, the button creates a flyout menu for the user to quickly edit or sign that document. 3.0. The HTML/XHTML file concept is now eliminated, replaced by HTML hyperlinks. Finally, the system offers significantly better error/exception handling to help quickly identify common issues (e.g., show a particular template field that is not long enough to hold the data being written to it from LincDoc).
The process of setting up codelists, including dynamic codelists that depend on other codelists, has been streamlined. There is now a "basic" interface for simpler codelists, and "advanced" where you can have full control of codes, labels, sort order, and descriptions.
Earlier releases of LincDoc required that administrators use a third party tool called TortoiseSVN. This is a robust and comprehensive tool, however LincDoc uses a fraction of its capabilities. The burden of learning this tool was deemed to be outside the scope of the LincDoc experience, so the core functionality has been directly integrated into LincDoc itself.