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© 2014 Accusoft Corporation
1
Unleashing the Power of Document Sharing for Students,
Faculty, and Administrators in Higher Education
Introduction
While messaging via email or learning management system
(LMS) has emerged as the critical and comfortable link for daily
information exchange in higher education, it has unfortunately
also come to double in many institutions as a platform for
document sharing, an essential activity for which it is ill-suited.
Faculty distribute important documents such as syllabi and
test notes in attachments to email or other messaging media,
a time-consuming practice that greatly increases the risk that
recipients will wind up with outdated or incorrect information.
Administrators commit the same error when sharing policy
documents and other critical communications.
Sharing documents through links on school websites or LMSs
avoids some of the problems inherent in sharing attachments,
but doing so is often inconvenient for faculty and staff, and an
additional burden on IT staff maintaining the website. Doing
so also shares another fundamental flaw with distributing
documents through message attachments: What if the recipient
does not have the application or viewer program required for
reading the document type attached?
This whitepaper describes how the use of a document
sharing environment designed for the purpose can enhance
communication effectiveness in higher education settings.
The Trouble with Attachments
When sharing syllabi, notes, example files, and other document-
based content to students, faculty often simply attach document
files to a message and broadcast it to a class list, either through
a university email system or through messages generated from
an LMS. The pitfalls in this practice are both numerous and
common, and fall into five categories:
Bandwidth: University email systems can have message-
size limits as low as 10 MB, preventing the attachment of
larger or multiple documents. Even when the sender’s limit
is sufficient, the recipient may have a smaller limit that
thwarts delivery.
Distribution: As drop/adds and other roster changes occur
and employees come and go, address lists quickly fall out of
date. It is all too easy to rely on an outdated list and fail to
send a document to everyone who needs it, or to send it to a
person no longer authorized to see it. Spam filters may hide
important communications, with neither the sender nor the
recipient aware of the problem until it’s too late.
Versioning: Often the same document is sent out multiple
times to the same list, in a single thread, as the document
evolves. Sometimes these threads become quasi-
collaborative, with recipients editing the attachments and
then using Reply All to share altered versions with the
entire list. Senders can lose control of what constitutes the
“official” communication, and recipients can accidentally
download and act upon a document that contains outdated
or inaccurate information. Who is to blame when a student
completes the wrong assignment because the correct,
current syllabus was buried in an email thread among other,
inaccurate versions?
© 2014 Accusoft Corporation
24001 N. Riverside Dr. • Tampa, FL 33603 • P .813.875.7575 • F .813.875.7705 • accusoft.com
Viewing: Even when the right document reaches the right
recipients as an attachment, there is no guarantee that
all recipients will have the necessary program to view
the document. If it’s a Microsoft Word document or a PDF,
does the recipient have Microsoft Word or Adobe Reader?
What if it’s something less common, like a slideshow, or an
infographic in an image file format? What if the recipient
receives the attachment on a tablet or phone, where support
for even common Word and PDF formats can be spotty, and
wants to read it there?
Convenience: Attaching and reattaching document files
in email or LMS messaging systems and keeping up with
which documents have gone out to whom is an ongoing
headache for professionals in higher education. It can strap
their productivity, and overburdened professionals may
simply not bother to apply the care required to ensure that
important communications always reach everyone who
needs them.
Document Viewing as a Vehicle for File-Sharing
A multi-platform document viewer is a single interface through
which a range of different document file types can be viewed
on a range of different systems and devices. Some document
viewers are browser-based, using an ordinary web browser as
the vehicle for displaying documents.
You have used browser-based document viewers, even if
you may not have been aware of it. The tools for previewing
email attachments in cloud email systems like Yahoo! Mail
are document viewers. And right now, you are viewing this
whitepaper through a browser-based document viewer in a
cloud service for document-sharing.
With a browser-based document viewer, the document is
displayed within a viewer window featuring buttons for paging,
and sometimes for other activities such as searching the text,
zooming in and out, or printing and downloading the document
where security policy permits. More importantly, a browser-
based document viewer can display a variety of file types
without additional software, so those who need to see the
document don’t need the file’s native application or another
viewer program. So called “zero footprint” document viewers run
in common HTML5 browsers, including those on smartphones
and tablets, to enable users to read documents in multiple file
types without any software other than the HTML5 browser itself.
Deployed through an education website, document viewing
technology can circumvent problems inherent in other forms of
document sharing commonly used in higher education:
Bandwidth: Attachment size limits no longer apply, and
very large files can be shared.
Distribution: Recipients can be directed to website
containing current documents and communications,
eliminating the managing of address lists and repeated
messaging.
Versioning: When a document is accessed through a
document viewer in a website, multiple versions cannot
persist as they do in email threads. Updating the document
requires only replacing the file on the server. When students,
faculty or staff open the document, they see only the
current, correct version.
Stanford and other universities
that have embraced document
viewing technology have
positioned themselves to
both operate effectively and
serve their student bodies with
distinction. Stanford relies
on Accusoft technology to
accomplish these goals.
© 2014 Accusoft Corporation
34001 N. Riverside Dr. • Tampa, FL 33603 • P .813.875.7575 • F .813.875.7705 • accusoft.com
Viewing: A broad range of file types can be published,
without concern about whether readers will have the native
application to view the document.
Convenience: Viewers can be configured to enable non-
technical faculty and staff to post and replace files on the
server, so sharing a new or updated document takes only
a minute and only needs to be done once, no matter how
many people will view it.
Low-Impact Implementation
Document viewers come in several types. Server-based
document viewers are the preferred type in many higher-
education institutions because they are easy to administer,
scalable and robust, and enable the school to keep document
files secure behind a firewall.
But there also are cloud-based document-sharing services
like the one you are using now that supply not only the viewer,
but also the web page to put it on. Such services enable users
to upload a document file to the Cloud and present it on its
own customizable page, with its own URL. Users often set up
a document on the service and then share a link to it through
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.
Conclusion
Effective communication is the cornerstone of outstanding
higher education. Though evolving technology has incrementally
overcome many of the challenges that faced early adopters
of electronic communication in education, many have not yet
grappled with the inherently error-prone, time-consuming way in
which they handle the essential task of document sharing.
About Accusoft
Tampa-based Accusoft provides a full spectrum of document,
content and imaging solutions as fully supported, enterprise-
grade, best-in-class client-server applications, mobile apps,
online and cloud services, and software development kits
(SDKs). Accusoft products work reliably behind the scenes for
capturing, processing, storing and viewing images, documents
and more. Add barcode, compression, DICOM, image processing,
OCR/ICR, forms processing, PDF, scanning, video, and image
viewing to your applications. For more information, please visit
www.accusoft.com.
To learn more about the benefits of document viewing
technology, please contact info@accusoft.com.