Traditional Templates

Traditional templates use a mix of placeholders to indicate where data is required, and application code to provide specialized functionality. The use of shared content such as that provided by ActiveDocs Opus Snippets is rarely if ever supported. Traditional templates are stored in shared folders or need to be rolled out to user's individual computers, creating a maintenance and version-control workload that can easily overwhelm an organization's IT resources.

As with the risk- and error- prone practice of copying and modifying an old document, users still have to go looking for traditional templates. This carries a level of risk - including selecting the wrong template or an old version - and costs time and effort. Unless templates are easily found and easy to use, users can easily fall back on practices like copy-and-paste.

Template repositories need to be kept up-to-date with changes driven by re-branding, regulations, and the market. Large numbers of templates can produce significant maintenance issues. Maintaining traditional templates can divert IT resources from more valuable core activities, and will inhibit your responsiveness if maintenance work needs to wait in a queue with all of the other, pressing, work that IT is doing for your business.

Functionally, traditional templates don't easily support shared common content, repeated instances of the same data, filtered access to external data sources, and other features to help reduce errors. They are not always easy to use, require a significant investment in client software, and do not easily support re-use for document creation from your other valuable IT software investments.

The ActiveDocs Opus Advantage addresses all of the drawbacks of traditional template design, maintenance, management, and usage.