Best PracticesChoosing FlashPaper or PDF for Your Document Management Model


You may have noticed that FlashPaper is capable of creating PDF documents as well as Flash movies. This might, in turn, spark the question as to which document platform is better and why. Over the last few years, Adobe has really advanced document management by developing the PDF format to its current state. PDFs are excellent because they are snapshots of a document that can be made non-editable. From personal experience in the legal industry, the PDF format has been very useful because documents can be submitted and there is no question about whether or not they have been altered. Other formats, such as Word or Excel documents, don't offer the same level of security.

The only downside to the PDF format has been the reader required to view the documents. To read a PDF, you have to install the Adobe Reader on your machine, and then, each time you open a PDF document, the Reader application has to open and process the document before either sending it to the browser for rendering or displaying it natively in the Reader application.

FlashPaper is Macromedia's attempt to improve on this document management model by allowing the document to be captured in a static, uneditable format similar to that of a PDF document, while reducing load time for the document significantly. Because the Flash Player is already installed on the vast majority of machines connected to the web, no additional download or installation is required. In addition, the Flash Player always renders Flash movies in the browser, ensuring that the user doesn't have to wait for the helper application to initialize and process the document, as is the case with Acrobat Reader.

On the other hand, your users might be accustomed to PDF documents because they have become the standard for document management on the web over the last few years and switching to the FlashPaper model might cause some confusion. Therefore, I would suggest generating and providing access to documents in both formats while the popularity of FlashPaper grows. Then, as your user base becomes more comfortable with using FlashPaper documents instead of PDF documents, you can slowly phase out the PDF versions.



Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
ISBN: 0789733854
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 337

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