Competitive Analysis

Morgan,
I've added a link to Tina's document:
Tologix P3 - Competitor Analysis - Tologix P3 Prototype

Hi Tina,

Thank you for preparing the document above. It looks like you've given a lot of thought to this, and it's interesting to see what other products are doing in the PDF space. Having said that, as we proceed into the stakeholder interviews over the next few days, I should clarify my position on PDFs. PDF documents are a necessary evil for this project, because all the source documents are obtained in this format. With ISLG (and TLG), we coped with using PDF documents, but this has proved to be a limiting factor for these products that we'd like to eliminate or minimize for P3. Therefore, rather than planning to use PDFs for subject-matter analysis and end-use comparison, I want to explore ways of dispensing with PDF documents by developing an application that will automatically covert PDFs to HTML. This will avoid the laborious process of manually coding the documents while creating documents that are conducive to analysis and display.

I was on a call with Anil last night, and they've been able to produce good working HTML documents from PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat Pro. They are working on ways of integrating this directly into the application so that an admin user can drag-drop PDFs into the application, and have them automatically converted to HTML.

Assuming we're able to develop this aspect of the application, I see the focus on developing innovative ways for subject-matter experts to integrate their analysis into the HTML documents. The products you've listed in the Tab/annotate documents section have interesting features that may be applicable to this process.

Once the valued-added analysis of the subject-matter expert is integrated into the documents and application, the information needs to be clearly conveyed to end-users (i.e., researchers) through comparator tools. The products listed under Compare documents provide some interesting feature for that process. 

Your document clearly touches on my points above, but I wanted to clarify that we'd like to design an application that pushes beyond PDFs so that we have more flexibility in the way we capture information and present it to users.

We'll flesh these ideas out over the next few days.

Also, during my call with Anil, we discussed how we're going to better synchronize DevIT's efforts with Industrial's. DevIT's work will be dictated by Industrial's design, but we should ensure that both sides are regularly kept in the loop as the process moves forward. As a result, I suggest that we setup a session between DevIT and Industrial after the stakeholder interviews are complete to ensure efforts are coordinated going forward.

Thanks and looking forward to tomorrow.

Morgan

Hi Morgan,

Thank you for this additional detail.  It is very important for me to understand priorities and current pain points.  I will go forward with the assumption that converting PDFs to HTML format is a must have.

All of the tools in the competitive analysis have the capability of uploading a PDF document and editing/annotating/sharing the document online, usually within the browser.  You are right though, only some of them convert to HTML format.

Thanks,
Tina

Hi Morgan, 
I would like to set up that call between Dev IT and Industrial next week before I'm away (July 17-22). Our team is available next week at 10 am (EST) Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday. Please let me know if any of those days will work for you and Dev IT.

Hi Sarah,

I can make that work.

Anil, will that work for you and Herin?

Morgan

Hello Morgan and Sarah,

Friday 10 am EST would be fine for me and Hiren. 

Great. I just sent our a calendar invite with the GoToMeeting details.

Morgan

Hi everyone,

Just realized that we changed the day to Friday. I can make the call but, I'd have to push it back to 10:15am. 

Thanks,

Morgan