The Document Assembly Industry
Document assembly is an industry that deals with increasing the productivity (and profit margin) of companies by making documents faster and easier to create, with much higher levels of consistency and accuracy. The documents can be simple letters, memos and forms, PDF type form fill documents or highly complex documents (such as legal documents) with hundreds of instances of optional content, multiple levels deep. As with any programming, the better the sytem designed and programmed for you, the less effort you need to spend to create your documents. The benefits of document assembly are not limited to any specific industry however, the industry that appears to benefit most is the law firm and legal-related entites.
If you produce many documents on a day to day basis that are not "accounting driven", document assembly is most likely a profit avenue for your company or firm.
To some, document assembly (or document automation) means Microsoft Word mail merges, to others it means a host of WordPerfect or VBA macros and to others it conjures mental images of PDF documents with form fill fields. Document assembly is all and none of these things. Can document assembly be as simple as mail merges in word? Absolutely. Is document assembly able to help fill out fixed PDF forms? Yes. Is document assembly limited to these applications? Absolutely not.
Document assembly is simply a process to create "better" documents more efficiently and with less effort while increasing quality control, consistency and accuracy of content. Both Microsoft Word and WordPerfect have inbuilt scripting languages which can be learned and used to create document assembly systems. Several companies have products that are "document assembly platforms" which contain very specific programming languages designed to create better document assembly systems than standard word processor offerings. In short, document assembly can be a variety of things, created by various different programs. The only real limitations when creating a document assembly system are the program you chose to write it in, the skill and experience of the programmer and the amount of resources you are willing to dedicate.
Something Slightly Different...
The purpose of the DDS website is not to sell you a specific document assembly
product or suite of products. The purpose of this site is not even to sell
the concept of document assembly. In writing this site, I hope to achieve
a single goal: To inform and educate the general public
regarding document assembly. It is my firm belief that document assembly
is massively under utilized in Australia and that even firms who have "embraced"
document assembly are not using it to its full potential.
With that in mind, the majority of the content on this website are delivered
by way of online forums (or messageboard) which can be found here.
These forums allow me to organize and categorize information regarding document
assembly and also to allow public feedback and responses to the information
provided.
Table of Contents
| Website Index | Starting point of the "regular" website, with contact details, about DDS and other general information | |
| Forums | Document assembly forums, which contain most of the info on this site | |
| HotDocs (in development) | HotDocs is the most common document assembly platform in Australia, so I will be focusing on that | |
| Programming
Showcase (in development) |
Overviews of various systems built with HotDocs. You'll never know whats possible until you've seen something a little different taken to the next level |