Finding a good day and time for installing patches or updates on a server is always tricky. After analyzing our service statistics, we figured out that patching on Monday morning at 5AM (Central European Time) creates the least impact.

Up until now, we patched our servers manually after extensive testing, but we decided to automate this process. As such, you may find degradation in performance or a potential interruption of service on Mondays at the announced time.

We have been seeing some slowdowns in our document creation recently. And there were some requests in the last couple days where the free LiveDocx service was affected to the point of extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility.

We apologize for any inconvenience and will work to avoid future issues.

We are very happy that LiveDocx is getting more and more popular, but as always, there is the famous other side of the coin. The more people are using this service the more server load we are experiencing. We already improved several parts of LiveDocx to avoid such a slowdown and we are very sure that we are prepared for the next wave.

It is our goal to offer you a stable and usable, free web service and we will improve this as best as we can.

To gain more information about the situations in which LiveDocx is getting slower, we would like to encourage you to send us your stack traces or any other information you can provide when you are not able to use the LiveDocx service.

Just send everything directly to: support@textcontrol.com

Thank you very much and happy holidays!

About 2 weeks ago, we already revealed the new amazing features of LiveDocx 1.2: 

What to expect of LiveDocx MailMerge API 1.2

We are glad to announce that LiveDocx 1.2 has just been released. The new features are:

• Create images or thumbnails from document pages
  
• Save documents as HTML
• Create multiple documents in one run
• Reduced file sizes
• List of all available fonts

The new API 1.2 can be used right away with your already uploaded templates. You simply need to replace your service reference. The new WSDL can be found here:

https://api.livedocx.com/1.2/mailmerge.asmx?WSDL

The updated documentation is also available:

http://www.livedocx.com/pub/documentation/api.aspx

We would be glad to get your feedback on these new features. Feel free to post your comments and enjoy LiveDocx 1.2!

LiveDocx is getting popular very fast. We are receiving more and more requests regarding a paid premium service for LiveDocx.

We thought that it is the best way to ask you – our users – what you expect from such a premium service. Therefore, we created a quick survey which doesn't take you more than 2 minutes to complete. We would be glad, if you can help us to find the best way to provide you with the best possible service plan.

Please find the survey below:

We just set up a LiveDocx health checker on our servers that tweets the results directly to a new dedicated Twitter account. The health monitor checks the availability of the Web service definition (WSDL), the functionality of the database and the time it takes to login in order to send appropriate messages to the Twitter account.

The more users, the more traffic, the slower the connection. Generally, the performance is very good and stable, but when a lot of users are creating loads of documents at the same time, your experience might not be ideal.

Feel free to follow us on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/livedocx

We received loads of requests regarding the SSL encrypted version of LiveDocx. Finally, the API (api.livedocx.com) is now accessible using HTTPS:

https://api.livedocx.com/1.0/mailmerge.asmx

To enable SSL encryption in your existing projects, you simply need to switch to this new API. All traffic between your application and the LiveDocx service is encrypted. Of course, it is always recommended to use SSL for all sensitive data.

The non-SSL version is accessible as well and won't be deactivated as long as there are users for it. 

After long weeks of working on our core product TX Text Control, we are gathering new ideas and strategies for the future development of LiveDocx.

The next version of LiveDocx is going to support 3 new merge fields: IF, DATE and INCLUDETEXT.

The IF field can be used to compare a specific field value with an expression in order to insert a "true text" or a "false text". This is very nice for hiding information based on a specific field value. The Date field is quite self-explanatory: It inserts the current date. It is possible to specify the format of the date like this:

The format "dddd, MMMM d" would insert:

Saturday, November 26

The format "h:mm am/pm, dddd, MMMM d" would insert:

10:00 AM, Saturday, November 26

The INCLUDETEXT field can be used to insert the text and graphics contained in the named document. The format of the document will be recognized based on the file extension and can be uploaded to the LiveDocx server like all other normal templates.

The core product TX Text Control will be extended with loads of new features that will be part of LiveDocx as well. A very nice feature is PDF import. This enables LiveDocx users to convert PDF files into editable MS Word documents including images, fonts and text positions. We are thinking about creating specific web services for such tasks. The current LiveDocx service is MailMerge which can be recognized based on the namespace: api.livedocx.com/1.0/mailmerge.asmx

We are thinking about services for converting documents or assembling documents from text boilerplates.

Additionally, a LiveDocx trial version is planned to test LiveDocx on your own IIS server. It is planned to provide LiveDocx including a management tool for the management of databases, user accounts and templates.

I am very interested in your ideas for LiveDocx future developments. Feel free to post them in our forum:

http://www.theimagingsourceforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=23

I just published my LiveDocx overview PowerPoint slides. A LiveDocx partner requested them and I thought to share these slides with the community. Feel free to use the slides when you need to present the LiveDocx idea to your colleagues or management.

LiveDocx.pptx (279.29 kb)

I would be glad to get your feedback on them.

After a month in beta stage, we got a phenomenal feedback from our users. We decided to open the LiveDocx service for free:

LiveDocx Service can be used completely free of charge.

There is no catch: The free version of the LiveDocx Service is identical to the version, which has been online since January 2009, with one exception: All methods which are related to sharing documents have been deactivated.

It is allowed to use LiveDocx in in-house projects and small-business end-user applications. It is not allowed to encapsulate LiveDocx in another web service or product that offers a similar functionality. If you plan to publish a product based on LiveDocx, you should get your own LiveDocx server to offer such functionality. We call that LiveDocx Appliance, which I would recommend, if you intend to generate many thousand documents per month.

Feel free to address your questions directly to me, if you need more help:

http://www.livedocx.com/pub/contact.aspx

We just created a new discussion and support forum for LiveDocx. It is part of the forum website for all products of The Imaging Source and can be found at:

www.theimagingsourceforums.com/

Feel free to post your experience, problems, general questions or suggestions for future versions of LiveDocx. Members of the LiveDocx support team will respond to all comments and questions as soon as possible.

Enjoy the forum!