LiveDocx 1.2 has been around for quite a while now. We think it's time for a new version. In fact, this thought is not new. Months ago, we thought about implementing and releasing LiveDocx 1.3 that should bring some small improvements. We have even given some hints in several forum posts and in some support emails indicating that the 1.3 release was imminent.

As you can all see, we have decided differently. This post is intended to give you some long overdue insight regarding our planning.

First things first

There has been a nasty bug in our server backend, which kept us quite busy for some weeks. The bug's existence became more and more apparent with the growing number of users accessing our services. We had to straighten out our priorities; making the current service more robust trumped releasing new features. Thus, we've put development on ice and went bug hunting.

Finally, we've been able not only to track it down, which alone was hard enough, but also to fix it. We have still some final testing to do to make absolutely sure the bug is gone, but it won't be too long before we apply the fix to our servers. We will inform you separately of the upcoming maintenance, of course.

Roadmap

As indicated in the introduction, this post means to give you an idea of what we are up to. Currently, we are working on two releases.

LiveDocx 1.3

The long promised version. This version is based on the above mentioned fix. Its sole purpose is to replace all previous versions of LiveDocx, 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, all of which include the bug that has made our lives so hard for the past couple of weeks. LiveDocx 1.3 is completely backward compatible, so apart from swapping the old service URL with the new one, you shouldn't have to do anything to make it work with your existing code.

Obviously, the above means that shortly after releasing LiveDocx 1.3, we will discontinue the older releases. To make sure every user gets a chance to make the transition to the new version, we will send an email to every user and also wait an appropriate amount of time before we shut down the other versions.

LiveDocx 2.0

The long awaited features. Many users give us feedback regarding our service. Some of it is good, some of it not so much. We appreciate this. Feedback shows us what we have done right and also where there is room for improvement.

Regarding improvement, two features that users have constantly been asking for are nested merge blocks and formatted merge data. LiveDocx 2.0 will support these features. As the version number indicates, the interface will change—probably a lot. The new API is not finalized yet, we still have to figure some things out regarding cross-platform compatibility. For one, it's not always easy to use the built-in serialization of .NET data types, while at the same time remain, e.g., PHP friendly. Also, we are trying various authentication methods to reduce the number of API calls.

I am pretty sure we'll come up with a solution that will keep everybody happy. Of course we'll keep you posted.

Enjoy LiveDocx.