Item: ActiveDocs
Rating: 8
Author: Derek Schroeder

Overall Satisfaction with ActiveDocs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveDocs is used for document generation and can quickly pump out a professional document based on a template with all relevant information regarding a client or customer. The software includes base templates that can be used to create customized templates. There are a large array of templates available and creating one from scratch is very easy.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The user-friendly interface guides you through the template creation process.
Highly customizable including rules for following client/customer information.
Fast and easy to use - anyone can create documents once templates are in place.

Cons

The built-in template designs are a bit lackluster. While there are numerous, they all have the same blase style and formatting
The built-in template designs are not very diverse and could be expanded upon.

Return on Investment

Greatly increases productivity by removing document creation and copy-pasting from an employee's workflow.
Reduces mistakes made during the manual document creation process, ensuring better and more professional deliverables.
Cost for the software is market price and very fair for what is gained.

Alternatives Considered

HotDocs

ActiveDocs and HotDocs are very similar. HotDocs requires training or a technically savvy mind to pick up and run with. ActiveDocs seems much more user-friendly and easy to use. HotDocs, however, can produce some very intricate documents based on the templates. Both use rules and question-based information intake. Another benefit of ActiveDocs is its integration with numerous systems including Office 365.

Performance

The software overall is very excellent. It responds quickly and produces documents well. The integration with systems makes data input easy. Questions can be designed to allow further expansion of template creation/customization. The rules section is very useful for complicated If/Than/Else style templates. Although experience and training help, the software is very user-friendly out of the box.

Usability

Very good usability overall. Any user can pick this up and run with it. HotDocs, the closest competitor, has similar end-user usability, but from a designer of templates perspective, ActiveDocs definitely has the edge in this regard. I would recommend this for any company that mass produces documents from templates as deliverables.

Ease of Integration

Connects easily with numerous popular systems including Office 365 (or direct to Outlook if necessary), SharePoint, Salesforce, and SAP i.e. it covers the majority of businesses platforms in 2019. Almost every company uses Office 365 or Outlook in some capacity and can, therefore, draw client or customer information directly from the software.

Likelihood to Recommend

There are not a lot of competitors to compare this product with, but ActiveDocs holds its own as a very useful software for the need. I recommend doing a demo to see how the process works, but it's rather streamlined and easy to create a template and produce a document from it.

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ActiveDocs - user-friendly template creation and document generation