Welcome

HotDocs Cloud Services (HDCS) is a globally available service that provides core HotDocs functionality. Subscribers to HDCS can leverage HotDocs content and take advantage of hosted interview and document assembly capabilities.

Key Benefits of HotDocs Cloud Services

  • Make document assembly features available in your application.

    HDCS exposes SOAP web services to provide your application with the ability to present HotDocs interviews in a web browser, and assemble documents based on the results of those interviews, all without hosting HotDocs Server or worrying about how to administer it. You can also query the service for metadata about HotDocs templates.

  • Handle HotDocs templates in easy-to-manage packages

    HotDocs templates can rely on many different files to function—component files, graphics, and even other templates. HotDocs Developer can bundle all of these files into compressed template packages for use with HDCS. These packages are then uploaded to your application where they are stored and managed. In order to receive these uploaded packages from HotDocs Developer, a web app needs to implement a simple upload web service.

  • Transmit all information securely

    All communication between your application and HotDocs Cloud Services takes place over HTTPS, so the transmission of sensitive data is always protected. In addition, each subscriber is issued a key used to further secure communications. Each web service call must be signed, and the HotDocs templates cached in HDCS are encrypted with subscriber-specific keys to protect intellectual property. Furthermore, no sensitive user data (answer files or documents) are persisted in HotDocs Cloud Services; this data is the responsibility of the web application that makes use of HDCS.

  • HotDocs Cloud Services scales to provide the document assembly capacity you need

    HDCS can be scaled up or down as demand increases or decreases. Currently, all subscribers are serviced by a common pool of servers, which grows or shrinks according to demand. To prevent one user from negatively impacting the capacity available to others, the service is governed by a "fair use" policy.

    In the future, subscribers will have the option to license a dedicated pool of servers, which will put the full capacity of those servers at their disposal to meet their document assembly needs.

Who Uses HotDocs Cloud Services?

Subscribers to HDCS will typically fall into two primary categories:

  • Enterprises (small or large) who want to utilize features of HotDocs Server without needing to host and administer the requisite hardware and software in-house. Such enterprises can use Microsoft SharePoint (together with our web part, HotDocs Workspace for SharePoint) as a gateway to the functionality provided by HotDocs Cloud Services. Alternately, they can choose to write or customize another intranet application to interface with HDCS.

  • Web application developers that wish to offer HotDocs interviews and document assembly features, adjunct to or as part of their core functionality. In this case the web app that integrates with HDCS may be a multi-tenant SaaS application, often tailored to the needs of a specific vertical market, with Enterprise customers of its own.