HotDocs Advance Suite Overview

HotDocs Advance Suite is a powerful platform for creating templates, delivering interviews, and assembling documents. With the HotDocs Advance Suite, you can significantly reduce the time needed to generate client or customer-specific documents, such as individualized loan applications court forms, sales proposals, business contracts, medical forms, and more.

It consists of two main components: HotDocs Author and HotDocs Advance web application. With HotDocs Author, you can create and edit templates, which can then be uploaded to HotDocs Advance. The Advance web application enables you to organize and manage your templates, launch interviews to collect data from users, and download assembled documents that contain unique data entered by individual users. In this way you can generate an infinite number of personalized documents in HotDocs Advance from a single template created in HotDocs Author.

Main Features of the HotDocs Advance Suite

• Create and edit templates using HotDocs Author
• Organize and manage templates using the HotDocs Advance web application
• Conduct interviews to gather data from users, including external clients
• Generate personalized documents from templates using document assembly
• Automate document creation and approval processes using workflows
• Collaborate with team members on templates using collaboration tools
• Integrate your own web applications with Advance using a web API
• Integrate with other systems, such as iManage Work
• Track template usage and performance using reporting and analytics
• Protect your data and templates using security features

Workflow

To begin using the HotDocs Advance Suite, the first step is to download and install HotDocs Author, the desktop tool used to create templates. After obtaining a valid license, you can download Author by logging into the HotDocs Advance web application and clicking the "Download Author" link in the account menu. Once installed, you can use Author tutorials to learn how to transform your existing Word, PDF, and plain text documents into HotDocs templates. For example, you can use the Author add-in for Word to perform many template creation and editing functions from within Word itself, as well as Component Studio to edit components, the basic building blocks of a template.

Once you have created your templates, you can upload them to the HotDocs Advance web application. From there, you can assign a template to a Work Group based on department or topic area. With a template in a Work Group, you can create a Work Item, which allows you to launch an interview based on a selected template and save the answers to a specific location. Once the interview is completed, the Work Item provides a link to download the assembled document, which contains the information gathered in the interview and is specific to the client. 

Common Tasks

The HotDocs Advance Suite offers a range of common tasks that can be performed within the two applications that make up the platform, including but not limited to:

HotDocs Author

• Create workspaces to organize your templates
• Create new DOCX, plain text, and foreign language templates
• Test your templates
• Upload your templates to HotDocs Advance

HotDocs Advance Web Application

• Manage uploaded templates and template groups
• Control user access to templates
• Create new work items
• Download assembled documents

HotDocs Advance Suite and Previous Versions of HotDocs

If you are familiar with previous versions of HotDocs, you may be interested to learn about the differences between HotDocs Advance and previous versions of HotDocs (now considered Classic HotDocs).

Licensing

For information on licensing, contact HotDocs sales and support.