Acorel Document Service: Recent features and improvements

Wilco Menge, 27 October 2021

In the past we have blogged a few times about the Acorel Document Service, a solution that allows you to easily create nice looking documents in SAP Cloud for Customer. In this blog, I would like to higlight some newer features and fixes that we have released. Thanks go to colleagues Arjan Nieuwenhuizen and John Lee in developing a lot of those features.

Acorel has developed a solution for creating and managing documents easier and with more features than what is available with the Out of the box solutions from SAP:

Key users create new templates based on Microsoft Word, HTML or PDF. (If you use Word/PDF, you can drag and drop fields into your document).
End users generate documents with the click of a button. These documents are populated with data from SAP Cloud for Customer (or other systems) and are made available in SAP Cloud for Customer.
Data is not limited to transaction- and master data, also SAP Cloud for Customer data sources and external sources can be loaded into a document.

You can use this solution to create nice looking Fact Sheets, Visit Reports, Survey Reports etc. As more and more customers use our solution we have decided to deliver some new features.

Sharepoint Integration

Up until recently, the Acorel Document Service stores documents into SAP Cloud for Customer. While this is a very logical place, it has some drawbacks:

When you want to edit a document after generation, you download it from SAP Cloud for Customer, edit it locally and upload the document again.
Users need access to SAP Cloud for Customer to see/share the document.

You now have the option to store documents into your (Cloud based) Sharepoint environment: After a document is being generated, it is stored into a designated folder in your Sharepoint environment. A url to this document is then stored in SAP Cloud for Customer:

You still have the same advantages of the original solution: The document is instantly available in SAP Cloud for Customer and can be opened with a single click.

However, the added benefits of the Sharepoint integration are:

User can edit the document directly in Sharepoint, the changes are instantly available in SAP Cloud for Customer, because it only stores a link to the document (In the case of a Word document).
Users can share the document with a wider audience through Sharepoint External Sharing.
Documents/Content can be consolidated into a single place (Sharepoint), instead of being scattered through the application landscape.

Support for images

Images that are stored in SAP Cloud for Customer can be used in your templates. This makes it easy to for example add photos from a service ticket (Eg. a product complaint) to a PDF, helping the service representative understand the issue.

Hosted in EU Datacenter for GDPR compliance

We now host the Acorel Document Service in an EU data center. Even though any data that appears on a document is never stored on our infrastructure, the data still passes through it. By hosting in an EU Data Center we allow our European customers to be GDPR compliant.

Minor features

Allowing placeholders in document name

Generated documents have a filename that is defined in the Acorel Document Service. You can now use placeholders in the filename:

"Ticket ${productName} - ${date}.pdf"

will be saved as:

"Ticket Vacuum Cleaner Turbo - 27-october-2021.pdf"

Bugfixes

Better error messages: User should see better error messages that make clear from a user perspective what is going wrong.
Support for SAP Cloud for Customer Multivalue fields: Sometime ago SAP broke OData support for multivalue fields. A patch in the Acorel Document Solution fixes this.
Better support for advanced OData features such as $sortBy and $filter.
Swagger API Documentation has been fixed.

Coming up soon:

Admin Panel: Better login experience

Key users modify templates in the Admin Panel of the Acorel Document Service. Up until now, the login experience was a bit basic and there was no way of logging out (only quitting your browser). In the next iteration, you can expect a better login experience and the possibility to log out.