For a while now, our customers as well as ourselves have felt the need for the possibility of viewing uploaded documents right there in HITGuard, without having to download them again every time. Be it the evidence for measures or controls or supporting documents as part of knowledge bases, there are many situations where it’s simply necessary to provide colleagues with an image, a spreadsheet, or a PDF in addition to the information entered directly into the tool.
After a period of searching for and then reviewing different options, we finally came across GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET. In comparison to other options we looked into, GroupDocs’ solution covers all of our and our customers’ needs.
It was quite simple to implement the library. There are lots of useful resources in the online documentation including so called „How to Run Examples“. These solutions guide a way on how you can run GroupDocs Viewer with your specific technology stack (.NET Core/MVC/Web Forms/WPF and so on). For each type a GitHub repository exists. Simply clone one of that GitHub repos to use it as a starting point or take only the parts of code necessary if you have an existing solution you want to expand. Since HITGuard does not store attachments in the file system but in a database, some adjustments were necessary so that GroupDocs Viewer knows how to load the file to be displayed. Questions asked via GitHub were answered very promptly. In the end, only a few changes were necessary to get it to run.
It’s now possible to view the following document formats:
- Word files
- Excel spreadsheets
- PowerPoint slides
- Visio graphs
- Project plans
- Outlook messages or appointments
- OneNote notes
- PDF documents
- various image types
- and many more
Click here to see the full list of supported file formats.
Who benefits from the new solution?
- Practitioners, Experts, Professionals, and Observers…
- …across all of HITGuard’s modules and add-ons.
A few examples:
- Users who create measures as well as those who report their progress.
- Users who create controls as well as those who implement them or examine the results.
- Users who want to add supporting documents into knowledge bases to help auditors and interview partners during reviews – as well as those auditors and interview partners who then view the documents to help assess and answer different review questions.
- Users who carry out Data Protection Impact Assessments and need to document communications with and feedback from the data protection officer and/or the data protection authority.
- Users who want to report an issue in the case management module or those who are working to resolve reported issues or answer questions.
- Users who prepare gap analyses or other reviews for interviews or self assessments and those who then complete the reviews.
- Users who manage resources in HITGuard and want to add RTO documents, such as a Service Level Agreement.
- And many more.
An attachment is opened in the browser in a new tab with GroupDocs Viewer
Implementing this solution has been a game changer for the way we manage documents in HITGuard, as it increased user friendliness and ease of access to documents by a lot. This way of handling documents also greatly reduces how error prone working with downloads can be: being able to simply access the most up-to-date version of any document right then and there instead of having to download it first means fewer copies of it floating around.