[Dan Tuleta] Okay so I have two o'clock on my phone, so I think it's a good time to get started.
Thank you everyone for attending another edition of our Equidox Webinar Wednesdays.
Today we're going to be talking a bit about the on-premise solution. So Equidox,
as many of you may know from previous webinars or just exploring our website, historically, we've
always been a web-based application. So a PDF remediation solution that is hosted in the cloud.
But now we have a new development where we've actually taken the same functionality that the
end-users would experience when remediating with Equidox on the cloud-based version, and
we've given it a new platform for the on-premise solution. So for organizations that are looking
for different security protocols and measures, we can now have Equidox hosted and operating on your
network inside your own four walls. So that's the topic of the webinar today, and as always just to
mention, if you'd like to reach out to us, if you'd like to have a one-on-one discussion with
someone from our team, please feel free to reach out to us at EquidoxSales@onixnet.com,
or visit our website at Equidox.co. We're also very active on all of the social media platforms
so please feel free to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.
Just before we get in into the nitty-gritty of the on-premise solution just a reminder
Equidox is a division of Onix. Onix is primarily a Google and an Amazon web services cloud partner.
So we are a major cloud consultancy and our mission is to improve organizational efficiency
through cloud computing solutions. We've been in business for 28 going on 29 years now
and Equidox being a division of Onix, our mission is to ensure that digital information
reaches everyone via accessibility solutions. So we are primarily affiliated with PDF remediation
both in our software and our services, but we also have a number of other
digital accessibility services as well. Just a quick slide here about who we serve we do have
quite a few customers across all the major verticals and we work with clients large small and
anything in between. So it doesn't matter which type of market you are in how large
your organization is, we are more than happy to work with you and help you in any way we can.
So today, if you've been on these webinars before you probably are familiar with me. I'm typically
on all of them so my name is Dan Tuleta. I'm a sales engineer here with the Equidox team.
So I typically have been hosting these webinars. But today everyone's going to be lucky you're
going to hear some different voices. So we also have Ron Runyan our development lead.
Ron is primarily involved with the development and the implementation of all of the new features and
functionality within Equidox. We also have Zach Easterling, who handles our quality assurance.
So Zach does a number of different testing and is heavily involved in the development cycles
prioritizing what should be coming out next and also works a lot with customer support as well. So
a couple of different people from our team will be talking today and with that said I'm actually
gonna turn it over to Zach to kind of get started here. And we're gonna have a little bit of a Q&A,
a little bit of back and forth to start talking through some of the different components and why
the on-premise solution of Equidox is really beneficial to a lot of different organizations.
So Zach the first thing first things first why did we create this Equidox on-premise solution?
[Zach Easterling] Thanks, Dan! Well again just to start off, thank you very much for giving us an
opportunity to answer some of these questions. This is my first webinar so go easy on me!
But I, you know the title of this slide is actually probably the answer to your question.
We recognized a need. A lot of our customers are starting to move into some of the secure
documentation. And because of that security because of the security requirements, it's
sometimes necessary to bring that data or maybe to keep and maintain that data within, like you said,
your four walls. Up in the cloud, you know, we trust our partners Google, we trust our partners
AWS. But a lot of organizations have put a lot of hard work and money into security protocols and
so they want their data to be stored within that security protocol. So just really the concept of
making sure that data is maintained within your four walls, and always follows the security
protocols set forth for your organization. [Dan] Great! And who is this on-premise this
on-premise version of Equidox really intended for? [Zach ] Well we like to think that it's for all
levels of government: local, state, and federal. It's for financial organizations, banking,
insurance, healthcare, as well any types of organizations where you have secure data...
where you might need to limit the access of that data outside your current network...
or any organization that has some unique security protocols that really can't be adhered to
using a solution that's up in the cloud. [Dan] Great, and Zach so you've talked a
little bit about some sensitive data. What would qualify as sensitive data?
[Zach] Well on this slide, we've listed it out, but let's think about it
from an organizational perspective. So if you're in the healthcare industry, you're looking for
personally identifiable information, PII, or sometimes in healthcare, it's called PHI.
That could be things like your social security number, or your Medicare or Medicaid number,
any kind of health records or condition reports. Maybe diagnoses or medications that you have
as well. If we take a look at the next point, client data, what comes to mind for me at least,
is in the legal realm. We see a lot of legal contracts that need to be remediated, or maybe
even evidence as well. Evidence in trials. All of that needs to stay within your four walls.
Company records is another great example. Internal Human Resources need to be able to transfer that
documentation back and forth between each other. That needs to be remediated, but that has a lot of
very personal information in it, whether that's your work history,
whether that could be proprietary information that a company is working on,
or maybe unique individuals within a very, let's say limited groupset.
Things like financial records as well in the banking industry. That's kind of paramount.
So account information, routing information, any kind of stocks or tax information, things that are
future looking like maybe PR releases, as well proprietary information.
Again PR releases and in just other sensitive information general things that
need to stay within your four walls, that need to be remediated,
that need to be shared internally, but should never really reach the outside world.
[Dan] Great, and so Zach, so what is this Equidox on-premise solution? [Zach] Well
it's the same as the cloud-based. It is just a little bit different in the location of where
it lives. We basically plucked it right out of the cloud and kind of packaged it up so that
it can live within your hardware well within a customer's hardware, within their network.
[Dan] Great and for anyone that isn't really sure what Equidox is, at the end of this webinar I'm
going to be doing a short demonstration to just kind of walk through some of the basics
so you'll have an idea of what this Equidox solution is for if you've not yet seen it.
So Zach if you don't mind, would you just take a moment to
describe some of the components and maybe some of the slight differences but similarities between
the cloud-based and the on-premise version? [Zach] Sure. I actually love this slide because
it's going to give me a real strong basis for what we need to talk about. So again, like we said,
the difference is really where it lives. So in the on-premise solution, you're still going to get
all of your Smart Detection Tools. It's going to look and feel the same. You'll still have your UI,
you'll still have your import and your export, you've got your collaboration.
So you'll still be able to share documents to specific users or to a group of users.
Again because it's basically mimicking the cloud-based solution it's easy to learn.
All of the documentation works exactly the same and you're still always going to get your same
output type. So PDF, HTML, and ePub.
A little bit of the differences in there: the cloud-based solution generally can be accessed
from any internet connection. So whether you're in your office, whether you're in your car,
or at home on your desk, you can get to the Equidox in the cloud. Now on the on-premise,
that's really restricted. The application is run in a very restricted environment on virtual
machines. It's generally only accessible via the internal network or the intranet and there are no
cloud dependencies. So you wouldn't be able to work on a document at home and then, I'm sorry,
work on a document at work and then realize you need to download a copy of it at home. That just
wouldn't meet the requirements for the security to maintain all of that data at an organization.
[Dan] Great and just here is just another slide kind of talking about the on-premise
components. Maybe this will help you visualize a little bit more. But Zach,
do you want to take a moment to explain? [Zach] Of course. Equidox has really broken
down into three main cores. We've got the application core, and that handles the UI,
the user interface, the import and the export at its base level. We've got the AI
so that's all of your Smart Detection Tools. So if you detect a table or you detect a list
or you use any of the sensitivity, that's where that lives. Then lastly there's a data storage.
So that stores all of your layouts and all of your PDFs as originals. All of that is
packaged into one image and that's provided to your IT team in the on-premise solution.
[Dan] So Zach, what are some of the setup options? How do we get this set up and deployed?
[Zach] Well the simplest setup is just a single machine that runs all three of those cores.
It runs... the app core runs, the ML core and it runs the data store.
We've kind of... we have a user count in mind. So generally that single machine is going to be
good for you know 20 to 25 users. There are different ways to set it up you could set
the application core up onto multiple machines and balance that. So that maybe an organization
that has a hundred or 200 users could have just a similar experience as just a single
machine. But in general you can set it up with all three of those cores on one machine, or you can
split those cores up across multiple machines. [Dan] Great and what would the sort of minimum
system requirements be for the on-premise solution?
[Zach] Well the individual single image does handle 20 to 25 users.
If we come into a customer and we consult with them and we find that 20 to 25 is the number
that they're shooting for, we generally recommend four CPUs on the hardware that they're deploying,
eight gigs of RAM and about 100 gigs of storage. Let's say that the system needed to be accessible
for a hundred users, you'd probably quadruple most everything. So you'd go up to 16 CPUs,
you probably wouldn't have to quadruple the RAM although 32 gigs would be nice, and maybe
doubling or tripling the hard drive space. [Dan] Great. And Zach can you talk a little
bit about the scalability of Equidox? [Zach] Sure so each one of those individual
components: the AI core, the ML core, or the data storage can be split out. And by scaling to
each one of those, you can scale to the number of users that you need. So increasing the RAM,
again increasing the RAM or the CPUs for any kind of situation where you're going to do heavy
heavy user loads... You can allocate larger hard drive resources. In cases where we know that most
PDFs are in the two to three mg range, but if you're working on thousand-page legal documents
or thousand-page documents that have full-blown architectural images in them,
we know those sometimes can get to 200-300 mg large. So by allocating more hard drive
space, it really allows you to stay scalable to the types of documents that you work with.
[Dan] Great, and Zach can you talk a little about the IT administrator
interface and how that's going to work? [Zach] Yeah so the on-premise solution has
one additional piece, one additional user interface that the app doesn't have.
And it's the IT administrator interface. This is really a point where your IT team
at a customer is going to come in and set some of your base configurations. So
it'll kind of help them decide whether they should have one AI core, one ML core, and one datastore
all on the same machine, or it might allow them to decide that they need to have three application
cores, one ML, and one storage core. So it gives them basically a setup wizard to do all of that.
Additionally, it allows them to monitor the system status. So
they can see that if the application core is running at maybe 85 or 90 percent of capacity.
It'll allow them to create a new application core, kind of reduce that capacity and balance
that load across multiple applications. It also is a place for them to install updates,
and we know that the IT, as well, generally is…. well I shouldn't say generally,
but could be responsible for user administration. This new screen isn't necessarily where they
would do that. They'd still do all of their user administration inside the Equidox app.
This really is more of a very technical interface to give them a status of the system.
[Dan] And Zach can you talk a little bit about the how support is going to
work with the Equidox on premise solution? [Zach] Sure. So customers are still going
to get the same level of application support as they've experienced in the cloud solution.
Additionally, we're going to offer operational and configuration support to start-up and set up the
machine. So your when your IT team gets this image, we'll be able to help configure and
support that. But more importantly, what we're really interested in doing is helping to handle
the day-to-day remediation support and all of the questions around that. And that kind of sets
up what we consider an ”Equidox specialist,” or maybe an “Equidox champion”. That champion
is really going to be trained and designed to kind of foster the accessibility culture within
an organization. That could be an individual. or at a large organization, it could be a team.
And that team is really designed to handle the remediation-specific questions for documents.
Especially for documents that can't be shared via the internet through our normal support
channels. So in the on-premise implementation, we do help train and build an internal team to handle
some of those remediation-specific questions. [Dan] Great and can you take a moment to describe
some of the benefits of this on-prem solution? [Zach] Sure well as
as we've talked about. It's mainly for security. But some of the other things that you're going
to inherit when you use this on-premise is that it's as fast and secure as the internal network
that you're placing this image on. You don't have to rely on internet upload or download speeds.
You can rely on your intranet speeds. So moving a let's say a 200 mg file through the internet via
an upload could take 10 minutes, but on your internal network that might take 10 seconds.
It could be faster, could be slower, depending on
what your intranet looks like, but you'll you'll find a huge benefit in just moving files around.
So you know, we've seen that definitely through upload speeds. The way that the data storage is
accessed as well, allows us to export documents a lot faster. So in general we can go through,
I would say, maybe 15 or 20 pages in a minute in the cloud solution.
We can get that down to just a couple of seconds with this on-premise. So transferring that that
information between cloud services is no longer necessary because it all lives in the same place
in your local hardware, in your local storage. The UI is faster as well, again,
because it's page loading and it's page loading within the intranet. It's just a lot faster,
and as well, like we talked about, when you buy Equidox on-prem, we do foster
that culture of accessibility. We help train and build those Equidox internal specialists.
[Dan] All right. So thank you so much Zach for all of that great information. Now for all the
attendees on the call right now, we do have this video inserted that contains an Equidox demo. But
while we're all here I'm actually to just close out of this and do a live demonstration. So when
you receive the recording this video will be here available for you. So if you'd like to share this
internally with someone else from your team or someone that couldn't make this call today
they will be able to get more of a visualization of how Equidox works. Now what I'm going to do is…
Excuse me this ZOOM button is always giving me a problem. If I can just close out of that…
This ZOOM. It does never...it's always in the way for me...
Okay! All right so what I'm going to do is I've pulled up Equidox and I'm actually working on the
cloud version of Equidox. But keep in mind that from the remediator’s perspective the interface
and the functionality are going to be exactly the same. So this is essentially what Equidox
will look like for any user that is interacting with the tool. Now what we have here is just
a page or a list of documents that have been loaded into the application by importing them
through this second tab on the left-hand side. And just in the interest of time, I'm actually
going to jump straight into the remediation of a document. Now this document here, if I click on it
this will present me the Document Detail page. And here I have basic information about the document:
when it was published, the title of the document, which I can edit and enhance if I need to. I can
do things like setting the language attribute if I have documents that are in multiple languages or
different languages. I have an Images tab that will give me a consolidated list of all of the
images in the document in one location where I'm able to actually apply alt text if I need to.
And I also have the Output tab here that I want to mention. So if you aren't aware, it was briefly
mentioned during the webinar but we are able to export documents in either an HTML a PDF or an
ePub format. And we also have this new feature called Zone Transfer where if you have documents
that are of a very similar layout or maybe you have you've made some minor edits to a document or
you have a document that is basically a template that you're producing on a daily, or weekly, or
monthly basis, you can actually take the layout of these zones (which we'll get to in just a second)
and you can apply that to future iterations of that document. So that you don't actually have
to remediate that same basic layout time and time again. It's a very powerful tool especially with
longer documents that you might spend several hours working through. Because it's hundreds
of pages. If you can take that same layout and apply it to a future iteration or a different
copy of that document in the future, it can be a massive time saver. So speaking of those zones,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually just jump right into to the main interface here.
And what I'm looking at, I've now just isolated the single page of this document and what I'm
struck with right away are these different boxes that are covering up the content on this page.
Now, this is what Equidox does while it's importing. The file, this document,
was completely untagged, to begin with. There was no tag structure at all. But Equidox what it
does is it starts recognizing where the data is located and it will begin identifying that data
and drawing reading zones, what we call reading zones, around them. Now these reading zones,
when we import, they're going to be things like images. So these images are here and they are
locked in place and it's my job as a remediator to either describe them with an alt text or I
can artifact them if I find them to be sort of just decorative in nature. I also have other
components here where I have like headings, for example, which are critical for PDF accessibility,
I need to provide that sort of navigation tool for an end-user to freely move around this document.
And that is done mainly by headings. S I'll have to identify my headings. I also have a pretty
complicated list here. So this is what we call a nested list, where you have lists inside of list
items inside of other lists. So you have it's almost like an outline. But these can be quite
tricky to remediate in other tools. So I will show you how we remediate this document or this list
rather in our Equidox solution. And we also have a table down below that I'm going to work through.
So some different elements here. The reason I'm using this document, it's pretty straightforward,
but it does kind of consolidate a lot of the functionality that you'll see throughout all of
your documents into a single page. So we can kind of keep it all isolated here on just one page.
Okay, so a couple of things to mention about the Equidox remediation process. If
you're not satisfied with the detection level that Equidox has given you, or
if you have a document that was previously tagged and you don't like the existing tag structure,
you can use this Detection Slider. So if you notice, if I move this Detection Slider tool,
the zones will start to change their sort of size and granularity. So as I zoom this in and out,
I'm able to just redefine my starting point so that I don't have to make as many
manual adjustments to the page. So if I find a detection level that I feel works a bit better
for me on this page, I can stick with it and then just begin working from there.
Most of the time Equidox will give you a really nice Detection level just by simply importing it.
But there can be some of those outlier pages where you have a strange layout and you might want to
move that around a bit to give yourself a different starting point so that you like I said,
don't have to make as many changes. Now another important part of Equidox is this button up here
which looks like a computer monitor. If I press this at any time, what this does is it opens a
separate tab in your browser which gives you an HTML rendering of the page that you're
currently working on. So you can see here in your HTML preview exactly what you're
building in terms of your lists, your tables, your headings, all of this starts to render in HTML.
And it gives you this preview so that you don't have to actually interact with the tags yourself.
You simply need to check your progress as you go via this HTML preview. So we'll jump back
and forth from that a couple of times. Now just starting here at the top of this particular page,
one thing I want to do is I'm going to just artifact these things like logos. These can be
considered decorative and also this is where it says “PDF sample document.” I don't necessarily
need that in the form of an image. What I could do with it, if I really chose to since it's an image,
is I could actually use an OCR feature where I can actually convert that into something that
is text. I don't then have to actually type out anything to describe that as an image. The next
thing I want to worry about are my headings. So this is my heading level one. I actually have
it labeled for us right here. So this being a heading level one, I can simply tap “1” on my
keyboard to identify it as a heading level one. Down below I have a heading level 2 so I'm gonna,
because of the font size being similar and the spacing kind of very tight on this page, it kind
of consolidated the heading and the text into a single zone. So I'm just going to quickly resize
and just draw a new zone. Just so you can see that. You know identifying content is as simple
as just clicking and dragging and resizing zones. It is very easy as well. Here's another just an
image that I'm going to define as decorative. This is just like a silhouette. It's there to
just break up the page. So again I'm just going to hit “backspace” to artifact it because there's
really not much of a description that I would type in there that's going to add value to this page.
I might take this image here of our what we call Equidog. So this is a little dog holding
a briefcase that has our Equidox logo on it. So that's exactly what I can type in. So I can
come over here to the alt text field and type in “dog holding a briefcase with an Equidox logo.”
And then so moving down the page here, now that we've handled all of our images,
I have this... this is actually in a heading level 3 that I'm gonna call I'm gonna tap “3” on
my keyboard to set that as a heading level three. To identify this list... but the list here is the
real star of the show. So as it currently sits, if we go back to the preview just for a second…
If you can tell, this list is really... it's got some major issues. We have the all these bullet
points are kind of just running together, and this would be read as just a strange run-on sentence.
But if I were to just hit “L” on my keyboard, and move my Detection Slider from left to right, this
is going to trigger machine learning and computer vision where Equidox is able to define all of
these list items. And then the sub lists inside of those list items. So just by moving that Detection
Slider from left to right, I have built a nice clean nested list with the proper structure. And
keep in mind, Equidox does the hard part where it will actually export this in the form of a
PDF with all of the necessary tags. So even if you know nothing about PDF tagging, you don't have to
know really anything to just be able to identify this as a list and move that Detection Slider.
And Equidox does the hard part. Now the next thing here is this table. So I want to make sure that I
define this as a table. And again, as you can see because this isn't a tagged document, that table
would be read just in this sort of scrambled mess where you have all of these different...
every single zone is going to be sort of read in its own individual way. There's really no way to
deviate from that reading order. So what we'll do is we'll just draw a single zone over the entire
table. And then we can press “T” on our keyboard to change the zone to a table. And then open
up the Table Editor. Now the Table Editor, once I've opened it up if I just move these Detection
Sliders around… left and right back and forth, I'm able to get this detection of this table structure
basically spot on. And the only thing else that I have to do is span across these years. So there
are four different cells there for the year 2017. So I'm going to span across just to make sure that
I don't have any blank cells or any duplicated data. And then also there are two rows of column
headers here. So what I'll do is, the default for Equidox is that column and row headers are set at
a one-to-one ratio. So I will just choose ‘2” for my column header. And when I check my preview,
you will see that we have a nice clean HTML table. Whereas before we had that scrambled
mess of all of the different cells being sort of read individually. So a page like this as you sort
of get the feel for how Equidox works. Oce you just press the “Reorder” button, and we take one
final look at the HTML preview. You can see where we've come from... like we had a te. We have our
image which is described, and we have our table down below. Once you get into the habit of using
Equidox on a frequent basis, pages like this will take you less than a minute to remediate. Very,
very simple, and straightforward once you kind of go through the training and have a feel for what
you're trying to accomplish. But with that said it is 2:31 and I apologize for keeping people over.
I do want to be respectful of everyone's time. But just as a final wrap up you can feel free to reach
out to us anytime at Equidox Sales@onixnet.com or our website Equidox.co. Or give us a call
at 800-664-9638. And then of course follow us on all of our social media. We would love to have a
chat with you and kind of talk at maybe a slower pace about your specific PDF-related questions
and how we can help. This is really just kind of scratching the surface. But I hope that everyone
found value in this webinar and I really appreciate everyone for attending. Thank you!