2 New Features to Accelerate Your Document Management
To help you generate reports faster and make your office life easier in general, we developed two new features in JungleDocs for Office 365 that we are thrilled to share with you.
- JungleDocs Modern UI enables quick access to JungleDocs rules without leaving your current SharePoint list or library.
- Merge feature allows you to “shop for” documents as while navigating SharePoint and then merge them in addition to a few conversion and compression options.
In this post, we’ll explain each feature with step-by-step instructions on how you can benefit from each one.
Brand New UI
Simply put, the Modern UI is an app that you can use to supplement the standard JungleDocs experience. Once installed, Modern UI works as a neat sidebar from which you can launch JungleDocs rules. The big difference is that, while using the sidebar, you remain on the same SharePoint location (a list or a library). The sidebar opens comparatively faster, too.
Creating new rules or editing existing ones still takes place in the main JungleDocs app that you can access through sidebar commands.
Not only does Modern UI accelerate document generation, but it also opens up scenarios that were not really feasible before. It is now easy to generate documents on a screen of any size. Working with SharePoint, in general, should still be left to desktop computers or laptops, of course, – but you will do perfectly fine with your smartphone or tablet if you need to send that proposal on the go.
Installation
The Modern UI can be installed by SharePoint or global admins only. The instruction boils down to three steps:
- Download and extract JungleDocs Modern UI installation file.
- Upload the extracted .sppkg file to the App Catalog.
- Deploy and test the application.
You can read more about the installation steps here.
It is also important to note that Modern UI is designed for the modern SharePoint experience. If you switch to the classic experience and launch JungleDocs, instead of the sidebar you will be directed to the full application. This means that Modern UI will not work in SharePoint 2016 or older versions that provide the classic experience only. The good news is that SharePoint 2019 is out already, and, among other cool features, it supports the modern experience. You can expect our new feature to be available on this platform soon.
Merge and Convert
Let’s say you have an upcoming negotiation with a long-term client and you want a quick overview of the quotes and invoices sent. Or you need to prepare material for a new team member to get the gist of the project. Often, in scenarios like these, not only there‘s a whole lot of documents to skim-read, but they are scattered across multiple Sharepoint libraries or even sites.
The usual way to go about it is to download and read or print the documents one by one. However, we have developed a more elegant solution. The new Merge feature allows you to collect links to documents as you navigate SharePoint and then do some cool things with your list.
Here’s a quick example of Merge in action. First, let’s select a couple of documents from a random list and launch JungleDocs. Now, we go to the Merge tab and click Add selected documents to Merge list. We can navigate to other SharePoint lists and repeat this process as many times as we need. We can also change the order of documents before merging by simply dragging them. The default button action is configurable in settings, too.
As you can see, we have several options in the Merge drop-down list. We can:
- Merge the documents and download or save them to the current SharePoint library. If you merge documents of the same type, the merged document could be either in original format or in PDF. Documents of different types can also be merged, but only in PDF.
- Download the list as a ZIP archive. Pretty much self-explanatory.
Another new feature in Modern UI is converting to PDF, available in the Convert tab. Just like with Merge, you can select multiple documents and convert them to PDF files which you can download or save to the current SharePoint library. Note that this option does not merge files, only converts them all at once. If you download converted files, they will be compressed into a ZIP file, too.
Currently, the Merge and Convert tabs are available in Modern UI only, but we have plans to introduce this feature in the standard JungleDocs interface, too.
