Overview

This minor release adds one new feature and fixes one bug.

New Functionality

This release adds the Reject All Tracked Changes function to the Cleanup menu in both DokuMate for Word and DokuMate for Excel. As the name suggests, it lets you reject all tracked changes in:

• the selected Word documents, when used in Microsoft Word; or
• all Word documents contained in the selected DocumentTracker, when used in Microsoft Excel.

Fixes

In v3.2.2, the Finish Review and Update Fields functions did not have any effect. This release fixes that.

Overview

This minor release brings an important new feature for SharePoint users, fixes one issue, and makes some improvements under the hood.

New Functionality

The new Cloud Files feature introduced with this release is all about improving the efficiency of working with cloud-hosted documents in the DocumentTracker. At the moment, the feature supports SharePoint Online only, but an enhancement to support Google Drive is already underway.

Have a look a the Cloud Files and DocumentTracker-related knowledge articles (by clicking on the links) to learn more about this feature, which helps process large numbers of cloud-hosted documents in a very efficient way.

Changes

The one behavioral change we made is to respect the user’s automation security settings when opening Office documents from the DocumentTracker. Believe it or not, the default is to always enable macros when opening other Office documents regardless of the user’s automation security settings (in an attempt to not break existing solutions that are based on this assumption). One needs to do extra work to respect the user’s settings. We’ve now done that work, meaning macros will no longer be enabled if the user’s settings demand that macros be disabled.

Overview

This major release includes many changes and improvements under the hood, introduces exciting new features, and enhances existing features.

A key technical change is that DokuMate now requires at .NET Framework 4.7.2 or greater, which is no issue if you are on Windows 10. If you are on Windows 7 and your .NET Framework has not been updated for a few years, you can’t install this latest release. And the DokuMate Updater will also not update DokuMate for you.

New Functionality

The new functionality introduced with this release is all about digital signatures in the context of the eIDAS regulation. For more information on the new feature, please have a look at the corresponding knowledge base article. On top of this feature-related article, there are further “basic” articles on:

• Electronic and Digital Signatures,
• Associated Signature Containers (ASiC),
• XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (XAdES).

Changes

The DokuMate Word and Excel templates have been updated to also include the docClassification content control on the title page, which should contain something like “Confidential”, “Restricted”, or “Secret”. Previously, this content control was only included in the footers of the second and following sections but not on the title page.

Digital Expert Talk

We’ve been leveraging “the cloud” for DokuMate for quite some time. The established DocumentTracker feature calls the Microsoft Graph REST API to access SharePoint resources on the user’s behalf, and so does the new Digital Signature feature. And we’ve been using Azure DevOps kind of forever (long before it was called Azure DevOps). But now, DokuMate has a key functional component in the cloud: the digital signature microservice, which:

• is a containerized Spring microservice written in Java (whereas the components running on your local machines are written in C# and XSLT);
• offers a gRPC API (instead of a RESTful API);
• runs in our Kubernetes cluster in the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • behind an L7 load balancer managed by a GKE Ingress controller and using Google-managed SSL certificates;
  • in a Pod with the Extensible Service Proxy (ESP), which is an NGINX-based proxy that enables cloud endpoints to provide API management features; and
  • with a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, which automatically scales the number of Pods based on the CPU utilization; and
• is built and deployed completely automatically by an Azure Pipeline as soon as we push code changes to the microservice’s Azure Repo.

To digitally sign documents stored on SharePoint Online, for example, the gRPC client (Office add-in) and server (microservice) use bidirectional streaming RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls) to exchange relevant data. For example, to create a so-called Associated Signature Container (ASiC):

1. the gRPC client (Office add-in) initiates a gRPC call, providing:
   • the signing X.509 certificate with its complete certificate chain up to the trusted root certificate (all of which can be shared publicly, because they only contain public keys);
   • the location of the SharePoint Online folder containing the documents to be signed;
   • the location of another SharePoint Online folder (in the same or different SharePoint domain or site) in which the resulting ASiC container should be stored; and
   • access tokens obtained from the relevant Azure Active Directory (AAD) cloud authorities;
2. the gRPC server (microservice)
   • downloads the documents from SharePoint on behalf of the user, or users, represented by the access tokens provided by the client (using the OAuth 2.0 on-behalf-of flow to obtain access tokens required to authorize the Microsoft Graph API requests made on behalf of the user);
   • creates the “data to be signed”; and
   • sends that data back to the gRPC client;
3. the gRPC client (Office add-in):
   • signs the “data to be signed”, using the private key corresponding to the signing certificate (which contains the corresponding public key) and thereby creating the signature value; and
   • sends that signature value back to the gRPC server;
4. using the signature value provided by the client, the gRPC server (microservice):
   • finalizes the creation of the ASiC container;
   • uploads the ASiC container to the destination SharePoint folder on behalf of the user, authenticating requests as in step 2; and
   • either sends a final success response or, in case the user wanted to attach the ASiC container to an email, streams the ASiC container back to the gRPC client.

Finally, all of this is secure. The user’s private key is kept secret at all times. Only the public key is shared and also included in the signature as part of the user’s signing certificate. The microservice reads files (i.e., the documents to be signed) and writes files (i.e., ASiC containers, XML advanced electronic signatures) on behalf of the user and with the access rights granted to it when the user consented to use the service.

This new release improves the Tabular Form Review feature consisting of the Propose Change, Accept Left, and Accept Right functions located on the Review tab of Microsoft Word.

Those functions are used to increase the efficiency of Request for Proposal (RFP) processes and contract negotiations in which the parties use the tabular or ReportCard form to keep the proposed wording changes and comments organized.

In the previous releases, the Propose Change and Accept Right functions implicitly leveraged the Windows clipboard to copy and paste text from the left to the right or vice versa. Secondly, all text contained in a table cell was copied. Using the clipboard could lead to timing-related runtime errors in certain versions of Microsoft Word and for individual users. And for Accept Right, copying all text often led to the need to manually remove leading or trailing whitespace or empty paragraphs that were left over after tracked changes had been accepted.

With this release, DokuMate no longer uses the clipboard to avoid any potential issues. Secondly, DokuMate now analyzes the text to be copied and trims all leading and trailing whitespace, meaning that manual editing otherwise required after using Accept Right is no longer required. This increases efficiency during negotiations even more.

Overview

Apart from a number of improvements “under the hood”, this new release provides new and enhanced functionality and fixes an issue with the Tabular Form Review feature.

New Functionality

• Fix Broken Cross-References (REF Fields). You might have come across Word documents that contained text like “Error! Reference source not found” (or the corresponding wording in your local language). Word creates this text when you update broken cross-references, i.e., REF fields with bookmark names that no longer exist. DokuMate for Word and Excel now contain additional functions in their respective Cleanup menus that can often fix such broken cross-references, unless you already see the above error message. Overall, this feature is very powerful:
  • DokuMate uses artificial intelligence (AI) to do this. Specifically, DokuMate leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify candidate reference sources even in case you might have made changes to a certain extent. For example, it will be able to identify the headings “Customer Resources” or “Cancellation of Resource Requests” as reference sources if the current field values are “The Customer’s resources” or “Cancelation of Resource Requests” (note the spelling differences), respectively.
  • DokuMate for Excel allows you to fix a large number of documents very efficiently and it reports on what it has done per document.
• Remove Reference Numbers. If you have transformed documents from the tabular or ReportCard form into the narrative form, you might have chosen to also project (or render) the reference numbers, e.g., to quickly match the paragraphs in the narrative document with the rows in the tabular document. At some point in time, you’ll likely want to remove the reference numbers, which this function does for you. And it is offered in both DokuMate for Word and Excel so that you can do this for individual documents and large sets of documents.

Enhanced Functionality

• Report DocumentTracker Errors. Previously, when errors occurred while creating a DocumentTracker, DokuMate just reported semi-helpful error messages and then did not create the DocumentTracker. With this release, DokuMate creates a DocumentTracker and includes error messages in an error column next to the documents which caused an error.
• Better Error Messages in Excel. Under certain circumstances, Excel reports errors that DokuMate simply relayed to the end-user. This release provides more friendly error messages.

Fixes

• Tabular Form Review Feature. On certain machines and under certain circumstances, the Propose Change and Accept Right functions of the Tabular Form Review Feature did not work because of a Word error. This release fixes that issue.