Patents Ink

Optimizing the visualization and sharing of patent illustrations for Patents Ink

The Business Challenge

Patents Ink provides superior customer services to Intellectual Property law firms, corporations and inventors and helps them with drafting patent illustrations. Patent drawings and illustrations are part of almost every patent application. Patents Ink helps process and manage patent drafts for its clients. It provides a Web based platform for its customers to collaborate on its latest Patent applications Moreover, strict access control and user identification protocols have to be preserved to protect the security of these documents and illustrations.

• The solution needed to have the capability view a host of patent drawings in different formats
• Selected patent documents had to be shared among different law firms where reviewers could view and annotate on documents in an asynchronous environment
• The view and markup application needed to use real-time collaboration to achieve interactive discussions from anywhere and at anytime
• There were legal challenges of protecting the documents from unauthorized access
• The solution needed to maintain an audit trail of the completed discussions; it had to have the ability to playback completed sessions later

The Solution

Web4’ web-based view and markup solution eReview has optimized document visualization and review procedures for Patents Ink:

• eReview applets are fed into the Patents Ink portal framework using AJAX service to populate the same frame with different eReview viewer instances. A host of documents in different formats can be viewed using eReview
• Documents can be shared, reviewed and annotated in an asynchronous environment
• Synchronous meetings facilitate web-based document-centric collaboration between reviewers, approvers and other team-members anywhere and at anytime. Integrated email option allows participants to be invited to online document review sessions on-the fly
• Document access is authenticated for the end user; there is a role-based user access mechanism that allows only authorized users to enjoy certain rights and privileges. The entire user interface with along with tools, buttons and menus are customized for specific user groups. There is a specific color-coding schema that assigns a specific color to a user. All the markups and pointers created by the user are displayed in that color for easy identification in a collaborative environment
• Annotations and discussion events are automatically saved and can be loaded back. Meeting sessions can be replayed at a later point of time

The Bottom Line Advantage

• eReview supports visualization of Patent drafts in almost any format. The application eliminates the need of installing and maintaining any application that created the documents and drawings
• All types of users across the enterprise can quickly provide feedback using one simple-to-use Web based product
• Document-centric collaboration between different participants help avoid costly errors sooner. Inputs from a broader spectrum of customers, employees, suppliers and stakeholders ensure better quality control and increased productivity
• Being web-based and server-centric, eReview does not require any configuration or installation at the client-end
• The application automates the natural business processes of user profiling and user access rights management through its role-based user access and profiling paradigm