Apryse Innovation Days: Improving Tech Support with an Intuitive Sandbox Experience

Summary: In the second blog in this series on Apryse 2024 Innovation Days, we’ll showcase our second-place team Syntax Squad and their standalone debugging environment.

At Apryse, innovation is core to what we do. In our annual innovation days hackathon, some of our most creative minds come together in teams to compete and come up with impactful updates to our products.

This week, we’re highlighting the second-place finisher in our recently held 2024 innovation days competition, team Syntax Squad, and their standalone sandbox environment for WebViewer that could provide a handy debugging environment for developers.

Team Syntax Squad included Darian Chen, Logan Bittner, Matt Parizeau, and Franco Lorenzi.

Before we dive into this team’s exciting project, let’s overview WebViewer. This is our customizable, javascript-based document SDK. As you may have guessed, WebViewer runs client-side, embedded in web applications, reducing IT requirements and boosting scalability. It supports 30+ file formats including PDF, DOCX and even CAD filetypes.

WebViewer is a great solution for adding document processing capability to web applications, including viewing, editing, annotation, digital signatures, stamps and watermarks, and more.

As easy to use as WebViewer is to set up and use, Apryse also provides support resources, including human technical support. Developers can submit a ticket for troubleshooting help and assistance. However, as anyone who has waited on hold knows, sometimes technical support systems require a bit of waiting, and reproducing issues and parsing out-of-context client code can be challenging for even the best technical support agents.

That’s why team Syntax Squad came up with their innovative solution for WebViewer troubleshooting: a sandbox environment.

“As a support engineer, I take pride in providing the best possible support experience to our customers,” said Darian Chen, a member of Syntax Squad. “But often, good support requires not only effort on our end, but also from the customer as well. When customers have an issue, they first look through our documentation and guides, and troubleshoot the issue themselves. If that fails, they come to us and create a support ticket, sometimes sending sample code or descriptions of the problem that can be challenging for agents to understand.”

“With our Sandbox Environment, the back-and-forth of technical support is optimized,” said Logan Bittner, a member of Syntax Squad. “Support agents don’t have to build their own reproduction of an issue, it’s already built and ready for their help.”

According to Syntax Squad, they approached this innovation challenge with both developers and tech support personnel in mind. To ensure the solution met these needs, the team agreed on three core pillars:

The team set to work building a functional, stand-alone sandbox environment with a code editor on the left side, and WebViewer on the right. When users add or change code in the editor, they can watch as it affects WebViewer in real time. This allows for an iterative tweaking process to help developers resolve issues independently, or reproduce issues for additional support.

Other features of the sandbox environment include saving code changes, sharing a link to the state of the sandbox, reset and roll back, and testing on different versions of WebViewer.

Using the Sandbox, customers with an issue can paste in code, reproduce an issue, then save and share the sandbox, to allow support personnel to easily review a functional code sample.

The sandbox also supports versions. As you can see in the above screenshot, the “Snippet Version” is 1. When a support agent rewrites the code, the customer can use that drop-down to select version 2, and compare versions of the code to ensure that the issue is resolved. Users can also change the version of WebViewer running in the sandbox, to test if that helps resolve the issue.

According to the Syntax Squad, this innovative troubleshooting tool is just the beginning. The team believes that features like real-time collaboration, file uploading and sharing, support for other Apryse SDKs, templates, forking, and user accounts would allow customers to get even more value from the sandbox.

We’re glad to see this passion for service from our talented technical teams!

Now that you’ve seen the passion we put into technical support, are you ready to tackle your document processing challenges? Check out WebViewer capabilities, start your free trial, and dive into the documentation to craft your ideal solution. And if you get stuck, remember our support resources are always there to help.

Note: The projects covered here and in the other Innovation Days blog posts are not currently in product development. They are prototypes created specifically for this event. If you'd like to request the features you see here, you can fill out this form. Or, feel free to reach out to your CSM directly.