AODocs: Reinventing document management with App Engine

About AODocs

In a market still dominated by on-premises technologies, AODocs reinvents document management by integrating it directly in the Google Workspace environment. Customers can apply all the benefits of cloud collaboration to their content management processes in a secure, compliant, and affordable way, while saving infrastructure costs and automating workflows.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States

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By building its document management service in a serverless Google Cloud environment, AODocs scales with customer needs, delivers uninterrupted service, and saves 1 million USD per year.

Google Cloud results

  • Delivers cost savings of approximately 1 million USD per year by simplifying engineering operations with App Engine
  • Boosts flexibility by facilitating the management of parallel environments, adapting release cycles to regulatory compliance needs
  • Strengthens customer trust by ensuring security of business-critical documents, passing every single penetration test
  • Scales with any project size without impacting the performance of other users on the multi-tenant platform

80M docs migrated on live system without performance impact

Once you’ve worked in the cloud, it’s hard to return to the old ways of sharing and managing documents. But for many companies, reconciling the old with the new is one of the realities of digitalization. Even as real-time tools are taking collaboration to the next level, cobbled together on-premises systems are alive and well in the world of document management. That’s where AODocs comes in.

“There’s a long-held belief that you need to separate your collaboration environment from the place where you store your business-critical documents,” explains Stéphan Donzé, founder and CEO of AODocs. “We disagree. With AODocs, businesses can apply all these cloud innovations on the enterprise level, implementing document management directly into their collaboration environment in a secure, compliant, and affordable way.”

As the only content services platform that is tightly integrated with Google Workspace, AODocs works like a document management layer that sits on top of Google Drive, enabling businesses to organize their data and documents effectively. They can establish permissions and ownership controls, automate business workflows, apply retention policies, and comply with standards and regulations, all while saving infrastructure and administrative costs.

“Keeping traditional document management solutions after deploying a collaboration tool such as Google Workspace is frustrating for businesses, because they’re stuck halfway on their migration to the cloud,” says Donzé. “With AODocs, we’re getting them all the way there, allowing them to have all their documents and processes, even the most business critical ones, in Google’s collaborative environment.”

“Instead of concerning ourselves with servers, or even virtual machines, we wanted to focus all our energy on the software, knowing that everything else is taken care of. At the time, App Engine was the only serverless computing offering on the entire market, allowing us to do just that.”

Stephan Donzé, Founder and CEO, AODocs

Ditching servers to gain flexibility

Using AODocs means thinking beyond the status quo, and Donzé applied the same mindset when it came to choosing a cloud provider to build his platform. Back in 2012, that meant going serverless at a time when that term wasn’t yet in anyone’s vocabulary.

“Instead of concerning ourselves with servers, or even virtual machines, we wanted to focus all our energy on the software, knowing that everything else is taken care of,” remembers Donzé. “At the time, App Engine was the only serverless computing offering on the entire market, allowing us to do just that.”

App Engine is since inception the backbone of the AODocs cloud stack, running the primary set of services for its enterprise document management service. Information is stored on Datastore, and BigQuery helps AODocs monitor user activity and gain insights with predictive analytics.

Scaling to every demand, solving every security challenge

With its serverless stack on Google Cloud, AODocs has been unconstrained in its growth since day one. No migration from legacy software to the cloud is too large for the system, and once customers are up and running on AODocs, they can scale their footprint as needed, regardless how many users or documents they want to add.

“We recently migrated a customer’s entire document management system, containing 80 million documents, to AODocs,” says Donzé. “The one thing we didn’t have to worry about at all was the data, because we knew Google Cloud would handle any amount, without impacting the performance or response times for our other customers in the slightest.”

Security is the second pillar of AODocs’ Google Cloud environment. From network intrusions to hackers or denial of service attacks, the platform needs to be prepared for all possible security incidents. Leveraging the built-in security features of Google Cloud enables Donzé and his team to focus all their efforts on the solution itself, knowing that security threats are properly dealt with.

“We manage business-critical documents, so our customers need to be able to trust that their data is safe with us,” says Donzé. “To make sure we’re up to that standard, we run regular penetration tests. Thanks to the Google Cloud infrastructure, we’ve passed every single one of them with flying colors.”

Seamless updates, simple testing

In the “old” world of document management, each software update entails a migration in itself, which is the responsibility of the business. Even moving from one version to the next can be a strenuous process best carried out with professional help. With AODocs, customers experience the rollout of new features and versions seamlessly, without having to concern themselves with migrating the data. “We’re performing more than 50 major and minor software releases per year, while causing zero interruption for our customers and never requiring them to migrate anything manually,” says Donzé.

Because creating new tenants is a matter of seconds with App Engine, those curious to try out the AODocs platform can do so almost instantly. “With most document management services, it takes a day or two to receive a testing environment,” says Donzé. “At AODocs, Google Cloud enables us to provide an instance for testing purposes immediately, allowing potential customers to try out the AODocs solution right away.”

“Running multiple environments in parallel is an effort that would normally require a dedicated team, but with App Engine, it’s a built-in feature. It’s incredibly easy to manage and allows us to strike the right balance for each customer between pushing new features and carefully preparing each change.”

Stephan Donzé, Founder and CEO, AODocs

Meeting customer needs with multiple environments

One of the things Donzé and his team love about App Engine is the ability to manage multiple environments in parallel. “Most of our customers have two Google Workspace domains, one of them purely for testing purposes,” explains Donzé. “App Engine enables us to push new features to these test domains first, giving our customers the chance to test and explore the changes and prepare their users for them.”

Some of AODocs’ customers, such as businesses in the life sciences and other highly regulated industries, have even more specific compliance demands, requiring extensive validation for every single software update. With its serverless setup, AODocs can push updates to selected customers in slower release cycles, even while running on the same App Engine instance. This gives businesses enough time to test and validate, without impeding new releases for other customers.

“Running multiple environments in parallel is an effort that would normally require a dedicated team, but with App Engine, it’s a built-in feature,” says Donzé. “It’s incredibly easy to manage and allows us to strike the right balance for each customer between pushing new features and carefully preparing each change.”

Saving millions in engineering operations

To monitor the system performance and fix emerging issues quickly, AODocs still needs an operations team, but most of its engineering resources can go towards the development, deployment, and continuous improvement of the platform.

“Just to reproduce everything App Engine does for us, we’d need to expand our infrastructure and operations team significantly or shift internal engineering resources towards it,” says Donzé. “This amounts to savings of roughly one million dollars per year in engineering operations thanks to Google Cloud.”

Tapping into new markets and industries

Just a few years ago, separating collaboration environments and controlled document repositories was the norm. Challenging it, admits Stephan Donzé, was a bit of a “crazy idea.” Today, AODocs’ continued growth is proof that more and more businesses are recognizing this idea as the future, realizing they can achieve secure, compliant document management and user-friendly collaboration all at once.

Currently, they’re venturing into highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and financial services, which comes with new challenges. To comply with data retention requirements, for example, AODocs has started to integrate Cloud Storage to ensure that selected data can never be deleted or overwritten.

“We started with industries that are more likely to be early adopters, from retail to manufacturing,” says Donzé. “Today, we’re finally winning new customers in the more conservative, highly regulated industries, which heavily rely on document management. They have recognized that what we’re doing is the future, and together with Google Cloud, we can deliver it with the security and regulatory compliance they need.”

“We developed AODocs for businesses that saw the future of document management early on. By leveraging Google Cloud tools, we’ve been able to make this future a reality for everyone. Together with Google Cloud, we’re once again at the forefront of change, excited to change the game with AI.”

Stephan Donzé, Founder and CEO, AODocs

Changing the game with AI

Having established credibility and recognition across different industries, Donzé and his team have a few more ideas up their sleeves. Next up: AI. Today, many AODocs features rely on the fact that documents are tagged with structured metadata, which is traditionally a manual process. By integrating Google Cloud AI, AODocs lifts this manual constraint, making it possible to tag documents in a semi- or fully automated manner. The first AI-based product will be an invoice processing package, allowing customers to automate invoice processing at scale with Procurement DocAI.

“With our upcoming AI solutions, our customers will be able to tag all their documents with structured metadata automatically, which opens up a whole new range of possibilities,” says Donzé. “They’ll be able to automate workflow decisions, retention management, visibility permissions, and more, without requiring manual data entry.”

Much like serverless computing, AODocs has moved from early adopters to the mainstream, and the potential for growth is enormous. “We developed AODocs for businesses that saw the future of document management early on,” says Donzé. “By leveraging Google Cloud tools, we’ve been able to make this future a reality for everyone. Together with Google Cloud, we’re once again at the forefront of change, excited to change the game with AI.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About AODocs

In a market still dominated by on-premises technologies, AODocs reinvents document management by integrating it directly in the Google Workspace environment. Customers can apply all the benefits of cloud collaboration to their content management processes in a secure, compliant, and affordable way, while saving infrastructure costs and automating workflows.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States