Identify API key needs

Assess the needs of your systems: Evaluate how many API keys you need to integrate Inkit Render successfully

Prerequisites:

Understand the difference between users and API keys within the Inkit platform.
Know what API keys are

The purpose of this topic is to give you high-level information to make integration-design decisions.

You will evaluate your current systems and processes on a conceptual level. Then, you will assess your system needs to use Inkit Render effectively.

Identify optimization areas by creating an overview of internal processes

When determining how many API keys you need and how many of your internal systems need to connect with the Inkit Render API, we recommend making an overview of your current operational processes.

You should evaluate your business needs and your technical needs. So, first, we begin with your business needs.

Consider the following few questions:

Within your organization, what departments produce high volumes of documents?
What kind of documents get passed around between employees? Are they confidential documents? If so, must they conform to specific security standards?
How do you store and manage your documents? Is your method efficient and easy to use?
Do you delete documents after a specified period of time, as is often enforced by law? For example, you could be mandated to keep customer data for seven years and delete it thereafter.
Is there an efficient, cost-effective method in place that ‘generates’ your documents?
Would a service to automatically create PDFs at scale be of benefit to your organization? In what areas other than the cost would it be beneficial?
What about controlling data access and security of your created PDFs? How secure are your PDFs?
Are you looking for a way to gain higher performance when creating PDFs in terms of speed?
Would your business efficiency and operations improve if you had document templates that could automatically populate and render with your data?

By answering these questions, you have a clearer view of what your business needs are. You now also know how fulfilling these needs benefits your organization.

To continue, let us evaluate and create an overview of your technical processes.

As you make this overview, ask yourself the following questions:

What technical processes are currently producing (paperless) documents?
On what other systems do they depend?
How does the data flow from one system to the other?
What is the volume of the data?
Are there bottlenecks in your current architecture? If so, what are they?
Do your processes depend on costly infrastructure? If so, what business results would you achieve by eliminating this infrastructure?

Questions such as these help you identify areas where Inkit Render can substantially improve your technical and business operations. Thus, resulting in higher performance on a technical level and reduced costs on a business level.

If you find it challenging to make this overview, note down the systems, components, and processes you have identified by answering the previous questions. The result of this exercise becomes your technical overview.

After identifying the systems that could benefit from Inkit Render, you may wish to ask yourself these questions for further details per system.

Does this system create renders (PDFs)?
Will this system only retrieve renders?
Is this system deleting renders?
Will this system access specific renders while being restricted to others? For example, bank statements.

Separate your systems, components, and processes based on the actions they perform.

Keep separation of concerns in mind, and you can change the permissions of each system as they integrate with Render.

The ability to decide permissions for each system is a core feature of the security & management layer of Inkit Render and adds many security advantages.

For an overview of API key permissions and their functions, click here (coming soon)

Determining API key amount

Now that you have an overview of the different systems, components, and processes you would like to connect with Inkit Render, you can determine the number of API keys you need.

To calculate the amount of API keys you need, count the number of systems you have identified in your technical overview. For each system, you want to have one API key.

Learn more about storing API keys (coming soon)
View the API key management documentation overview