directEDGAR’s platform is hosted by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product called Appstream. It allows us to provide you with a virtual Windows machine where your machine is connected directly to our infrastructure. When you first log into Appstream you will be see a welcome screen similar to the one below:

My personal preference is to select the Desktop option. This allows you to interact with all of the programs almost as if you are working on a local computer. When you select the Desktop a loading screen will appear. Because we store your search history and any files you may have saved locally all of the unique files and features that relate to you have to be pulled from a storage unit and loaded onto the machine. The standard load time is two minutes.

If this is your first session with directEDGAR you will need to validate your unique license file. The license file is a txt file that has a license key in plain text embedded into the file. While our software will allow you to run searches without a valid license file it will limit your interaction with the infrastructure until that file is validated. Before you can validate your license it has to be transferred to the instance. Make sure you have the license file handy on your local computer and then look to the left corner of the frame around the Appstream session for a Folder icon. The red arrow in the image below is pointing to that icon.

Click the Folder icon to open the file transfer control. Remember the Appstream instance is somewhere else and we need to transfer a file from your local computer to this instance. Later you are going to want to transfer files back and forth so this is an important feature to get comfortable with. Here is the File transfer interface that opens after you click on the Folder icon.

For this session you want to click on the Temporary File choice in the list of available folders. The interface will change to show you the content of the Temporary Files folder – which will be empty – but now you can drag and drop files onto the interface. You can also select the Upload Files button and use a file selection control. Your choice – I am just going to drag my license file to the interface and drop it on.

Once you drop the file onto the window your browser will manage the transfer to the session and you will see that the file is available in the Temporary Files folder. Note – any files in the Temporary Files folder will be deleted when you end your session.

Close this interface – yes close it because it will hide the messages from the application. Once the file interface is closed double-click on the ExtractionEngine icon on the desktop.

You will immediately see an error message:

Hit the OK button in the application and the Error message will be replaced with the applications Options control.

In my case it opened to the Update Historical CIK – select the License Maintenance option from the left menu tree. When you select the License Maintenance option a message will appear that reports that we seem to be having some technical difficulties. That message should be dismissed. You will also observe that the License will seem to be authenticated because of the message in green. Ignore that message – you are not authenticated – that loop is designed to allow you to use the platform when other components are being updated. When you see that in later sessions you can’t interact with our Preprocessed Content because we might be backing up or updating something.

Hit the Okay button on the Authentication Server Failure and then hit the Browse button on the Options control. A file picker window will appear – navigate to the Temporary Files folder and select the license.txt file. When you select it the file name field will populate with the name of the file. Once that happens hit the open button.

After you hit the Open button the License txt file to load field in the control will populate with the name of the file – hit the Test License button.

If you watch real closely you might see the Current License Status blink. After you hit the Test License button you can hit the OK button to dismiss the options menu. When you do that the Options control will close and the main application will be open on your instance.

You are ready to go. We did something important in addition to authenticating the license file – you transferred a file from your local computer to the instance. It may have felt a little awkward – you cannot just drag and drop – you first have to select the folder icon to open an interface that allows you to drag and drop (or to select a file). Nonetheless – if you need to limit searches by CIK or merge data across files you will want to be comfortable with that process.