About Enlightened Software Inc.
Since 1992, Enlightened Software, Inc. has been providing the professional services industry (architects/engineers) a tool to generate marketing forms that procure government work. Now with over 5,000 users, GovernmentFormsSoftware has been primarily a stand-alone desktop application operating in a Client-Server environment. The need has now arisen for a true web-based solution.
Requirement Scenario
In order to satisfy a major requirement of our product, which is generating Word formatted documents, we needed a tool that would allow us to operate without the restrictions of Word Automation. After almost a solid year of trial and error, we found everything they say about the problems implementing a server-based Word Automation solution to be true. It’s unreliable, “heavy”, and the security issues are endless. We were dead in the water with our web-based solution if we could not provide a better approach for our customers.
Solution
After only a bit of research on the web, we found Aspose. Then, after reading up on Aspose.Words, we could not believe there was an EXACT solution to remedy our situation.
Although our web-based system was written in classic ASP using VBScript (this was a requirement of our clients) we were floored by how little code we actually needed to change in order to implement Aspose.Words. In fact, their technical support was dead-on in terms of providing correct responses to our queries.
Benefits
When we provided a demonstration using Aspose.Words to one of our clients they thought it could not be as fast as what they were actually seeing. Previously, there was a lag time of up to a couple of minutes due to the complexity of using Word Automation, and that was when it did work. Additionally, there was always an issue with security in some form or another that would hinder the entire process which they considered completely unacceptable, and rightly so.
With Aspose.Words we have been able to generate the professional-looking forms our clients needed in order to procure government work. They rely on our product to help them grow their businesses, therefore, ease of use and reliability are essential.
Future Implementations
Aspose.Words gives our product unlimited flexibility as we move forward with more offerings for our clients. Additionally, it provides peace of mind in knowing we have tackled a problem that had been hampering our development for a long period of time.
Conclusion
Although we provide a very unique application and rely heavily on the technical expertise of our client’s network administrators, Aspose.Words for .NET enable us to rest easy that a previously major component of our system (Word Automation) can be replaced with complete confidence on our part as well as that of our customers.
This screenshot is of a key area of the GovernmentFormsSoftware system called GFS.onDemand. Users populate pre-designed templates of particular forms which are then converted to Word using Aspose.Words when the “To Word” button is pressed.
Bill Cooke
Enlightened Software, Inc
