About Red Gate
Red Gate needed a simple solution for sharing management reports in a portable format with internal and external advisers. Converting spreadsheets and presentations to PDF was taking up valuable time. To streamline the process, Red Gate implemented Aspose.Total for SharePoint, giving all their users the ability to convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF with a click of button.
Red Gate chose Aspose.Total for SharePoint because it was easy to use, worked from the start and had better licensing options than the alternatives.
Red Gate has been producing software since 1999. The company creates products that are technologically challenging and fulfilling to the people who work on them, but also work well for their customers. Red Gate have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs and believes that a good piece of software starts and ends with the person who is going to use it.
Red Gate’s product portfolio includes products for SQL server development, database administration, Oracle development, .NET development and Exchange administration. We have achieved Best Companies accreditation and The Sunday Times Best Small Companies to Work for awards every year since 2007.
The Challenge
The management team at Red Gate is supported by a group of external advisers. To be able to give insightful advice, these advisers need access to the same information as the management team at Red Gate. All management information is posted to a secure area of a SharePoint intranet that can be accessed from inside or outside the company.
Inside the company, the Red Gate IT team has control over what platforms and software versions are used by their users. This means that it is easy to share information internally by uploading the original report documents: all interested parties are likely to have access to a version of the software that it was created with. For external parties, this is not the case. The best way to share documents with external agents in a safe and portable way is to convert them to PDF files. By converting Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations or Word documents to PDF, the document authors got confident that they can be read by anyone with Adobe Reader installed.
Initially, the report authors or their assistants converted files to PDF manually and published them. It was not a good use of time. Something had to change.
The Project
Red Gate’s ideal solution was one where authors could upload a file and convert it to PDF on SharePoint. That solution ensures that a centralised PDF converter is used, saving effort and license cost. PDF conversion is not a standard feature in SharePoint websites so Red Gate had to find a product that would allow them to perform this action. They started looking for a SharePoint component that would meet their needs.
Finding a Solution
Red Gate looked at a number of different solutions before deciding on Aspose.Total for SharePoint. Their trials showed that SharePoint components can be difficult to install – some need several attempts before they work – and tricky to configure. The type of component they were looking for also came with a number of different licensing and pricing options.
Red Gate decided to use Aspose.Total for SharePoint because it had better licensing, more features and was less expensive than the options. It also installed first time and was ready to use immediately.
A positive side effect of the component is that one-click conversion to PDF is now available to all users of the SharePoint system. PDF has quickly become a popular file format within Red Gate: portable and non-editable it is perfect for safely sharing information within and outside of the company.
Getting Support
When Red Gate started the project, they needed a component that would work on SharePoint 2010 and not all of the Aspose components for SharePoint did. Aspose are continually developing the products so before the project was complete that had changed. All Aspose.Total for SharePoint now support SharePoint 2010.
Next Steps
Aspose.Total for SharePoint may allow Red Gate to make their newsletter and other publications easier to read on the go. EPUB is an increasingly popular format and Aspose’s support for it allows companies to publish books, magazines and newsletters to their community.
Aspose had better licensing, was less expensive, had more features and no impossible evaluation restrictions
Dave Mellors, IS Project Engineer
Summary
Red Gate chose Aspose.Total for SharePoint because it was feature rich, easy to use, had better licensing terms and was less expensive than the options. It allowed the company to meet their objective: easily delivering portable documents to their external advisers.
Aspose.Total for SharePoint helped red Gate meet the immediate objectives. The benefits extended to all users, not just the team with the original need and Red Gate had ideas on how to get even more out of Aspose.Total for SharePoint.
Red Gate needed a simple solution for sharing management reports in a portable format with internal and external advisers. Converting spreadsheets and presentations to PDF was taking up valuable time. To streamline the process, Red Gate implemented Aspose.Total for SharePoint, giving all their users the ability to convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF with the click of a button. Red Gate also chose Aspose.Total for SharePoint because it was easy to use, worked from the start and had better licensing options than the alternatives.
Read other case studies to find out more about how Aspose’s customers use their products.
