About GearMage
GearMage develops popular email attachment processing tools to enable consumers and businesses to automate their email related workflows. GearMage software is widely used by both consumers and businesses – with over 2M files that have been downloaded using the tool in over 130 countries.
Problem
One of the more commonly requested features by GearMage customers is the ability to perform document conversion and printing on email attachments that arrive.
This enables customers to process email related attachments, perform archival in a more standard manner using standard document formats, and do further processing. In addition to that, there have been requests to be able to encrypt or decrypt PDF related attachments.
It was also important to not have to rely on Office/Acrobat interop or automation APIs as customers may not have these products installed. Also as GearMage software is sold as a tool and is deployed to many customers, a solution that did not require royalties for every installation was needed.
Solution
The Aspose SDK offered a very simple API that greatly reduced the time taken to convert one format to another format. The solution involved adding a ‘Convert’ option to the rule filter actions that are run after a download of an attachment is complete.
A user can then add a new conversion by clicking on the Add conversion button. They are presented with a set of options to choose which formats to convert the document to.
The user can first choose the type of attachment that they want to convert (this could be any doc supported by Aspose, including Words, Cells, Pdf, or Slides to start with). Once they have picked the From Type, the program automatically populates the To Type combo box and presents the users a list of options they can pick to save the document to.
The user can then choose to add any number of conversions for their attachment processing needs.
Experience
A prototype using various popular software solutions and SDKs were looked at. When trying out many of these solutions, it was discovered that the conversion formatting of many of these solutions was far limited or error-prone or unreliable.
In other cases, they offered only a small subset of the conversion feature. For example, they supported converting word documents to PDFs but nothing more. In some other cases, they lacked the ability to also offer the ability to print these documents. Furthermore, the APIs for some of these solutions were not straightforward and left a lot to the imagination.
Aspose solutions when tested were not only accurate in terms of conversion but also were fairly efficient in terms of processing power that was consumed, which is critical when a customer may be processing 1000’s of files on a multi-core system.
Aspose’s OEM licensing meant that GearMage could now use and distribute Aspose software along with GearMage’s solution to enable customers to do further processing with their email attachments.
Next Steps
GearMage plans to continue to use Aspose to offer the ability to automatically print attachments as they arrive. This would be a unique offering that many solutions do not offer out in the market today.
Summary
Aspose’s SDKs give tremendous flexibility and add value to GearMage’s offering. Developing a similar solution would have taken GearMage a lot of time, money, and effort.
Compared to all the other solutions, even though some of those appeared to be priced lower, Aspose came out shining in features, efficiency, and reliability as the SDK of choice for document conversion and processing.
