Posted at: 14:11 on 28 March 2019 by Muhimbi

When I recently wrote the 10 years of Muhimbi article, it gave me the opportunity to reflect on how we communicate about our products and services. We tend to focus on the hard-core technical facilities such as the ability to Convert, Merge, Watermarks, Secure and OCR files, which resonates well with our technical audience, but this doesn't answer the question of WHY you would need such functionality.

Fortunately, they let us out from time to time, especially when we go to trade shows, which is always enlightening as we get to talk to people, for real, like in face-to-face. It is at times like this that we find out what people really use our software for. Naturally our products and services are also used in the most obscure scenarios that we could never even dream of, but for the vast majority of the customers the same handful of scenarios are mentioned time and again. We have summarised these scenarios below.

Generating meeting and board packs

Although some organisations fully automate this as part of a larger workflow, many customers use our standard user interface for merging files to generate meeting or board packs. The reason for generating these packs is easy to understand. Typical meetings require a Word, Excel and PowerPoint file to be distributed to attendees. As we are no longer living in the 20th century, people want to consume these documents digitally. Up until a couple of years ago this usually meant reading the documents on a Windows based laptop, but times have moved on and people use all kind of devices including tablets, Chromebooks, and even mobile phones.

These devices all have their own strengths, but other than Windows Laptops, they tend to display Office (and other file formats) in a way that is usually a bit - and sometimes a lot - different from the way the original author intended. The only way to guarantee that the documents are displayed in exactly the same way as intended, is to convert them to PDF, and distribute everything as a single file.
 

 
Traditionally, organisations have used complex, desktop based, PDF editors for this purpose, the likes of Adobe Acrobat. This software is not particularly easy - or quick - to use and tends to end up being quite expensive if it needs to be rolled out to more than a handful of people in an organisation. It doesn't help that these meeting documents are often changed just before the meeting starts, resulting in a last-minute rush, causing all kinds of nasty errors.

Although never intended to be used specifically for this kind of scenario, Muhimbi's range of PDF Conversion products, and particularly the SharePoint versions, provides an excellent solution to create meeting packs. It requires no training, does an excellent job when converting and merging files into a single PDF, and can do so in either an automated fashion - via workflows - or simply via the SharePoint user interface. The results look perfect, on any device.

Watermarking and securing files downloaded from SharePoint

Another common scenario we hear about is watermarking, and securing, PDF files in real-time the moment they are downloaded. It doesn't really surprise me that this is popular, as we built this facility based on real-world customers asking for this exact functionality.

It is used for all kind of reasons and scenarios, but we see it most commonly used as a DRM light solution. What we mean with this is that a full-blown DRM solution (a.k.a IRM / RMS / AIP) tends to be difficult to implement and roll-out, and - no matter how powerful - has all kind of nasty side effects. What organisations need is something that is good enough, and in our case good enough means embedding the user's name, IP address and timestamp in a PDF the moment the file is downloaded from SharePoint.

Some organisations visibly display this information in the downloaded PDFs as a deterrent to prevent 'sharing' of sensitive or valuable documents. Others embed the same information in an invisible manner leaving it as a surprise - for people who 'misplaced' a document - for the yearly performance review.

If this is a topic that is of interest, have a look at the SharePoint on-premise (SP2007-2019), and the SharePoint Online examples. Drop us a line if you have any questions.

Sharing files in PDF format

We provide a lot of functionality out-of-the-box; workflows, watermarking, merging, security, OCR, but quite often people just need to take a source document, being it in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MSG, AutoCAD, Image, or HTML format, and turn it into a PDF as that is just so much easier to share via email, websites or other medium.

Our customers especially appreciate the ability to easily turn almost any document into a PDF when it comes to Freedom Of Information requests. You cannot just distribute emails in their original MSG format, or share InfoPath forms as a combination of XML and XSN files. Not only is PDF the perfect file format for these kinds of requests, it also strips out personal information and other metadata.

Fortunately our software supports most file formats used in office environments.

Archiving files

In the Enterprise Document and Content management market we operate in, each document typically goes through a life cycle. A document is created by a person or group of people, the document is then reviewed by a manager and ultimately - if you are lucky - approved.

While a document moves through these various stages, in the background an automated workflow process organises the entire process. Emails and other notifications are sent out when certain stages are reached, people are asked to take action, reminders are sent out etc.

One of the final steps in the process is usually to take the document, regardless of the source file format, convert it to PDF, add a watermark to include status as well as other metadata associated with the document (who approved it, value, category, priority etc), and write the PDF to a records centre or other archive.

Our range of PDF Conversion products come with a set of building blocks that workflow designers can insert in whatever part of their business process they want to. We don't force a certain methodology or process upon you, just use our facilities as you see fit.

When we sit down and write the specification for whatever amazing new feature we are planning next, we always envisage these massive and complex enterprise level workflows that our software participates in. However, more often than not, the workflow only contains 2 steps

    Step 1: Has the document been approved?

    Step 2: Convert it to PDF.

    Step 3: There is no step 3.

Keep in mind that various regulatory bodies specify standards for archiving files. More often than not the exact PDF version to use is PDF/A. Our software supports this sub-standard, one less thing to worry about.

Converting InfoPath forms

As the only serious player in the InfoPath to PDF conversion market, it doesn't surprise us that many organisations use our software to convert InfoPath forms to PDF.

InfoPath is a particularly tricky format that makes it nearly impossible to share forms with someone outside the organisation, and often even inside the organisation. In the right hands InfoPath is an excellent solution, but in many cases.... oh well, let's not dwell on that.

As so many organisations come to us to convert InfoPath forms to PDF, over the years we have added all the bells and whistles you can imagine. We even make it possible to convert files that are attached to InfoPath forms, and provide full control over which views to convert as well as which views NOT to convert.

Have a look at the whitepaper we authored on this topic, Making InfoPath Documents Available for Long Term Archiving.

Similar to the Archiving topic discussed above, InfoPath to PDF conversions are usually coupled with very simple workflows. Once a form reaches a certain status, e.g. approved, automatically convert it to PDF, apply a watermark as well as PDF security, then write it to an archive.

Build random stuff using workflows

As mentioned previously, most workflows that our components participate in are very basic and contain only a handful of steps. However, as the topic of automating processes using workflows is so important to our customers, we have really gone the extra mile and added support for most of the popular workflow platforms.

As a result we support SharePoint Designer workflows, Workflow Manager Workflows, Nintex Workflow (2007-2019), Visual Studio, K2, Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps and anything that knows how to consume a REST endpoint.

Why use workflows? Well there are as many reasons as there are organisations, but the key reason I always mention is the ability to automate processes and take the human error factor out of the equation. Even for the most basic workflows, including the simple 2 steps flows mentioned previously, you cannot trust humans to always get it 100% right, not even for the most disciplined teams.

Time and again we see situations where, for that last-minute change, a crucial step was forgotten, or the wrong output folder was picked. ONLY by automating business processes using workflows can you guarantee that the same steps are always carried out without fail.

Any questions on these topics, or anything else? Contact us, we love to help.

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Labels: Articles, News, PDF Converter

Posted at: 18:16 on 22 March 2019 by David Radford

This article is based on a post Clavin Fernandes made to his personal blog, the information in it is used with his permission. Thank you Clavin!

Ever since Microsoft announced the retirement of InfoPath, people responsible for archiving forms and maintaining their accessibility have been busy searching for alternatives to InfoPath.

Luckily, we’ve been busy with this as well!  So, we started with a previous post and decided to update it here using some of the new functionality available with Microsoft Flow.

Using Flow to convert and archive InfoPath forms is a bit more involved than doing the same in SharePoint, as InfoPath uses two files to create a single form, an XML (data) file and an XSN (template) file. In this post we will create a simple Flow that is triggered whenever a form is added to a folder in a SharePoint Online Library. Once added, the form is automatically converted to a PDF stored in a OneDrive for Business folder.

This is just an example, it can easily be adjusted to use different file services (e.g. the trigger can be for files uploaded to OneDrive, Box.com, DropBox, Google Drive or can even be used to Migrate your SharePoint On-Premise InfoPath Forms to SharePoint Online etc).

Before we begin:

• Make sure you have a Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online Full or Trial subscription (Start trial)
   
• Make sure you have the appropriate privileges to create Flows.

Create the Flow

From a high-level perspective, the Flow looks as follows: 
  

 
   
Note: Converting an InfoPath form is similar to converting any other document type using Muhimbi's Flow Actions, but - as it is needed during conversion - you need to pass in the XSN file (the file content, not the URL to the file) alongside the XML file.

The Flow consists of the following elements:

• Trigger - When a file is created in a folder: Specify the path to the SharePoint Online folder to monitor for new files. (To trigger a Flow for files created anywhere in a Library, use the ‘When a file is created (properties only)’ trigger, and retrieve its content using Get file content.)
   
• Get file content: Specify the path to the SharePoint Online location where the XSN has been published to. (By default it is stored in the Forms Folder, e.g. “https://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/sites/Sitecollectionname/Library/Forms/template.xsn“
   
• Convert document: Insert the Muhimbi PDF Convert Document action, and fill it out as follows. (see the screenshot below for details):
  
  • Source file name: “File name” the output from the “When a file is created in a folder” trigger.
  • Source file content: “File Content” the output of the “When a file is created in a folder” trigger.
  • Output format: PDF
  • Template file: “File Content” the output of the “Get file content” action, which contains the InfoPath XSN file.
     Do not just pass the path to the XSN file into the Muhimbi Action as it doesn’t have the privileges to read that file.

• Create file: Specify the path to the OneDrive folder where the converted PDF files are written to. Pass in the 'Base file name' field returned by the Convert Document action, making sure that it is suffixed with '.pdf'. In the 'File content' field pass in the 'Processed file content' returned by the Convert document action.
   

   
Voila- You’re finished!  Now, publish the Flow and then save an InfoPath form in the SharePoint Online folder to test the Flow. After a few moments a PDF file will appear in the OneDrive destination folder.

This is just a basic example. Please keep in mind that the Muhimbi PDF Converter also comes with facilities to convert files attached to InfoPath forms as well as choosing which InfoPath view or views to convert.

    
For more Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps & PowerApps Tutorials and Blog posts, see our Knowledge Base.

As always, if you encounter any difficulties, please feel free to contact our friendly Support Desk for any assistance you may require.
 

Labels: Articles, Flow, InfoPath, pdf, SharePoint Online

Posted at: 17:19 on 18 January 2019 by Muhimbi

Yes, you read that right, we have added a 100% free subscription tier to both the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online and the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online.

When we launched the first Online version of our software in 2015, we included a completely free trial, but that is intended for evaluation purposes only. Over the years we have been approached by many companies and individuals, including charities, non-profits, and very small organisations, for which ANY price, even US$ 5 let alone our most economical US$ 99 subscription. is completely out of the question.

We pride ourselves on affordable pricing across all our product lines, but we never had a completely free offering. As we want to make our service available to the largest possible audience, we have decided to introduce a free subscription tier.
 

 
This Free subscription comes with no strings attached, other than having to notify us once a year if you wish to extend. Naturally there are some limitations; free operations are limited to 50 per month, input file types are restricted to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, and the maximum file size per operation is 2MB. In order get access to OCR, PDF/A output as well as further file formats such as Visio, AutoCAD, MSG, EML and InfoPath, customers will need to switch to one of the commercial subscription tiers.

How to get the Free subscription? Just start using our software by installing the SharePoint Online app, or creating an account for the PDF Converter Online, and select the 'Free' option when asked. Please do not use the Free subscription for evaluating the software with the intention to purchase, for that purpose you should choose the Trial option as it provides an experience that is more similar to the commercial subscription tiers. For the difference between the Free and Trial subscription tiers see this Knowledge Base article.

Whether you want to create meeting packs, track and secure documents, or just create PDF files for sharing or archiving purposes, there now is a solution for every budget, including no budget. It doesn't matter how you use our software, being it via the SharePoint Online User Interface, SharePoint Designer Workflows, Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps, PowerApps, or our API.

What do you think, is this something that could be of use to you? Leave a comment below or contact us, we are always happy to help.

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Labels: Flow, News, Office 365, pdf, PowerApps, SharePoint Online

Posted at: 13:25 on by Muhimbi

Over the past 10 years, we have always made it a habit to listen to our customers, especially when kicking off the development of a new release. Once you receive a request, or bug, more than once, you'd better do something about it.

However, during the last 3 to 4 years things have changed. Naturally we still listen to our customers, but Muhimbi is now its own biggest customer. What!?

Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, no one carries out more operations in a real-word production environment than we do in-house. Why is this? Well, our popular cloud based services, the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online, and the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online, use the exact same engine that we ship alongside our on-premise products.

Because our Online customers fully depend on us, our data centres and our software, the responsibility to keep things up and running has shifted from our customers' IT departments, to our own operations team. Although our products have always been very stable and scalable, there were plenty of minor hiccups that we did not know about because it wasn't too much of a problem to our customers. However, when you run your own software at a very VERY large scale then all small things add up.

To cut a long story short, we monitor our online services like a hawk. Each and every issue, no matter how big or small, is recorded and analysed. If we can help it, we fix it. As a result we have improved and fixed dozens of issues in the new 8.4 release of the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services (on-premise).

Naturally we added some new functionality as well. The key changes are as follows:

• Support for PDF/A-3b in addition to existing support for PDF/A-1b and 2b.
• Support for 3rd party OCR engines.
• Support for TLS 1.2 throughout.
• Automatically generate named destinations based on PDF Bookmarks.
• Support for merging of PDF Portfolio files.
• Optionally unhide hidden Excel columns and rows during PDF conversion.
• PDF Conversion of Outlook contacts (in MSG Format).
• PDF Conversion of delivery and read receipts (in MSG Format).
• Support for targeting 'last page' when watermarking documents.
• Many improvements to Email, AutoCAD, MS-Word and HTML converters.
• New unattended installer.

 
A quick introduction for those not familiar with the product: The Muhimbi PDF Converter Services is an ‘on premises’ server based SDK that allows software developers to convert typical Office files to PDF format using a robust, scalable but friendly Web Services interface from Java, .NET, Ruby & PHP based solutions. It supports a large number of file types including MS-Office and ODF file formats as well as HTML, MSG (email), EML, AutoCAD and Image based files and is used by some of the largest organisations in the world for mission critical document conversions. In addition to converting documents, the product ships with a sophisticated watermarking engine, PDF Splitting and Merging facilities, an OCR facility and the ability to secure PDF files. Separate SharePoint and Cloud-based Subscription services are available as well.     
 

When upgrading from a previous version, read this Knowledge Base article first.

 
The main changes and additions in the new version are as follows:

For more information check out the following resources:

• Product Page.
• Brochure.
• FAQ & Knowledge Base.
• Release Notes.
• Administration Guide.
• User & Developer Guide.
• All PDF Converter Services related Blog Posts.

As always, feel free to contact us using Twitter, our Blog, regular email or subscribe to our newsletter.

Download your free trial here (90MB). .

.

Labels: News, pdf, PDF Converter Services

Posted at: 17:46 on 16 January 2019 by Muhimbi

Over the past 10 years, we have always made it a habit to listen to our customers, especially when kicking off the development of a new release. Once you receive a request, or bug, more than once, you'd better do something about it.

However, during the last 3 to 4 years things have changed. Naturally we still listen to our customers, but Muhimbi is now its own biggest customer. What!? Indeed, and to the best of our knowledge, no one carries out more operations in a real-word production environment than we do in-house. Why is this? Well, our popular cloud based services, the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online, and the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online, use the exact same engine that we ship alongside our on-premise products.

Because our Online customers fully depend on us, our data centres and our software, the responsibility to keep things up and running has shifted from our customers' IT departments, to our own operations team. Although our products have always been very stable and scalable, there were plenty of minor hiccups that we did not know about because it wasn't too much of a problem to our customers. However, when you run your own software at a very VERY large scale then all small things add up.

To cut a long story short, we monitor our online services like a hawk. Each and every issue, no matter how big or small, is recorded and analysed. If we can help it, we fix it. As a result we have improved and fixed dozens of issues in the new 8.4 release.

Naturally we added some new functionality as well. The key changes are as follows:

• Support for PDF/A-3b in addition to existing support for PDF/A-1b and 2b.
• Skip processing of 'real-time operations' for search indexer and other system accounts.
• Support for 3rd party OCR engines.
• Support for TLS 1.2 throughout.
• Automatically generate named destinations based on PDF Bookmarks.
• Support for merging of PDF Portfolio files.
• Optionally unhide hidden Excel columns and rows during PDF conversion.
• PDF Conversion of Outlook contacts (in MSG Format).
• PDF Conversion of delivery and read receipts (in MSG Format).
• Support for targeting 'last page' when watermarking documents.
• Many improvements to Email, AutoCAD, MS-Word and HTML converters.
• New unattended installer.

For those not familiar with the product, the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint is a lightweight solution that allows end-users to merge, split, watermark, secure, OCR and convert common document types - including InfoPath, AutoCAD, MSG (email) MS-Office, HTML and images - to PDF as well as other formats from within SharePoint using a friendly user interface, workflows or a web service call, without the need to install any client-side software or Adobe Acrobat. It integrates at a deep level with SharePoint and leverages facilities such as the Audit log, Nintex Workflow, K2 blackpearl, localisation, security and tracing. It runs on SharePoint 2007-2019 & SharePoint Online and is available in English, German, Dutch, French, Traditional Chinese and Japanese. For detailed information check out the product page. This ‘on-premise’ version of the PDF Converter requires software to be installed on the SharePoint server. Please note that if you have no server access, there is always the option to deploy our SharePoint Online App to on-premise versions of SharePoint 2013, 2016 and 2019. For details see this blog post.

When upgrading from a previous version, read this Knowledge Base article first.

Some of the main changes and additions in the new version are as follows:

For more information check out the following resources:

• Product Page.
• Brochure.
• FAQ & Knowledge Base.
• Release Notes.
• Installation & Administration Guide.
• User Guide.
• Product videos.
• Screenshots.
• Related Blog Posts.

As always, feel free to contact us using Twitter, our Blog, regular email or subscribe to our newsletter.

Download your free trial here (100MB). .

.

Labels: News, pdf, PDF Converter

Posted at: 14:58 on 14 January 2019 by Muhimbi

Both the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online and PDF Converter Services Online see many new releases each year. The most recent formal announcement was for version 9.10, but as versions 9.11 and 9.12 have been released as well, it is about time for an overview of the key changes.

Key highlights for versions 9.11 and 9.12, are as follows:

• Support for PDF/A-3b in addition to existing support for PDF/A-1b and 2b.
• Automatically generate named destinations based on PDF Bookmarks.
• Support merging of PDF Portfolio files.
• A new 100% Free subscription tier (See upcoming blog post).
• Unhide hidden Excel columns and rows during PDF conversion.
• PDF Conversion of Outlook contacts (in MSG Format).
• PDF Conversion of delivery and read receipts (in MSG Format).
• Support for targeting 'last page' when watermarking documents.
• Many improvements to email, AutoCAD, MS-Word and HTML converters.
• Link multiple tenants in a single subscription.
• Enable Watermark on Open on 'Modern View' lists and libraries.
• C#, PHP, Java & JavaScript sample code for the REST API.

Please note that all SharePoint Online versions are numbered in the 9.X range. At the time of writing the most recent version of the on-premise software is 8.4.         
     
 
For those not familiar with the product, the Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online is a lightweight subscription based solution that allows end-users to convert merge, split, watermark, secure, and OCR common document types - including InfoPath, AutoCAD, MSG (email) MS-Office, HTML and images - to PDF using SharePoint Online through a friendly user interface or via workflows, without the need to install any client-side software or Adobe Acrobat. More details can be found on the product page.  An on-premise version for SharePoint 2007-2019 is available separately.

The Muhimbi PDF Converter Services Online is included in the PDF Converter for SharePoint Online, but also available as a separate subscription. Although frequently used in combination with SharePoint Online, it is a completely stand-alone product which is typically used programmatically via its REST based API, via Microsoft Flow, Azure LogicApps or Microsoft PowerApps. It comes with the same functionality as the SharePoint Online product to convert, merge, watermark, secure and OCR files. 

In addition to the changes listed above, the key changes and additions in the new version are as follows:

For more information check out the following resources:

• Product Page.
• Brochure.
• FAQ
• Knowledge Base.
• Product videos.
• Related Blog Posts.

As always, feel free to contact us using Twitter, our Blog, regular email or subscribe to our newsletter.
 

Start your 30 day trial by installing the App and Workflow Actions, or just start

using it from Microsoft Flow, there is nothing to install.

Labels: Flow, News, Office 365, pdf, SharePoint Online