Posted at: 11:43 on 27 April 2017 by Muhimbi
In addition to releasing new versions of the on-premise editions of our popular PDF Converter for SharePoint and PDF Converter Services (for C#, Java, PHP), our team has been working hard on a new PDF Converter for SharePoint Online release.
This new release – version 9.9 already - was rolled out a few weeks ago and has reached all our customers by the time you read this. In addition to making some improvements in the areas of copying metadata and real-time watermarking, we have also added support for Microsoft Flow (inc PowerApps and Logic Apps), a new REST based API that makes it easy to integrate our Online software in your own JavaScript, C#, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby code, and key changes have been made to the way our workflow actions deal with (very) long running operations.
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 8.2.
For more details see :
If you are an existing customer, or installed a trial version before May 2017, then we recommend installing the latest workflow actions for the best possible experience.
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 merge, split, watermark, secure, OCR and convert 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 overview of all our Actions in Microsoft Flow.
In addition to the changes listed above, some of the main changes and additions in the new version are as follows:
| 2853 | API | New | Expose all functionality via a REST based API |
| 2803 | Flow | New | Add support for Microsoft Flow |
| 3035 | Metadata | Fix | Copying metadata for Enterprise Keywords to office documents (doc, ppt, etc) stopped working |
| 2964 | Metadata | Fix | Copying metadata for on-prem collections migrated to Online using ShareGate causes errors |
| 3031 | Metadata | Improvement | Make copying of metadata more resilient when Microsoft's SharePoint Online team make changes |
| 2950 | Metadata | Improvement | Skip Workflow status field when copying metadata |
| 2874 | System | Improvement | Implement automatically renewal of token using redirects instead of session expiry error |
| 2875 | System | Improvement | Always include primary contact in alert emails |
| 2905 | TOC | Improvement | Improve generation of Table of Contents |
| 2767 | UI | Fix | Improve situation where multiple folder pickers are active at the same time |
| 3011 | UI | Improvement | Improve performance of folder picker on very complex sites |
| 2965 | UI | Improvement | Batch conversion using UI - Source file is missing in display data |
| 2866 | UI | Improvement | Change the message when a file is not supported by the converter |
| 2865 | UI | Improvement | Allow for the User Interface to be completely disabled in the APP (so workflow only) |
| 2762 | Watermarking | Fix | Filtering for empty fields doesn't work as expected |
| 3049 | Watermarking | Fix | Improve security around real-time watermarking |
| 3061 | Watermarking | Fix | Reading user profile in real-time watermark stopped working due to Microsoft change |
| 2931 | Watermarking | Fix | Cannot open a file within a folder using special characters |
| 2891 | Watermarking | Fix | Date/time filter does not work as expected |
| 2880 | Watermarking | Fix | Filtering for 'opened by' and using '[me]' does not work as expected |
| 2987 | Watermarking | Improvement | Add warning when people are using ‘modern Document Libraries’ |
| 2903 | Workflow | Improvement | Add support for (very) long running workflow operations |
| 2867 | Workflow | Improvement | Allow any file location to be specified as the source file in workflows |
| 2857 | Workflow | Improvement | Implement xml overrides for InfoPath conversion |
| 3005 | Workflow | New | Add 'DocumentStartPage' parameter to Merge activity |
For more information check out the following resources:
As always, feel free to contact us using Twitter, our Blog, regular email or subscribe to our newsletter.
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.Labels: News, Office 365, pdf, Products, SharePoint Online
Posted at: 14:45 on 12 April 2017 by Muhimbi
As part of our ongoing series about using the Muhimbi PDF Converter API in combination with Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps and PowerApps, we present an example about how to automatically convert the body of incoming emails to PDF, and archive the results in DropBox.
For those not familiar with the product, the Muhimbi PDF Converter API is a popular product to PDF Convert, Merge, Watermark, Secure and OCR files from Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps, PowerApps as well as your own code using C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and most other modern platforms. Leave a message below or contact us if you have any questions.
Earlier today we were contacted by a Flow user who wanted to convert incoming emails to PDF. Now, the Muhimbi PDF Converter actually comes with an awesome email to PDF converter, but it expects an MSG or EML file as the input. Unfortunately the various email based triggers that currently ship with Flow (Outlook for Office 365, Outlook.com, Gmail) do not provide files in this format. Instead, they expose the message Body, Subject, From, To, Attachments etc.
Update 10/10/2018: Exporting an email as an EML file, which can then be fed into our Convert Action, is now available for Outlook 365. When using Outlooks 365, read this 3rd party blog post instead and skip the information provided below.
Even though the MSG file is not available, all the individual elements are. We managed to ‘knock up’ a functional email to PDF converter using Flow in absolute no-time. You may want to customise it further by using the Compose Action to add the subject, from and to fields to the body before sending it into the PDF Converter. You can even use our Merge documents Action to convert the attachments and merge them all, alongside the main body, into a single PDF.
Similar to our other examples, this Flow is just a starting point. You can use a different email service as a trigger (outlook.com, Outlook for Office 365) and send the generated PDF to SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, email, you name it.
From a high level, the Flow works as follows:
The full Flow can be found below. It is automatically created by the Flow Template named Convert Email to PDF and archive in DropBox. After selecting the template make sure the following fields are changed:
- DropBox Output folder (for HTML emails): The DropBox folder to write the PDF files to.
- DropBox Output folder (for Text emails): The DropBox folder to write the PDF files to.
The Flow itself is relatively straight-forward, but there is one complication. Email may appear to be a simple format, but content can be represented in HTML format, Plain Text and even RTF. Depending on the format we need to send the body either to the HTML converter or the Text converter. In this Flow we use a simple and dirty trick, which is to check if either ‘<html’, ‘<p’ or ‘<br’ can be found in the email body. If it is then we send it to the HTML converter, otherwise the Text converter.
That is all there is to it. I left this flow running by mistake and when I came in the next day DropBox had synced dozens of emails to my local PC. They looked brilliantly though when opened in a PDF reader.
For more details about using Muhimbi’s Flow actions, see the Core Concepts knowledge base article as well as all other Flow related posts.
If you have any questions about extending this template, or implementing it in your environment, then please leave a message below or contact our friendly support desk. We are here to help.
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Labels: Articles, EML, Flow, MSG, Office 365, PowerApps, Workflow
Posted at: 11:43 on by Muhimbi
As part of our ongoing series about using the Muhimbi PDF Converter API and Server Platform in combination with Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps and PowerApps, we present a useful example which converts a blog post (basically HTML) to PDF when a new post is added to an RSS feed.
For those not familiar with the product, the Muhimbi PDF Converter API and Server Platform is a popular product to PDF Convert, Merge, Watermark, Secure and OCR files from Microsoft Flow, LogicApps, PowerApps as well as your own code using C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and most other modern platforms. Leave a message below or contact us if you have any questions.
We needed a good showcase for converting HTML to PDF. It was hard to narrow it down as everything nowadays is HTML. We settled for combining our HTML conversion sample with one of Flow’s other services, the ability to trigger a Flow when a new post is added to a Blog.
Once converted, the PDF is sent to the author of the Flow, but remember that this is just an example. Other options are to archive the generated PDF somewhere in SharePoint, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive or other file storage system. This example uses the RSS feed for the Microsoft Flow blog, naturally any other RSS feed or web page can be used as well.
From a high level, the Flow works as follows:
The full Flow can be found below. It is automatically created by the Flow Template named Send updates from the Flow blog as a PDF by email. Although the default settings are fully functional (send a PDF copy of Flow related blog posts), you may want to change the following fields:
- RSS feed URL: The URL of the RSS feed to monitor for new posts. Try changing it to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuhimbiBlog.
- Email recipients: The recipient of the generated PDF.
That is all there is to it. We were pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of this simple flow. New blog posts are delivered by email to your mobile device overnight. While commuting on a train with a spotty internet connection we were able to read our favourite blog posts.
For more details about using Muhimbi’s Flow actions, see the Core Concepts knowledge base article as well as all other Flow related posts.
If you have any questions about extending this template, or implementing it in your environment, then please leave a message below or contact our friendly support desk. We are here to help.
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Labels: Articles, Flow, HTML, Office 365, pdf, PowerApps, SharePoint Online, Workflow
