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 API and Server Platform.

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 API and Server Platform, 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 API and Server Platform (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). .

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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 API and Server Platform, 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.
• 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). .

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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 API & Server Platform 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 API and Server Platform 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 Logic Apps 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