Posted at: 13:25 on 18 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, 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