As Sexy As a Sweater Vest, But Still Awesome : Announcing the Office to PDF Conversion Solution Accelerator 1.5

I have the dubious distinction around these parts of being the guy who likes to give new products ridicul-- err, "innovative" names. Honestly, it's a reputation I've probably earned, given my votes for several of our recent projects, which, in a watershed moment for corporate transparency, I'll now share with you here on Bamboo Nation, via an actual copy of our official notes from the meeting. I haven't run this by the legal department yet, but frankly, those guys never let me do anything fun.

To be honest -- and this is just between the two of us, okay? -- I'm starting to think my ideas aren't being seriously considered, despite the fact that I usually say them in very cool voices and add explosion noises to the beginnings and ends of each one. Apparently, they go against our philosophy of naming products based on "what it is they actually do", instead of what would look awesome on a box. I'm forced to grudgingly accept the logic of this argument, especially since, last time I checked, our products don't actually have boxes.

Still, I think some of our best ideas aren't quite "huggable" enough due in part to this naming convention, and I can think of no product more unfairly glossed over than the incredibly boring sounding Office to PDF Conversion Solution Accelerator. I've spent a fair amount of time working with this fine application -- affectionately referred to here as "Office to PDF", and by self-absorbed journalists those loveable kids on Twitter as "ZO2PDF!!!11!!" -- and I can tell you, it's a very powerful solution to managing documents quickly, seamlessly, and efficiently.

Think of it this way :

1. You have LOTS of Office documents on the portal.

2. You want many different people to have access to READ ONLY versions of them, while the master versions are stored somewhere secure.

3. You want the read only versions to be as easy to distribute as possible; no Office version compatibility issues, no expensive software required to open them on the other end.

Don't forget my favorite qualifier:

4. You'd like to avoid doing work, if at all possible.

Office to PDF combines a service and a few lists into an automated conversion system, which takes a private library of Office documents, converts them into read-only PDFs, and moves copies of them, and their list metadata, to a different, less-private list of your choosing (even a list on a different site). In the background, the entire thing is audited, and conversions can even be offloaded to another server if you're a heavy converter and don't want to risk slowing things down. Once you set up the system, the entire thing is automated; you just add a document, and fall asleep at your desk, if you'd like. SharePoint and Office to PDF will take care of the rest. 

At its core, this is how Office to PDF has worked since inception, and we've got a number of happy users. But today, we're releasing a new version of the application that's likely to make it a lot more useful to a lot of people. Now, if you've got Microsoft Office 2007 installed on your server, you can use it to convert Office 2007 documents more accurately; compared to just OpenOffice (which does the bulk of the work), Office 2007 makes smoother, more accurate conversions of complicated, image-laden documents and spreadsheets -- meaning you get more conversions done right the first time, and making an already hands-off process even more painless.

Real, honest-to-goodness document control is not an easy task, and it's one of the reasons many organizations consider SharePoint in the first place -- but if you're trying to automate what's normally a repetitive, time-intensive process, the Office to PDF Conversion Solution Accelerator is the way to go. It's fast, customizable, and now, with support for conversions via Office 2007, more reliable than ever. 

And hey, if you're still not convinced it's worth checking out the free 15-day trial, go ahead and re-read this post from the beginning -- but in your head, call Office to PDF something like "Document Demon PRO 2009" instead.

Wow, that is better.