gDoc

The 1st December 2009, and the launch of gDoc Creator 2.1. For software product managers like myself, the day of release is one that brings joy and apprehension in equal measure. Delight of course in the culmination of many months of hard work by many people, but you can’t help asking yourself some searching questions: Have we built a good product? (Well, yes, I’m confident that we have.) Will potential customers like it? (I think they will.) Will they like it enough to want to pay for it? That part’s easy: we made it free! Yes, a professionally developed product from a company with an enviable pedigree in the graphic arts market is available as a free download. We’ve gone freemium, the buzzword combining free and premium.

So, what is it that we are giving away? The product is gDoc Creator, a tool aimed at Windows users for creating PDF (Portable Document Format) files. It can also handle XPS and convert between the two formats. It can also create PDF/A-1b compliant files – PDF/A is an ISO standard for long term archival of documents. Not only that, it can convert PDF back to Microsoft Word format, invaluable when you need to do some serious editing to a document that you only have as a PDF.

Of course we are not the first to offer free PDF creation, but with gDoc Creator you get a complete package. gDoc Creator includes Add-ins that install into MS Office 2003 or Office 2007, providing a toolbar from which to start the conversion. But they do more; they can add value to your PDF by creating bookmarks from all the headings in the document or adding hypertext links to Contents pages, URLs and cross-references. Not unique features but hard if not impossible to find in a free product, until today.

And that’s not all. Installed alongside gDoc Creator is gDoc Fusion. gDoc Fusion takes a new approach to the tasks of viewing, creating, assembling and editing documents, an activity us knowledge workers spend a good proportion of our working lives doing. So a tool that makes that task easier, even enjoyable, is very welcome. Or as our CEO Gary Fry puts it: “gDoc Creator is part of Global Graphics’ freemium go-to-market strategy for gDoc Fusion, an easy to use desktop application designed to improve productivity. gDoc Fusion gives users fast and easy assembly of new documents with a simple drag ‘n’ drop action from a wide range of multiple document formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, XPS, JPG, TIFF and PNG. The product is designed to significantly improve knowledge workers’ productivity by automatically formatting a wide range of file formats, saving hours of manual cut and paste activity.”

gDoc Fusion, it must be said is not free, but even in its evaluation state it is a very useful tool for viewing and printing PDF & XPS files, integrating with Internet Explorer 7 or 8 if desired. It can even view Word, Excel and PowerPoint without MS Office being installed. As Gary goes on to say, “gDoc Creator gives immediate value to the corporate desktop. It also allows evaluation use of gDoc Fusion, demonstrating the ease of use and benefits of the full version. When an enterprise realises the productivity benefits of the full version of gDoc Fusion, it’s a very simple process to then upgrade.” And he’s not wrong!

We have worked very hard on gDoc Fusion to improve on-screen quality and performance, following feedback from a ‘soft launch’ six months ago. If you have already gDoc installed, you should definitely update as soon as possible, and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? You can download the product from today; I hope you like it.