The Sony VAIO productivity prize competition is now closed. Thank you to all who entered, please see here  for the winners list.

In order to celebrate the launch of gDoc Fusion 2.5, Global Graphics is giving away a brand new Sony VAIO E Series to boost the productivity of a lucky winner. This laptop features a 17 inch high contrast VAIO Display, 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive.

The winner, and 10 runners-up, will also receive a full version of gDoc Fusion 2.5 (worth £100).

gDoc Fusion is a quick and easy to use desktop software application that allows multiple incompatible files to be merged into a single document through a simple drag and drop action. It enables users to create a summary, report or other document that combines spreadsheets, slides, images, text, PDFs and more than 200 other types of document.

So how do I enter?

To enter you need to do the following…
1.    Follow Global Graphics on Twitter here
2.    Tweet the following message…

Win a Sony VAIO laptop contest. You can enter by following @Global_Graphics and retweet. http://bit.ly/98A8wL

The winner will be announced at the end of July.
Good luck to all those who enter and happy tweeting!

The reality is that organisations need to review the applications available to staff and tackle the issue head on with a software application that fits the purpose and eases the common day-to-day activity of e-document creation. gDoc Fusion 2.5 allows multiple incompatible files to be merged into a single document through a simple drag and drop action. It enables users to create a summary, report or other document that combines spreadsheets, slides, images, text, PDFs and more than 200 other types of document. Essentially this isn’t just a generic product upgrade as the new functions genuinely improve functionality and ease of use.

Here is a bit more on what’s new:
Assembly View – collate, convert, read and share documents from over 200 different formats in a single view page. New page preview functions save extra time and ‘page stacks’ feature allows easy organisation of chapters or document sections

Multi-format viewer – gDoc Fusion is now able to view more than 200 word processor, spreadsheet, image and drawing formats
LaunchPad – Compact interface that takes up a minimum of screen space, making it easy to use drag-and-drop action to open the files

30-day trial – Full product functionality now available for a 30-day evaluation period. After 30 days the product still provides free multi-format viewing and PDF creation
Flick View – saves time and printing costs by allowing users to quickly visually search through the pages to find information, just like a physical document.

As always we are keen to get individual feedback so please do check it out for yourself at http://www.globalgraphics.com/gdoc and let us know what you think.

I’ll leave you with a review from Angela Eager, senior analyst at Ovum, independent technology analyst, who believes that “the solution is very timely and well aligned with the requirements of enterprises that require an inexpensive and flexible way to quickly assemble documents from pages in different formats for tasks such as report creation.”

Even prior to an acquisition, the due diligence process requires solicitors and accountants to access hundreds of documents for analysis and forensic accounting. These documents may be held in legacy technology systems that are not easy to convert to a readable format, taking precious time and resources to resolve.

As a result of the acquisition there may be staff changes, office moves and restructuring, all contributing to the possible loss of corporate knowledge held in varying document formats.
A key benefit of gDoc Fusion is the ability to quickly and easily translate and merge over 200 types of incompatible document files into a single document through a simple drag and drop action, even though the original application is not available. Users can create a summary, report or other document that can combine disparate documents such as spreadsheets, slides, images or text in one simple operation, then save the result in a format everybody can handle: PDF.

So solicitors and accountants can rest assured that all nighters at the office during an acquisition will no longer be down to simply trying to convert one key document into a readable format!

With this in mind business computing is also becoming more intuitive and mimicking our offline lives in the way we search for or organise our offline data. gDoc Fusion is helping improve office productivity through easy to use features that emulate our offline document reading habits.

Instead of clicking on individual pages one at a time to read or search, we thought about how people read documents in real life and when creating Flick View. The feature saves time and printing costs by allowing users to quickly visually flick through the pages of a document to find information, just like a physical document but using a computer mouse to scroll pages on screen.

We constantly listen to our customers feedback to continually improve our products and during one visit to a legal practice, we discussed how solicitors stack case files in the real world and if this could be emulated in gDoc Fusion. A quick conversation with our useability genius, Riccardo Taffarello and bingo we’ve added Page Stack as a new feature for the forthcoming version, gDoc Fusion 2.5. Check it out when it ships at the end of May, we’re sure you’ll love it as much as Flick View.

This week Global Graphics announced the launch of gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition (http://www.globalgraphics.com/fusion-homestudent), offering students and home computer users easy-to-use, enterprise-level PDF software at an affordable price.

The PDF creation software has been designed with simple navigation and user interface so people can quickly and easily create, review, edit, share and archive documents. Instead of presenting you with a window with a blank document and thousands of tools, toolbars and menu options, gDoc fusion was designed from scratch to give you a clean and simple user interface, giving you different views to suit the way you want to work, having observed users struggle with enterprise applications that are not intuitive to use.

The interaction is intuitive, if you select some text, you get a context sensitive toolbar automatically popup right beside it. This gives you all the commands you need when you need them at your finger tips. Once you have edited your document you can use the Flick View to browse through it and see how it looks or present it to your friends and family in a fun way.

gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition also offers students and home users advanced functionality that was only available to enterprise users with benefits such as:

• Viewing, editing and saving Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) documents
• Enhancing the presentation of coursework, essays, and dissertations
• Redaction and secure archiving of sensitive personal documents
• Sharing, emailing, printing or posting documents to websites
• Creating easy-to-share electronic photo albums
• Simple ‘drag and drop’ editing of multiple file formats into one document
• Viewing documents with unique Flick View functionality to reduce wasteful printing

While our gDoc Creator product remains free for anyone to download here (http://www.globalgraphics.com/en/gdoc/free-creator) we are passing on the huge benefits of its big brother, gDoc Fusion, to home and students users at a great price. Download gDoc Fusion Home & Student Edition here (http://www.globalgraphics.com/fusion-homestudent).

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.

Across the world journalists, reviewers and our peers have been talking about gDoc Fusion and its benefits. In the UK business and technology publications like VNUet.com and Computer Business Review to general consumer media like Computeractive have highlighted gDoc Fusions’ ease of use as a key benefit.

In the US and Australia, ComputerWorld.au ran our launch story as well as trade media Planet PDF emphasising how easy it is to share and convert PDF, XPS, Word and PowerPoint files using gDoc. Sites like Technolawyer have given gDoc favourable reviews.
And in Germany Computerzietung and Computerwoche covered the launch.

Equally bloggers and Twitterers have been discussing gDoc Fusion including Adrian Ford and Ivan Walsh as well as Martin Heller who’s been recommending it to his followers.

Most reviews have been fantastic covering of the many benefits gDoc Fusion offers in terms of easy of use and simple user interface. Of those reviewers of the pre-release version a couple of people have found some issues on particular hardware configurations but Martin Heller, for example later posted than any challenges he had were just on his Vista for x64 machine but “the product is completely solid on my 32-bit Windows XP machine” and concluded that gDoc Fusion “…does a better job than Acrobat at redacting sensitive text from PDF documents and editing PDF text in place. It also fills a major void in Acrobat’s functionality and converts PDF documents back to Word format.”

Overall, we’ve been extremely pleased with our launch reception and I wish to thank all those who took the time to review the product and offer feedback. Our development team is now pressing ahead with SP1 which we intend to launch mid June.
We’re determined to continue to improve the product and only add extra functionality that users actually need. I look forward to continued feedback from across the world.