The seminar will look in detail at:

• What is the PDF/A standard and how is it used?

• What are the benefits of PDF/A?

• Which documents can be archived into PDF/A?

• What do PDF/A, PDF / A – 1a, PDF/A – 1b, PDF 2 mean?

It’s being held on Nov 19, 2010 from 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM at:

Hubworking Centre
5 Wormwood Street
London, London EC2M 1RQ

For more details, or to book attendance, see the event web site.

See you there!

Martin

(Re)- Introducing Back to the Fusion, the tense, gripping, comedy thriller now showing on Global Graphics TV at  http://bit.ly/d3sCEg

With his boss on his back, see how our hero, Marty, quickly merges PDF, PowerPoint and Excel files into a single file that he can easily edit and share.  And with Doc on hand it’s sure to be a ride to remember.

Let’s go back; Back to the Fusion…….

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!

While alternatives to Adobe’s Flash player are a little difficult to find, there are several alternatives to the Adobe Reader such as our own gDoc Fusion. For viewing, even creating PDF, it’s free. We’ve just released an update, v2.5, and it’s well worth considering.

Contact Fredrik at http://www.annapolistech.com/gsa/landing.htm GSA Schedule GS-35F-0021L

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).

Product quality and the availability of support were the two biggest concerns of CIOs when considering the use of free software. Product quality is a straight-forward concern with a simple solution; 82% of CIOs subject a free software product to the same evaluation criteria as a paid-for software product.

Support is a more complex area. Asked what type of support a free software vendor should offer, the majority (41%) of CIOs suggested free product support such as patches and upgrades.

To my mind that seemed surprisingly low given that all software products need such updates, and paying for upgrades for a free product seems a little perverse (indeed, less than 10% of CIOs thought that was a good move!).

What grabbed my attention was that 22% of CIOs want paid-for technical support (1-2-1) to sit behind a free software product. It’s completely understandable, given the professionalism expected of IT within a large corporate, but I was surprised that paid-for support rated so highly for a free product. There was equal backing for free forum-led knowledge.

It just brings home how important it is that products used within a business must be reliable – even to the extent of making a free product one that brings with it a support cost.

It also shows, of course, that flexibility is key, which is exactly the approach Global Graphics has taken; free product upgrades with a choice of free or paid-for technical support.

Similarly, we somewhat assumed that large enterprises would find server-based downloads more convenient as it eases the centralised management of a free software product. Yet only 17% of CIOs wanted server-based downloads and installation; one in five preferred PC-based downloads and installation. The overwhelming majority (62%) want, you guessed it, both!

So, just as well we support both options on that too…

Click here to view the results: http://www.globalgraphics.com/freesoftware

The survey is based on interviews with 400 CIOs from organizations with over 1000 employees across the US (300 CIOs) and the UK (100 CIOs).

The purpose of using free software is both to save on existing spend and to add new functionality. As an example of the former, 38% of the CIOs interviewed said they wanted to replace Adobe Acrobat with free software (a role gDoc Creator fulfills) while 24% are looking for a no-cost alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.

The other key driver for using free software, cited by 47% of CIOs, is to complement existing desktop applications and extend functionality to users that can’t be provided using paid-for software. Again, that’s something that gDoc Fusion (at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat) or free-to- use gDoc Creator can deliver.

Clearly enterprise IT is changing: free software is found extensively inside organizations, and new generations of employees now expect business applications to work quickly and easily.

With gDoc Creator we address both these trends. Download them here to see if we’ve succeeded!