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.

Those who participated in the Global Graphics desktop software survey back in February and opted in to try out a new software application will shortly be receiving a personalised email, giving them an opportunity to obtain a fully working, pre-release version of this new, office productivity product.

Those who take the opportunity to download and install gDoc Fusion may well want to tell the world about their experiences, and to do so they can post comments to this blog.

You can read more about gDoc Fusion at www.globalgraphics.com/gdoc