In this issue:
1. Announcements: XpertBuildDoc and XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2
2. Did you know? Support by and for the community through our Forums
3. Tip: Printing large files
4. Coming up: Office 2007 and XpertDoc 10
5. Survey: What version of Microsoft Office are you using and what are your plans for 2007
Announcements: XpertBuildDoc and XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2
Last week, we released a free utility for generating the documentation of Visual Studio 2005 projects.
- Read the news release.
- Visit our community forum.
- Download it now.
This week, we released XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2. This incremental update to our Word Document Generator features Visual Studio integration and better interoperability with Microsoft Outlook.
- Check our Knowledge Base article for the detailed release notes.
- Visit our Download Center to request a demonstration license.
- Go to our Online Store to buy it today!
Did you know? Support by and for the community through our Forums
Our forums are seeing increased action these days and they are becoming the best place to look for information and support. While the Knowledge Base is where we put important announcements and other relevant articles, the Discussion Forum is where YOU can ask questions, post replies and submit feature requests. Be sure to visit them both often for we are committed to steadily increasing the wealth of information you can find there.
One of the key benefit of XpertDoc Studio is its ability to generate high volume documents very rapidly. How rapidly, do you ask? Well, we're talking about millions of pages per day.
When dealing with very large documents, one have to make sure they keep them to a reasonnable size so that they can be efficiently rendered and printed by Microsoft Word. Over the years, we and our clients have figured through experimentations that the "optimal" document size for maximizing printer output speed is between 5 and 10 thousand pages per documents. Depending on actual content, the size of those files might be between 50 to 100 megabytes.
One of our client recently brought to our attention a very odd behavior of the Microsoft Word printing engine. Printing the exact same (large) document sometimes took as little as 10 minutes and, at other time, would take as much as ... 10 hours!
It turns out that Word is at least 60 times more efficient in formatting and paginating a large document when it is first given the "opportunity" to load in memory the printer driver and/or its printing modules. After extensive testing we were able to isolate the following sequence of actions which "forced" Word to consistently complete printing at the fastest performance level:
1. Open MS-Word (empty, blank document)
2. Print this empty document on the target printer.
3. Without closing MS-Word, open a very large document.
4. Print it.
Watch our Knowledge Base in the coming weeks for the complete results of our performance analysis for printing very large Word documents.
Coming up: Office 2007 and XpertDoc 10
Microsoft is getting ready to ship the latest installment of its ubiquitous productivity suite, Office 2007. It is currently available (for evaluation purposes) as a Beta 2, with the production release scheduled for the end of 2006 / beginning of 2007. Amongst the new features included in this version, of particular interest are:
- A new compressed native format which significantly reduces (by more than 50%) documents file size.
- An improved user interface.
- More complete, robust and secured automation options.
We too are preparing for our next major release. Our plan is to launch XpertDoc Studio 2007 in time for the general availability of Microsoft Office 2007. Code-named XDX, the 10th version of our document generator will integrate all the technological advancements that we introduced in our XpertDoc Enterprise API as well as some new features geared at making life even easier for our larger corporate clients. Stay tune for further announcements!
Survey: What version of Microsoft Office are you using and what are your plans for 2007
As part of our continuous commitment to always serve you as best as possible, we are conducting a survey regarding your current and planned installation of Microsoft Office.
You can answer the survey online by going to our Discussion Forum where you will find two "polls":
Which version of Microsoft Word / Office are you currently using? and
When do you think you'll be upgrading to Microsoft Word/Office 2007?
You have to register as a member of the forum (it's free!) and log-in in order to cast your vote there. Alternatively, you can also send us you response by e-mail
Francis Dion
The Process Academy
102-1160 RUE LEVIS
LACHENAIE (QC)
CANADA J6W 5S6
North America (Toll-Free): 1-866-961-9111
Local/International: +1 (450) 961-9111
Fax: +1 (450) 961-9113
Blog: FrancisDion.Blogs.com
Web Site: www.ProcessAcademy.ca
XpertDoc: www.processacademy.ca/Products
Email: NewsLetter@ProcessAcademy.ca
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