Conversion of office documents to PDF and PDF/A integrated into the Alfresco ECM platform.

Berlin - Users of the open-source content management platform Alfresco can now easily convert their office documents into PDF and PDF/A files. Alfresco Gold Partner Redpill Linpro made this possible by integrating callas pdfaPilot into the Alfresco enterprise content management (ECM) platform. The integration tool is available for free at https://github.com/Redpill-Linpro/pdfa-pilot-converter.

Alfresco is one of the planet’s most popular ECM platforms; more than 3000 companies use this open source software worldwide. Now Alfresco can also reliably convert office documents to PDF and PDF/A format. Niklas Ekman, consultant for the Swedish systems house Redpill Linpro, said, “Alfresco’s standard converters use OpenOffice and LibreOffice to convert to PDF and PDF/A, which means their results are often far from optimal when converting Microsoft Office documents. This is particularly true when converting the newer XML-based formats such as docx, xlsx or pptx.” But callas’ pdfaPilot, on the other hand (which is based on the same PDF/A technology used for Adobe Acrobat) reliably creates and validates documents in a wide range of file formats by using the native Microsoft Office applications. Kent Åberg, Founder and Director of callas software’s Swedish partner NewFormat AB, explained further: “This integration tool is good news for the global communities of both pdfaPilot and Alfresco. We expect many customers worldwide, especially within the public sector, to greatly benefit from this new solution.” And Dietrich von Seggern, Business Development Manager at callas software, added: “We are very pleased that Redpill Linpro have seized the initiative, and that our PDF/A technology can now also be used within the open-source ECM system Alfresco. This is a big step forward for PDF/A as it continues to grow.”

Using Alfresco’s command line module, Redpill Linpro integrated the pdfaPilot as a subsystem that the user can enable or disable as required using the Alfresco interface. The pdfaPilot Dispatcher can also be addressed in this way, meaning that especially demanding tasks can be automatically distributed across multiple servers. The Dispatcher is a server which, rather than processing files itself, picks them up from its job folders or uses command line operations to access them, then hands them over to so-called “satellites” for processing. These servers do not have their own job folders; rather, they receive processing jobs over the network from the Dispatcher. As well as easing the server load, this architecture offers high system stability, since processing can continue even if one satellite fails.