Amagno is a cross-industry enterprise content management manufacturer based in Oldenburg, Northern Germany. They offer a digital content management system that enables users to customize and automate their document-driven workflows.
The development team at Amagno works towards creating robust, scalable backend services for document analysis and visualization.
The challenges
Sarah Henintsoa Benecke is part of the company’s software development team and is a backend developer and trainer. She is the lead developer for integrating GemBox into Amagno’s product to implement the relevant features.
She shares that the development team used third-party components for diverse document operations. But as time elapsed, they confronted increasing challenges with the limitations of these components with unresolved issues.
They had to implement various mechanisms to tackle misbehaviors and employ multiple techniques to interpret the results of that component. While interacting with this previous solution, “everything seemed routine,” in Sarah’s literal words.
The solution
They knew that the juggling between multiple components had to stop. So, they started doing extensive online research for a new component that would offer information extraction and document conversion for multiple file formats.
After a few months of researching and trying different products, they found GemBox.
Sarah listed a few things why they decided to go for our components:
- Highest coverage of different file formats
- Most comprehensive documentation with helpful tutorials, open forum, and support
- Package with only a few technical dependencies or installation requirements
- Royalty-free deployment
How they use GemBox products
Amagno’s development team uses the products included on GemBox.Bundle to extract metadata and file information, generate graphical previews of different file formats, and convert them to other formats.
The extracted data helps their product analyze the document in detail and replace their customers’ manual research.
Also, the graphical previews and conversions can be presented in their application’s frontend to enable common document operations like adding annotations, signatures, or stamps.
“It is simply the comfort of being able to have a real insight into the documents. In every GemBox-driven functionality that our application provides, I can always investigate all characteristics of the file – all file attributes, its content, and all possible operations that I can use to modify or convert it. There is no need to transform it into a human-readable object or to save a temporary result, GemBox always provides a developer-friendly state of it.”
– Sarah Henintsoa Benecke – Lead Developer at Amagno
What they love about GemBox products
Integrating GemBox into their product, including the testing phase, deployment, and UX refinements, took just a few months.
When creating the first proof of concept with GemBox, the Amagno development team did a little console application that converted MS Word documents to Bitmaps. And since there was a tutorial available on GemBox examples to help them, it took no time to complete this process.
Sarah mentioned that “since the first results generated with GemBox, we noticed directly that the document handling is simplified, and the extremely fast and always helpful feedback on questions and bug reports makes working with GemBox really pleasant”.
The results
Amagno no longer has increasing license costs for new clients since GemBox products are royalty-free. This means their cost savings even grow over time.
One of the main upsides of using GemBox, according to Sarah, is the time-saving in the process of debugging. For her, the document handling steps are transparent, which makes it easier to identify unexpected behaviors and create automated tests for single document operations. This helps to accelerate the team’s internal processes and thus increases their overall performance.
Besides, their customers noticed the more realistic document previews they offer, thanks to GemBox document conversion.
To summarize, Sarah shares that:
“Using GemBox.Bundle has given us a more future-proof, enjoyable development process, saved us money, and has given us better results in our document operations. We are very happy with the choice we have made.”
Do you want to experience the same results as Amagno?