Office Automation

Once documents are created, they must also be automatically validated for correctness and consistency, and depending on the area of application, further processed, integrated into a collaborative workflow, or archived. We implement complex add-ins for MS Word that fulfill all these requirements. For this we usually employ functions that MS Office already offers, further developing them to fit our customer’s needs, or, we process the file formats of MS Office applications in order to be able to performantly access all contents of large-scale documents.

With the help of our MS Word add-ins, documents are generated according to pre-defined structures and strict, formal criteria given for each of a wide variety of document types (Document Type Definition – DTD). By request, we automatically integrate chunks of text from databases into these documents. The result is a customer-specific repository which provides templates for all the needed document types and makes it possible to automatically validate the structures.

Closely related to this is publication design, which adapts the concrete formatting of pages, paragraphs, and characters to each customer’s corporate design. In this area, the preliminary consulting is at least as important as the development work itself – only this way can we create the look that fits the individual document structure and form. And, just as important, we adapt the user interface to the customer’s needs.

This enables multiple, geographically distributed authors to create complex, unified documents within a smoothly running collaborative process. Contributors are efficiently supported by the workflow features in our Word add-ins, which means they can concentrate their efforts on content and editing activity. By automating their tasks, we support our customers not only in optimizing their workflow, but we also ensure consistency in the results of their work.

Besides collaborative generation and validation of documents, their structured filing, reliable retrieval, and further, automatable processing has all been posing interesting new challenges to IT for decades: storage in databases, research, and indexing, publication in the internet and print products, interchange between various departments or institutions, partial translation of only the changed portions, and more. All of these requirements can be implemented by our add-ins.

Due to our experience with multilingual texts in the context of various EU institutions, we’ve had a hand in shaping the development of the Unicode Standard character sets: our contributions have entered into the considerations for the standardization of the Unicode character set. Our competence in this domain is in regular demand from EU institutions, which has always striven to incorporate the particular character sets and sorting rules brought in by each new member state.

Our certification as a Microsoft Gold Partner further attests to our expertise in the world of Microsoft products.