What software do you use for letter patterns and printing?

Question

In our LOB application, there is a very important example of typing letters, which are then printed and sent from the mail branch (thousands per day). The current situation is that letter patterns are created in Word 97, and the fields are mail combined with the values ​​in the database using the VB.Net application, which mainly uses word automation. But depending on Word 97 today, this is not a good idea. We only have a few computers that have Word 97 installed as the rest of the company has moved to Office 2007.

What software or technology (.Net compatible) is available today that is best suited for this scenario. It’s better to do the same, but switch to Word 2007 or PDF or something else. Price cannot be a factor. The important thing is that letter templates should be developed by business users, and the data for filling in placeholders should be from the database.

The bonus will be to import hundreds of existing Word 97 letter templates without rewriting them from scratch.

Answer 1

Xpertdoc accepts Word documents and launches (combines) them efficiently on the server side, indoors or from the cloud, for interactive and batch writing generation. CGU, a large insurance group, uses this to generate, audit, print and send hundreds of letters per day. Here's what they have to say about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbqWiFt5dUA&feature=channel&list=UL Symetra Life Insurance integrated it with Customer Relationship Management (Dynamics CRM), combining 450 letter templates in 3 weeks.

Answer 2

My organization is also trying to solve a problem like this, and I can share with you some of the things I found. We are not doing this yet, still at the design stage, so consider the following.

Your situation also depends on the required format in the post office - at the moment they have to accept Word 97 documents, can they also accept XML, DOCX, PDF or something else?

There is a commercial product called Intelledox , which allows you to use Word 2003 (perhaps already in Word 2000?) As a template designer and then collect documents from data sources, which can be databases, web services, etc. It seems like a pretty interesting product depends on your budget. This is likely to be highly rated by your criteria for the design of end-user templates.

You can see the Open XML SDK , which allows you to programmatically create DOCX files (Word 2007). Your business users will generate the template in Word and provide it to the developer, who will then likely create XSLT. This XSLT is then used at run time to programmatically replace the contents of the basic template of a Word document. This does not require Word on the server, but only the .NET libraries that are part of the SDK. The disadvantage of this is that when creating a new template, a little processing by the developer is required.

I also looked at the reporting approach — we use SQL Server Reporting Services and can use it to create a federated document. It supports Word, Excel, PDF and other export formats. The disadvantage of this is that it usually requires a developer to develop a report. You can deploy SQL Server Reporting Services Builder , which is designed for advanced users to create their own reports. If you are considering this approach, make sure it is SQL Server 2008 (Report Builder 2.0), obviously Report Builder v1.0 is pretty poor.

If the mail service accepts XML, you can provide the mailbox to the XSLT file and simply send the data, not the assembled document. Not sure if the print house you are using accepts this, or if you need to keep a copy of the completed document internally for audit purposes.

Finally, it might be worth a look at the XPS format . Not sure how the templates will be designed for this, it may be too hard for programming.

Hope this helps with your thinking!

Answer 3

Doesn't the 2007 Office SDK cope with this?

Alternatively, you can look at a separate office and use wpf directly, with the Rich Text commercial editor.

Answer 4

Well, for all types of reporting, I used Crystal Reports, which allows you to easily retrieve information from a database and fill out a form. You can use PDF or HTML for this.

Answer 5

My company recently dealt with this problem, and we used the even more recent word 2003.

First, using Office products in a server type environment is not supported by Microsoft, and my experience will cause you a lot of pain. Is the Vb.net application running on the client machine, where the user can interact with the program or on the central server (you mentioned dedicated computers).

But this does not mean that you cannot use the office to create templates. An office file (.docx) is a zip / compressed XML file that can be processed using text manipulation.

Assuming the process is server-based or not controlled, I would recommend a) upgrade all your templates to office files (.docx). b) use office 2007 to support templates; c) write or find a program that can accept files (.docx), unzip them and replace merge fields. NO This answer depends on the complexity of your templates. There are many programs that can deal with text replacement, etc. d) run a program that can convert docx to pdf. Assuming that the document does not require subsequent modification. it is possible to find docx in pdf.

Are your templates simple? or do you have nested data, conditional formatting in a document and other similar difficulties?

Answer 6

We created something very similar to my company a few months ago. We used a library called DocIO by Syncfusion . Users create regular documents using MS Word (2003 or 2007) with standard Mail-Merge fields. These documents are then downloaded and stored in the application database. Then we use the DocIO library to perform mail merge, passing values ​​for merge to the DataTable:

byte[] templateDocument = . . . DataTable data = . . . Stream templateDocStream = new MemoryStream(templateDocument); mailmergeDoc = new DocIO.WordDocument(templateDocStream); mailmergeDoc.MailMerge.Execute(data); 

Then we can send the document to the browser, for example,

 Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=merged.doc"); doc.Save(Response.OutputStream, Syncfusion.DocIO.FormatType.Doc); Response.End(); 

Answer 7

Depending on the complexity of the letter layout, WPF may be a good option.

This is part of the .NET platform, so you do not need to rely on any third-party library or applications that may not be updated in the future. Which, hopefully, avoids repeating the problems you have with Office 97.

I know that you said that the price is not a problem, but it is also free.

Answer 8

Microsoft ReportViewer