Software firms join forces to target govt and financial markets

7 Dec 2009

Two Irish software companies have joined forces to create a technology that will slash the costs of government and financial bodies publishing information online.

With the government under increasing pressure to reduce public expenditure in the next budget, pTools today announced an Irish-developed technology solution that will slash the costs of making information accessible online and meeting compliance legislation.

Saved time and labour

The company, in partnership with Riverdocs, has developed an automated document migration and transformation solution that cuts the time and labour required to make documents available online. The all-Irish developed solution solves the problem of document accessibility and transparency and is aimed at government agencies and financial services.

Organisations can now seamlessly transform PDF, Microsoft Word and all Microsoft Office documents into compliant html webpages in pTools without the need for manual migration.

Documents of 100 pages or more that can take three to five days to manually convert, let alone publish, can be tackled in a matter of hours and made available online. This reduces costs and time substantially in government departments and financial institutions, where this work must otherwise be carried out manually.

Transparency Initiative

pTools was involved in the development of the document Transparency Initiative at the Irish Stock Exchange earlier this year.

“We continue to build our Enterprise Content Management suite of applications and solutions and, together with Riverdocs, we can now provide an instant solution to exchanging document information online in a manner that traditionally required dedicated investment in technical skills and resources,” managing director Tom Skinner explained.

“This makes large-scale document conversion and publishing easy.”

The solution solves the long-standing problem of easily representing documents online as searchable, usable and accessible web pages. Issues of document retrieval, lost attachments, and inability to search are all handled by transformation to HTML and automated publishing to browser.

An immediate benefit of this approach is that it eliminates the need for manual migration. While other services offer conversion, this solution differs in that documents are also automatically publishable for web.

Drag and drop

By simply dropping a PDF or document into a folder in pTools content management software, the document is transformed into web pages in the pTools application using the Riverdocs service.

“Riverdocs and pTools have a natural technology fit that results in a single solution for customers,” said Peter Acton, managing director of Riverdocs.

“For CMS users, it’s a trouble-free solution to an age-old problem and it really solves all the issues for people trying to easily access information that’s embedded in Office documents and PDFs. The savings in time and effort are significant and the results in controlling and sharing information accurately can’t be underestimated for financial services and government,” Acton said.

By John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com