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The Datalogics Motto – Where Experience Delivers

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Xplor President/CEO Skip Henk Interviews Matt Kuznicki, CTO of Datalogics

Datalogics is relatively new to the Xplor world, exhibiting for the first time at Xploration 17 earlier this year. That said, I reached out to Datalogics’ Chief Technology Officer, Matt Kuznicki, and asked him to introduce himself and Datalogics to the Xplor community.

Based in Chicago, Illinois, Datalogics considers themselves the premier source for PDF and eBook technologies in the industry. I won’t go into more detail than that as Matt gives us a great overview below. However, I do want to introduce you and tell you a little about Matt himself.

Matt Kuznicki is responsible for product development and engineering. He serves as a recognized expert in document applications, eBooks, electronic documents and the PDF file format. Matt is also a member of the board and Chairman of the PDF Association, as well as the US Technical Advisory Group on document management applications (ISO/TC 171 SC 2), and active in the PDF standards and technical communities.

Skip: Tell us a little bit about the company itself and a bit about its history?

Matt:  Datalogics, Inc. is based in the great city of Chicago, and we are proud to be able to say that we have recently celebrated our 50th year in business. We consider ourselves the premier source for PDF and eBook technologies. We were founded in 1967 and started as a small independent software firm, in the era of reel tapes and punch cards. We’ve come a long way from those days, and now leverage tools like Agile and GitHub to keep up-to-date with new ideas in the IT community. Our primary goal when we first started, which still rings true today, has been to surpass our customer expectations by providing them with innovative features and new product updates to meet their needs.

Datalogics offers solutions that include a wide range of powerful PDF and eBook technologies for .NET, Java, and C/C++ developers. We are a partner member of the PDF Association and I have the honor of being chairman of the PDF Association. Datalogics is also a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Readium Foundation.

Skip: Give us some history and context about why PDF has been and continues to be so widely accepted and used as a standard document format?

Matt: PDF has continued to be an ISO standard-driven document format; the PDF format provides consistent interoperability for users, facilitating the creation of portable documents and ensuring reliable interchange. Furthermore, regulated industries continue to require and utilize specialized versions of PDF such as PDF/A (archive) or PDF/X (graphics/print).

As further validation that PDFs continue to be a widely-used document format, based on a PDF Association Technical Conference presentation as of October 2015, there were about 1.6 billion PDF documents on the web, 60% of non-image attachments in Outlook Exchange Enterprise were PDF documents, and conservatively there might be 2.5 trillion or higher PDF documents created each year.

Skip: Where is PDF headed next, and how will it continue to be relevant?

Matt: Since one of PDF’s strengths is its focus on longevity – the ability to use PDF files far out into the future – I believe it’s a good thing that PDF doesn’t undergo drastic change very often. While it’s tempting to focus on new technologies, often times users and adopters of unproven document technologies can find themselves stranded when the hype cycle dies down and they are left with large investments in formats that fail to gain traction. With PDF, there is a broad ecosystem of tools and workflows that ensures the vitality of PDF for the decades to come.

PDF 2.0 is an exciting development that represents an evolution of PDF, one that preserves compatibility with earlier versions of PDF as much as possible. We anticipate that PDF 2.0 will be used first in closed-loop workflows, as end users gradually adopt PDF 2.0-compatible viewers. While many of today’s PDF viewers can view most PDF 2.0 files, new features of PDF 2.0 will take some time to be adopted. We expect that there will be a transition over the next several years, if not longer, as document creators gradually add support for PDF 2.0 creation to their software.

In fact, Datalogics is happy to announce our donation of an initial set of example PDF 2.0 files to the PDF Association. We are proud to help the PDF Association in their mission of providing technical resources and education to PDF practitioners. These PDFs are specially constructed to be readable even to those who aren’t yet PDF experts, and are based in part on PDFs Datalogics has built for our own in-house educational programs.

Skip: What are some key things you should consider when choosing/evaluating a partner/vendor for PDF technology solutions?

Matt: A PDF solutions provider/vendor should be active in the PDF community and be advocates for their users in the broader community by helping to move PDF forward. This ensures that PDF continues to address and solve new business problems while making sure that the needs of current users are also not ignored. PDF vendors should also enable users to solve their problems effectively by providing intuitive, simple and implementable solutions for both common and complex problems, while still adhering to the PDF standards specification.

All these points mentioned above are hallmarks of Datalogics’ strengths. We provide PDF technologies and document solutions to a wide range of industries and businesses and offer unparalleled support and expertise. We have dedicated Technical Support Engineers who are available to our customers and prospects during the evaluation process. We also offer many other resources such as our knowledgebase, customer portal, blog, technical service bulletins, and our development site which include documentation, code samples and release notes. We are also active participants in the various developer communities including Stack Overflow where we have the “Adobe-PDF-Library” and “PDF-Java-Toolkit” tags to help facilitate knowledge sharing.

Skip: Matt, I thank you for taking the time to share with our readers more about Datalogics and your thoughts on PDF. Any closing thoughts?

Matt: Just want to thank everyone for taking the time and be sure to check out our website at www.datalogics.com. Perhaps we can do business together in the future with some of you!

Skip: Once again, thank you for your time and for your ongoing support of Xplor International.

I want to go ahead and plug Datalogics as well as our upcoming show by saying I hope all our readers will check out the Datalogics booth at Xploration 18! The show will take place April 17-19, 2018 in Orlando at the Rosen Plaza. Datalogics will be in booth 9. Stop by and say hello, their team will take great care of you!

Until next time! Take care.

skip_Henk_Photo_2011

 

Skip Henk, EDP
President/CEO
Xplor International

Going Digital at Your Own Pace

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Submitted by Alexandra Truchot, Content Creation Specialist for Objectif Lune.
May 25, 2016

Going digital: everybody’s talking about it. For some people, it’s a no-brainer and has been reality for a number of years. Others are still struggling to digitize their business procedures. Any way you look at it, the future is digital. But making the switch is complicated.

In a perfect world, you would always send documents by email or publish them to the web. Not only would you be more efficient, you would save money.

Yet, most of organizations still do not send electronic invoices, even in simple PDF format! Customers are still requesting paper invoices and the employees are used to handling documents as they always have. Often, organizations do not have all of their customers’ email addresses. Small- and medium-size enterprises (SME) that began operations prior to the advent of digital, for the most part continue to use paper. Large businesses can afford to develop custom solutions and withstand the risk. SMEs that start up today put digital solutions in place from the get-go. But for medium-size enterprises that have been in business for a number of years, the risk is too great of placing the billing process at a disadvantage or weakening their finances by changing their procedures too abruptly. They lack the means to throw themselves into costly development projects and do not have the in-house resources to modify the systems in place.

Is your organization experiencing these problems?

There is, however, a way to remedy this situation without generating astronomical costs and up-ending your current procedures. Digitize your in-house procedures first. The transition will be smoother when you are ready to communicate electronically with your customers.

Here are some first steps that will make it easier for you to go digital.

  1. Set up an automatic digitization process for archiving your communications with your customers, such as invoices and other documents. Using a middleware system, you collect customer communications to digitize them and make them available as needed. This means that you are keeping electronic copies of all your records, even if you still do not send them to the customers.
  2. Have customer service employees routinely ask customers for their email address when speaking to them on the phone.
  3. Archive these documents in an .XML file and generate PDFs solely upon request for a copy. This takes up less space on your servers.
  4. Start by always sending PDF copies of current accounts in addition to the paper copy requested by the client. You won’t be abandoning paper right away but you will be starting a smooth transition.
  5. Once you’re more comfortable with the digital format in-house and your clients are used to receiving a PDF copy, it will be time to format your invoices so that they can be sent directly in an HTML email.

The right solution adapts to the processes you already have in place and does not require changing everything. Be careful with anything promising drastic changes; you need a solution that will adapt itself to what you already have.

AlexandraTruchot ThumbnailAlexandra Truchot – Content creation specialist with Objectif Lune. Writer and compulsive reader. Eager for unknown destinations and exciting encounters. Anything is possible, you just have to believe it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Objectif Lune has 20 years of experience developing Customer Communications Management solutions. Our solutions bridge the gap between systems and automate more personalized, relevant, multichannel customer communications. Learn more at: www.objectiflune.com.