Company Info
SoftArtisans
1330 Beacon Street
Suite 400
Brookline, MA 02446
sales@softartisans.com
www.softartisans.com
Pricing & Licensing
Standard Edition: $1495.00
Special Price: $895.00
(For 1-2 CPUs)
About the Author
Anand
Narayanaswamy is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual C#
and an independent consultant based in Trivandrum, India. Anand runs learnXpress.com and specializes in ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Visual Basic
.NET and Visual Basic 6.0 and in the development of courseware,
technical articles, documentation, and reviews of products and
books. He is available for writing documentations, help files and
product reviews.
Reach him at
ananddotnet@yahoo.co.in
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Developers
are always on a look out for powerful products for producing
documents over the web and users were keenly waiting to explore and
use them. Prior to .NET, developers faced lot of difficulties for
the creation of documents and reports over the web. There were no
concrete products for producing them based on User Input. Visual
Basic 6.0 came with a reporting tool called DataReport but it can’t be used for web-based
environments. Active Server Pages combined with HTML provided some
functionality, but still users faced difficulties for saving the
generated output on their systems. With the evolution of .NET, the
whole scenario has completely changed. Visual Studio .NET ships with
a reporting tool called Crystal Reports, but it lacks major features
like auto generation of reports in Microsoft Word.
These difficulties are completely eliminated with the introduction
of WordWriter by SoftArtisans. Headquartered in Boston, MA, USA,
SoftArtisans had already developed lot of powerful products or
components for .NET and Java and I must say that WordWriter 1.0 is
an another feather in their cap. The product comes in two versions -
Java and .NET. This review focuses on the .NET version of
WordWriter.
WordWriter is a high performance
.NET assembly which opens, modifies and delivers native Microsoft
Word documents over the Web. The product uses data from an existing
Word file or template. In addition to this, WordWriter requires a
data source. The data source can be an array or a database. An
interesting factor which I noticed is that it uses few lines of code
to generate editable, presentation-quality documents. Moreover, you
can save the document instantly and the product preserves all the
features associated with Word documents like formatting, styles,
graphics and VBAs. It is also easy to use a database as a data
source because WordWriter uses one-step database integration. You
can access the WordWriter’s Development Guide at
http://officewriter.softartisans.com/default.aspx?PageID=196
A key feature of this product is that the output is generated on the
server and Microsoft Word is not required on the Web server to view
the generated output. Hence, the product will have licensing
flexibility and you can deploy your applications without worries.
WordWriter also supports multilingual environments and hence you can
deploy the applications seamlessly without any concerns about the
language settings. The vendor claims that the familiarity of
Microsoft Word and the interconnectivity of the web enable
WordWriter to make a dramatic impact on the distribution of
information across an enterprise.
It also tightly integrates with
WebForm controls and the product is built upon a simple and
intuitive object model. Hence, you can use WordWriter to create and
distribute customized reports. The generated Word file can be saved
to your hard disk. You can also open it with your browser. But I
noticed that the product supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0
and above or Netscape Navigator 4.5 or later. I don’t think the
browser issue will be a big problem since most of the users are now
using IE 5.0 or higher versions. The server should be running under
Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows 2003 with the .NET Framework and
J# redistributable packages. The client system should have any
latest versions of Microsoft Word. The client can also use Microsoft
Word Viewer, but it is not possible to modify the output generated
by the WordWriter with the viewer. WordWriter can also be used with
Classic ASP. You will get more information regarding this from the
documentation which comes with the product. The vendor’s web site
contains a separate section called Tips and Tricks and it can be
accessed at
http://support.softartisans.com/kbview.aspx?show=tips
I didn’t experience any difficulty with the installation and to work
with this product. I tested the product with Notepad, but you can
also use Visual Studio .NET. If you use Notepad, you have to copy
the WordWriter.DLL from the installation directory to the bin folder
inside Inetpub/wwwroot directory. If the Bin directory doesn’t exist
you can create it. If you use Visual Studio .NET, you have to add a
reference of this DLL to your project. If you are using this product
for the first time, I recommend reusing the sample program which
came with the product. Before making any modifications to the ASPX
file, you have to create a template using Microsoft Word. It can be
done by merging fields via Insert | Field menu. I suggest reading
the quick-start tutorial first since it explains this process in
detail.
The product comes in an evaluation
version with a 30-day license. The vendor claims that the product
expires on the last day of each month. I think they have created a
good algorithm to enable the trial functionality. In order to
download the product you have to give your email address. The vendor
immediately sends you an e-mail containing the download
instructions. One of the most disappointing factors with this
product is that the size of download file is very huge. It comes
around 18 MB and the WordWriter is shipped with ExcelWriter also. I
wonder why the vendor didn’t provided separate installation
downloads for both these products. If they had provided like that
then the users without broadband connectivity could easily download
the product and in less time. It took around one hour for me to
download the product with a broadband net connection. I strongly
suggest you to install Download Accelerator before downloading this
product since it will marginally reduce the download time. The
product worked very well with Microsoft Word 2003.
The product ships with a good piece of documentation. It is divided
into several sections like Features in Depth, Samples etc. I liked
the samples section since it provides several demonstrations in both
Visual Basic .NET and C#. Moreover, the execution steps are clearly
detailed in boxes. The documentation includes a quick-start tutorial
which explains how to work with the product along with the relevant
screenshots. It also comes with a programmer’s reference and other
tidbits. Also it is in HTML Help Format – a version which I like the
most. I noticed that all sample programs are nicely organized in
folders and are well commented with short descriptions as well. This
will surely help developers a lot. You can also directly open the
installation folder from the start menu. You can know more details
about the product from its home page at
http://officewriter.softartisans.com/default.aspx?PageID=189
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