2011 was quite a year. The environment and the economy seemed unfriendly; iconic IT celebrities passed away and the end of the PC was announced more than once. Our customers and colleagues saw change everywhere around them. But in the midst of all this, work continued: software was written and new companies, services and products were launched worldwide. At Aspose, we did our best to support our customers and make sure that whatever they had to deal with, our products wouldn’t add to their troubles.

Here’s a quick review of what Aspose achieved in the busy and eventful year 2011.

New products

• Aspose.Pdf for SharePoint allows users to export lists, individual list items and Wiki pages to PDF files.
• Aspose.Email for .NET saw email programming features separated from Aspose.Network for .NET into its own product. We also released Aspose.Email for Java and Aspose.Email for SharePoint but because they are Aspose.Network for Java and SharePoint re-named, they’re not really new products.
• Aspose.Imaging for .NET lets developers work with images from within their own applications.
• Aspose.OCR for .NET added optical character recognition tools to Aspose’s .NET toolkit and
• Aspose.OCR for Java added optical character recognition tools to our Java toolkit.
• Aspose.Words Express is a free utility for converting word processing files to EPUB format.
• Aspose.Network for .NET is now a free utility that contains a number of network programming features.

Notable improvements

New features isn’t the only thing that makes life easier for our users. We also introduce new services and change the way we interact with our customers to give you more flexible ways of working with us. Below is a selection of process changes, features and services that we developed in 2011.

• Auto-porting allows us to maintain one code base and compile both the .NET and Java versions of our products from it. This benefits our customers because the two components are in sync and offer the same features. It benefits us because we only maintain one source for two products. We save time: you get a better product. This year we finished the work on auto-porting two products:
  • Aspose.Words for .NET and Java are now released on the last of the month, every month.
  • Aspose.Cells for .NET and Java now offer almost the same features.
  • Aspose.BarCode for Java went from version 2.7 to 4.4 when the .NET and Java features were synchronized.
• Aspose.Pdf for .NET and Aspose.Pdf.Kit were merged to give our .NET users a unified API for creating new and working with existing PDF files.
• We pay attention to the what out customers ask for so this year we have added a range of conversion options and support for new file formats:
  • PDF to HTML conversion in Aspose.Pdf for .NET.
  • PPTX conversion options added to Aspose.Slides.
  • PST support in Aspose.Email for .NET (previously Aspose.Network).
  • Barcode reading on Windows Phone 7 with Aspose.BarCode for .NET.
• Aspose Consulting allows you to outsource products that use our products to us, the team that knows most about them.

Retired products

Sometimes, we have to discontinue a product. This year, the following three were taken off our product list:

• Aspose.Flash
• Aspose.Report
• Aspose.Pdf.Kit for .NET (merged into Aspose.Pdf for .NET so the functionality is still there)

Community involvement

We sponsored a number of user groups and conferences. From the Great Lakes .NET User Group in the north-east US to Desert Code Camp in the south-west, we help developers get together and learn from each other in an open and friendly development. We are also building out own online community and have:

• 10,000 customers.
• 69,000 newsletter subscribers
• 140,000 signed up users
• Over 1,500 Twitter followers
• Over 600 Facebook fans

Awards 2010-2011

We’ve won a number of awards this year. We were entered for DevProConnections Community Awards for the first time this year and are delighted to have won two awards.

• SD Times 100 in the Components category.
• ComponentSource awards:
  • ComponentSource Top 10 Bestselling Publisher Award 2010-2011.
  • ComponentSource Top 25 Bestselling Product Award 2010-2011 for Aspose.Total.
  • ComponentSource Top 25 Bestselling Product Award 2010-2011 for Aspose.Words.
  • ComponentSource Top 50 Bestselling Product Award 2010-2011 for Aspose.Cells.
• DevProConnection Community Choice Awards:
  • DevProConnections Community Choice Award for Aspose.Network for .NET.
  • DevProConnections Community Choice Award for Aspose.Total for SharePoint.

Looking forward to 2012

We have great plans for what we’re doing in 2012 and are looking forward to sharing them with you over the year. Watch this space: we’re constantly working to improve our products and the way we support our customers.

We wish you a great new 2012!