About Xpand IT
Xpand IT with several customers across the world, provides top IT knowledge to its customers, so they can focus on their core business and still have the best IT resources for their company needs, seamlessly integrated into their business processes. We identify ourselves as a Team with Passion for Excellence, and we differentiate our services by having the best people with the best expertise in the following areas: Business Intelligence, Business Process & Integration, Enterprise Mobility, IT Systems, and Enterprise Applications.
Problem
Xpand IT has been an Atlassian Partner since 2006 and has recently developed a plugin – Xporter – that allows JIRA users to export content using Word templates and specific tags, into Microsoft Word or PDF documents. This plugin is available in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Internally, the Xporter plugin has a specific module that is responsible for managing all the input and output documents. Until now, Xpand IT has been using an opensource framework to do this integration, but unfortunately, this choice was limiting the evolution of the product and some issues were being reported by our customers.
The main problems were:
- Very limited PDF’s Exporter (several incompatible formats)
- Some plugin bugs using “Mapping” and “Custom Fields”
- Operational inefficiencies in Xpand IT, because we have been spending a lot of time with our customers to solve issues that are not our core business
- Product evolution compromised due to the import/export framework maturity.
Solution
Xpand IT chose Aspose.Words for .NET because it is a reference product that can bring benefits to the Xporter Plugin for JIRA. The integration of these two technologies enabled us to make a real data export tool! Previously we used an open-source framework to do the conversion of generated documents to PDF but, the solution was very limited and didn’t favor the end-users. Aspose.Words for .NET was used as the processor engine inside the Xporter for JIRA Plugin. It is responsible for reading DOCX templates, transforming the templates into final documents, and converting in the output format (PDF, ODT, PNG and many others).
Image 1:- Template Management with Xporter Plugin for JIRA
Xporter for JIRA templates is managed in JIRA Administration and allows us to manage templates (upload/remove templates) and set templates permissions (which templates to be displayed for a project, issue type, user, etc…). Before using the Aspose.words for .NET, we only supported formats such as DOCX, DOCM, DOTM, and DOCTX. However, after the implementation, Xporter managed to provide support for ODT and RFT. It also solved another problem such as mapping options and custom fields: now the bugs identified in these fields are completely solved.
After this component integration, the users will have many other options to export documents, not limited to PDF and DOCX. Actually, Xporter Plugin for JIRA offers the ability to export data along with a customization component, all in an extremely simple and effective way.
JIRA users can now export issues and thus create your custom reports in seconds. By using Aspose.Words component, it is now possible to export more formats such as EPUB, XPS, SVG, PNG, and many others. See the next screenshot:
Image 2:- Exporting Data with XPorters Plugin for JIRA
Experience
Finding a solution
Before using Aspose.Words for .NET, Xporter for JIRA was using the Docx4Java framework, which is an open-source engine for dealing with DOCX documents. After making some searches over the internet, we discovered that Aspose.Words for .NET was being positively referenced by several customers. After performing a simple prototype using the trial version, we realized that Aspose.Words for .NET could help us improve significantly the functionality provided by Xporter for JIRA. When we acquired Aspose.Words for .NET, we chose the option USD, OEM - (deployment unlimited), support for 1 year for bug fixing.
Implementation
The implementation took 1 week to do with the plugin support DOC, DOCX, ODT, and RFT as templates and still enabled the export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, XPS, SVG and PNG. The Aspose technical support was fantastic and very helpful and all Xpand IT members believed that Aspose.words for .NET is the best solution that we could have found for this case. This product has created added values to our plugin and increased our business agility. At this moment, all the team believes that Aspose.Words for .NET has proved to be the best solution for our product.
Outcome
The implementation achieved extraordinary results. The Aspose.Words for .NET integrated into Xporter Plugin for JIRA works perfectly and the customer’s feedback could not be better. With this component, we solved the bugs we had identified and it offered a greater variety of formats to import and export issues. This implementation also had a strong impact on the work of all Company members because we started to focus on Xporter core functionalities and we did not have to spend a lot of time with specific document process issues.
Next Steps
Now that the initial problem has been solved, we have a roadmap for using Aspose.Words for .NET in other products, like for example our Mobile Digital Publishing Service – Leafshelf (www.leafshelf.com). The objective is to use Aspose.Words for .NET in an automatic conversion process taking DOCX documents as input and exporting them to PDF. This enabled our customers to directly upload Microsoft Word Documents into our platform.
Summary
Our overall experience with Aspose products could not be better. This component increased business value to Xpand IT products - Xporter Plugin for JIRA, allowed us to develop a reference solution for data export. The Aspose.Words for .NET proved to be extremely complete and was very important in solving the main problems identified by our customers. The main benefits we achieved were:
- Eliminating bugs in mapping functions and custom fields
- The plugin accepts a wider variety of formats for import template (DOC, DOCX, ODT, and RFT)
- Export of issues (DOCX, PDF, EPUB, XPS, SVG, and PNG)
In addition to these benefits, this component also allowed advantages in terms of the processes of the organization. Aspose.Words for .NET increased efficiency at the organizational processes because it reduced the time spent in technical support activities. Now we can say that we are only focused on our core business. Xpand IT is very satisfied with the performance of Aspose.Words for .NET and we will implement this API in other products. We sincerely recommend Aspose.Words for .NET because this component offers many capabilities to deliver real business values.
Paulo Lopes
Xpand IT - Partner