As a business, we recently embarked on a journey of developing our own web apps to help our customers and streamline some of our internal workflows. Having employed an internal software developer, we started building an application to help our customers (typically trainers, coaches, consultants and facilitators) access high-quality workshop content that was professionally designed and easy to use.
Our goal was to create a system that managed our several thousand workbook activity pages and create a marketplace for thought leaders to buy and sell content. The app would build a PDF workbook from a series of single workbook activity pages selected and ordered by the user.
We had always wanted to include PowerPoint slides with the system, but with an aggressive launch target, we had almost abandoned the idea. Then our developer found Aspose Slides. The API quickly provided us with a seamless integration and the functionality we needed. By investing a day in the integration, we saved a few weeks of Dev time that could be spent on other critical components of our application.
Some notes from our developer:
“We initially tried using PHPPresentation by PHPOffice to handle merging and splitting of our slides, with no luck. It wasn’t able to manipulate slides as we hoped it would. We also tried Apache POI using the php-java-bridge, but this was quite a messy solution. Their APIs were not as extensive or clean as Aspose Slides Java for PHP. Using the php-java-bridge we were able to build a fast application that can move slides between presentations and add in a copyright line to each slide’s footer. It’s also great to know that we are able to achieve any other PowerPoint editing the app might need to handle in future.”
In our first iteration of our App we have used only a few basic functions like merging and splitting PowerPoints. Utilising the Aspose API has opened up a number of other opportunities for us to develop future features in our application that will allow our users to manipulate, create and edit PowerPoint too. This will be a valuable and desirable feature set in future versions of our App.
While we could have spent the time to develop our own code to manipulate the PPT files, licensing Aspose accelerated our development process and ultimately our launch.
As we launch the App, we know that our users will love that they have a ready-to-use PowerPoint deck to accompany their workbook. Thanks, Aspose!
For more info, checkout Aspose Slides