About FWBS
The production of a Home Information Pack (HIP) was passed as a legal requirement when marketing a domestic property in the UK from the end of 2007. FWBS developed a solution www.hipsworld.com to assist Law firms and HIP Pack providers to establish themselves as Home Information Pack Providers.
As a leading supplier of solutions to the UK property market and law firms, we needed to have a solution developed quickly for them to meet the time constraints put on the project by the government.
Requirements Scenario
The final output of the system would be to provide a comprehensive document containing multiple sub-documents relating to different aspects of the property being marketed. We would receive documents in a number of file formats and from a number of different companies involved in the process of manufacturing a HIP.
The solution would need to scale and consist of multiple component parts including, at the heart, a comprehensive document building service. The document building server will take, a number of different document types and provide previewing information and assembly to a final Adobe PDF File.
Solution Implementation
The www.hipsworld.com solution was delivered to customers via a web solution. Users would login with their account details, via the web site, and they would request required documents from various companies to make up the Home Information Pack.
External companies would then upload documents in various formats and in turn, they would be stored on the site against a master HIP record.
Once all documents were uploaded, then an instruction would be sent to the back end document build service that would take each of the individual documents and convert them into a standard assembled solution format branded for the Pack Provider with Table of Contents.
The document service used Aspose.Words for .NET and Aspose.PDF for .NET
components to combine and manipulate the multiple documents into a single document and make that document available within the web site to be downloaded as a completed Home Information Pack and or to be sent to a Print Factory for production.
We currently process thousands of HIPS a month and assemble MB’s of data and the speed and accuracy of the Document Build Service were critical to scale and be reliable. Aspose helped us provide the solution on time and supported us efficiently on issues raised in the development process.
Benefits
With the time constraints imposed for this project, by using Aspose components, FWBS was able to easily convert the documents into a common format, manipulate and gather information from the documents. They were then able to create a single document based upon the common component parts. This is done in a reliable and consistent way. Aspose has been efficient and passionate on their support forums on ensuring the product did work as intended and further assisted us in delivering our solution ahead of time.
Future Implementations
Future implementation of our document server may see the introduction of more complex bundling of documents into a hierarchy of sections with top-level indexes navigation to the component parts for our other Legal product portfolio as well as using some of the other products from the Aspose.Total for .NET solution to work on other Microsoft Office formats on a server and client.
Conclusion
As we were getting documents from multiple sources including various scanners and new Microsoft Office formats, we were pleased to see rapid responses to any support logs we raised during the time we were developing the document server. As well as providing confidence and a consistent API to working with documents and spreadsheets.
Screenshots
Figure 1 - Hipsworld.com Previewing Documents through Web Document Builder
Figure 2 – Hipsworld.com HIP Build Automatically to PDF