We are delighted to announce the availability of Aspose.Words for SharePoint, which is our latest addition to the Aspose.Words product family.

This release, Aspose.Words for SharePoint 1.0 makes high quality document conversions for DOC/DOCX/ODT/RTF/PDF/XPS and others easily accessible to SharePoint users.

Aspose.Words for SharePoint is built on top of the world-class Aspose.Words for .NET document processing technology and makes it available as an easy to deploy and use functionality in Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environments.

A Bit of History

In 2007, we wrote an article about how one can use Aspose.Words for .NET and Aspose.Pdf for .NET and write a bit of code to create a DOC/DOCX to PDF converter for SharePoint themselves. This article was published at CodeProject (no longer available) and also in the Aspose.Words documentation.

The article generated a lot of interest and support requests. Some requests were related to deficiencies of the DOC2PDF conversion and others were related to difficulties of creating and configuring a document converter for SharePoint. The article called for creating a converter according to the SharePoint Document Converters guidelines. While we always provided full and free technical support for Aspose.Words, we were reluctant to deal with issues related to configuring a document converter in SharePoint.

End of 2008, we have resolved most of the DOC2PDF conversion issues by releasing Aspose.Words for .NET that was capable of converting documents to PDF directly (e.g. without going through Aspose.Pdf). This is known as the “rendering engine” and allows us to convert Word documents to PDF, XPS, image formats and print with high fidelity (almost like Microsoft Word does it).

Today, end of 2009, we are happy to announce that we have finally resolved the other part of the issues related to the creation and deployment of the SharePoint document converter. We have created a product specifically for SharePoint. Aspose.Words for SharePoint can be easily installed and deployed on Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Enjoy

Please feel free to download, evaluate and also to submit feature requests and suggestions in our support forums. We have a dedicated team of developers and technical support who are eager to drive this product forward with your help.