Imaging Experts

Selling to Perceived Need

What happens if you offer a product that you believe everyone should have, but no one sees a need? Simple – it doesn’t sell.

Can you educate your market to create a need? Most of us can’t afford to – it’s an expensive and lengthy process. It’s much better to learn from your customers, and then provide a product they want.

This is not always an easy process. Selling in the software development space, many engineers are very busy, working under tight deadlines. They often evaluate available solutions with a cryptic “Does your product do this?” Answering only that question does neither your company nor your customer any good. What really needs to be done is to address that need in the context of the entire task or requirement. So how do you do that?

Often the request for a widget comes to a salesperson. Though salespeople are generally smart and talented people, they are not typically engineers by background. Their job isn’t to delve into the arcane technical details of an engineering solution. A smart company supports its salespeople in those situations with sales engineers or R&D engineers. These people are qualified and motivated to understand the customer’s requirements in the context of their technical environment. They assist in finding a full solution that ensures the customer’s success.

This is exactly what Snowbound attempts to do with every special customer request. It’s a free service but surprisingly, not everyone utilizes it. Many of our smart and successful customers have realized the benefits of allowing our sales engineers to assess their situation. Why don’t you join the club?

-Simon

Zipping and Unzipping .jars, .wars, and .ears

Most people familiar with Java Applets and Java class libraries are familiar with the concept of .jar files.Most of the time, Java libraries are distributed in jar files. For example: the JDOM XML library is distributed in a file named jdom.jar. Snowbound's FlexSnapSI Applet is packaged in a file named FlexSnapSI.jar.

JAR is short for "Java Archive" and it is a cute name, but perhaps an unfortunate one, because jar files are really just renamed zip files. I've had people ask if I could make a jar file for them from their class folders. All you really need is Winzip or a similar program. More on the basics of Jar Files can be found in this Java tutorial. You can easily unzip the contents of a jar file to see the classes that are included in a library or applet package.

EARs and WARs:

J2EE Servlet based web applications that run in Tomcat or Websphere are usually distributed as .war files. In this case, WAR stands for "Web Application Archive". Like jar files, they are in .zip format. To create one, you can use a zip program to create a file called myapp.zip and then simply rename it to myapp.war. Depending on your application server, they are often expanded at deployment time and converted to a folder structure.

Ear files take this one step further. In my experience,. an .ear file is just a zipped up .war, which is already a zip to begin with. So now we have a zip within a zip. I usually drive myself crazy when I'm trying to package up an .ear file for use in Websphere. A good discussion on the topic is found in this SearchWebServices.com Q&A.

-Alex

Why Should Developers Use Professional Services?

Snowbound Software came into being offering development tools for engineers who wanted to embed imaging technology into their own specific applications. These companies had already made the decision that their area of expertise was not in imaging technology. The display and conversion of various image formats such as TIFF, JPEG, MO:DCA, AFP, and PCL was better left to the experts – Snowbound or our competitors. When tabulating the cost of development, if you could find the expertise, and comparing it to our price which included mature, widely tested technology, it was a no-brainer.

Because it is a developer to developer relationship, we talk the right language and we understand engineering needs. Many times we’ve added new capabilities at a customer’s request – it helps them and it helps us create a more powerful, more useful product. When we developed a Java version of our Windows and Unix imaging libraries, it was originally at a customer’s request.

So what’s different today? Well, time-to-market and cost concerns seem more pressing. Everyone is in crisis mode. Some people don’t even have time to read the manual ☺. Well, we have a new department for that – Professional Services. We’ve organized and expanded what we’ve always provided – a group of engineers that can understand your needs (often better than you can yourself), recommend the right product, and also integrate it into your system. 

And if you want to support your system yourself, what then? Simply contract us to create the integration layers for you to own. Then, with the purchase of our imaging tools, you can both get a quick start and obtain full control of your application.

We can implement our imaging solutions for you quickly because we’re the experts – we know our products and how to get the most out of them. We’ve solved the imaging problems for hundreds of companies world-wide - this is what we do.

-Simon

Getting the Most Out of Your Imaging Vendor

Implementing or upgrading to a strong document imaging solution can significantly improve a company's overall productivity and accelerate overall growth. However, the integration and implementation of such solutions is often complex and can lead to engineering errors, costly delays or even project abandonment. That is why working with a reliable and experienced imaging vendor can eliminate the risks and get your company up and running on time just by following a few easy guidelines.

Know your business needs and what you want to accomplish. Review and analyze your current workflow and processes with an imaging expert, let them recommend changes that could increase productivity and save time by implementing imaging solutions. Work with an imaging expert to establish which solution will best meet your requirements and then review a range of imaging solutions and components that meet the criteria. This will ensure you have the best suited tools to fit your new streamlined processes.

Know what you're working with. List and review all the formats (proprietary, non-proprietary or specialized) that you will be working with. Then consult with the potential vendors of your imaging component to determine if they offer universal viewing for both your proprietary and non-proprietary formats, and the ability to display multiple formats or any conversion/merging tasks that you have in place or wish to implement. This allows the vendor to know all the possible uses for the application ahead to ensure all your bases are covered.

Know your Environment. Choosing a platform for your document imaging system can often mean extending your current platform. It is important to involve your vendor in this process to ensure you operate on the best platform to meet not only your current needs, but possible future needs as well. The applications and systems already installed, especially any kind of document repository or management system, must be considered when integrating any document imaging component. Determining how these applications will work together is not something you want to address without the valuable input of your document imaging vendor. Also be sure to consider things like 3^rd party software that is either in use or will have to be implemented with the imaging solution and/or security requirements that may already be in place.

Know you will need help. Make sure you budget for a maintenance and support program. This will not only allow you the latest releases and upgrades, it will give you access to the imaging software vendor’s resources; valuable tools that can help and guide your engineers or 3^rd party contractors that may not be familiar enough with the system to perform detailed maintenance, upgrades, or general troubleshooting when problems may arise. Things like new features or changes to the existing application can often be confusing and difficult to work around. Your vendor's support programs are a  valuable resource that will ensure you always have someone to turn to for help.

- Ed

Converting PDF to TIFF

The PDF file format is now commonly used to distribute and view electronic documents. The popularity of the format has grown because you can save your document from a variety of different software applications (MS Word, MS Excel, etc.). You can then send your PDF document and guarantee that your recipient will be able to view the document with Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Also, since PDFs cannot be edited, you can rest assured that when you send your document that it will remain as it was when you sent it.

Another common file format used for electronic documents is the TIFF file format. It was developed in the mid-80s and was designed to deal with volumes of paper documents. These paper documents were scanned and saved as TIFFs to be stored electronically. The TIFF format became and is still commonly used for archiving documents. Since the TIFF format grew to become the most common format used for archiving, the legal industry and government agencies often require that documents are saved as TIFFs. This means that you may need to convert PDF documents into TIFFs.

PDF to TIFF file conversion is often accomplished by using a printer driver. If you are an individual user only converting a few files, this method is sufficient. However, if you have multiple users dealing with a large number of documents and images across your organization, using a tool to convert your images is a more efficient method.

Snowbound Software’s RasterMaster for the Java Platform provides samples to allow you to build applications that automatically convert from PDF to TIFF. Two samples included in the product both in the full and evaluation versions are simpleconvertionDS and converter.

-Patty