100, 200, 300 document formats – how many are enough?

If you're an OEM selling to a wide audience or servicing the needs of a large organization, you want to provide the broadest possible document support. When you see a claim for 300 or more image and document formats – your eyes must light up. You don’t have to think or survey your customers or the industry – this package must have it all!
… Think again.

What if you have a narrowly defined audience that you need to provide document support? That 300+ format package will work for you too, right?
… Think again.

Unfortunately there is no product substitute that nullifies the need for you to understand what your customers and you need.

All the vendors in the imaging tool business play the numbers game, but it doesn’t really help you make a rational decision. Numbers don’t equate with quality, they don’t equate with support, they don’t equate with platform choices, they don’t equate with performance and they don’t equate with providing what you need.

When a vendor mentions hundreds of formats, you might ask how many are still in use. If Wordstar and other obsolete word processor formats make up that list, does that help you? A better question to ask is whether the formats my customers or my organization use are supported? Are AFP or MO:DCA documents (popular within the IBM ECM world) included? How about Adobe Acrobat files or PCL files? In truth, because of the consolidation of the software industry, there are only 10-20 popular document and CAD formats.

And not only do you need to know if the right formats are supported, you need to know whether they perform. Is the rendering fast enough for you? Speed differences of 2x-5x are commonplace. Is it robust – does it support variants of the specification that commonly exist for formats like TIFF or PDF?

And lastly, you have to make trade-offs. Sometimes number of formats for speed, sometimes numbers for platform support. If you need it for Java or .NET or Unix, your choices narrow down. And if you need it for several platforms …you can only get it from Snowbound. :-)

Simon