Published on

Advanced-Forms

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Roy van Kaathoven
    Twitter
    @razko

During my time at Quadira I've have mainly worked on Advanced-Forms which is a Document Output Management system that simplifies managing the layout, distribution and archiving of data.

My involvement in the project started out as an outsourced developer working on replacing a TEXT to XML converter. Quadira was a reseller of similar software and because they had requirements that were not being implemented by the vendor they decided that they wanted to develop an in-house solution.

This TEXT to XML converter was the first C# project I've worked on. There were many complex requirements:

  • Different input formats including PDF files that needed to be converted (OCR) to plain text first
  • Software has to fully utilize all available CPU's
  • Consider many different business rules to parse plain text to a structured XML file

In only a few months i was able to deliver a replacement software that fit their requirements and were able to sell to their customers, thereby also increasing revenue because they no longer had to share the revenue with their vendor.

After this I've joined Quadira in a permanent position as a developer. To give the customer more control over how these XML's were being processed a text based configuration tool has been developed that allowed customers to design an output process. Although this gave the customers a lot of flexibility it was difficult to keep an overview of these files when the configuration became large.

To improve the user experience i was responsible for developing a visual GUI, see screenshot below

Advanced-Forms GUI

Customers were now able to design their process, connect their business rules and output their documents by simply dragging and dropping components together and connecting.

After that the team grew to 12 developers where I've taken a leading role as a technical manager and product owner. By closely working together with customers, partners and consultants Advanced-Forms grew out as a viable and cost-effective replacement for expensive alternatives like Microsoft, Oracle and HP.