Sopra Banking Software UK is a market leader in providing software applications and services to the UK financial services industry. Our mortgage origination application was already capable of producing documents compliant with the regulatory standards in either an RTF or PDF format, but we wanted to extend this capability to support DOC and DOCX as well – that is when we turned to Aspose.Words for Java.
The mortgage origination application produces documents in RTF format. The production of these documents is a complicated process. A series of complex templates, that utilise Microsoft Word field codes to provide page numbering and conditional logic, are used and it is vital that the documents are produced in a consistent format for all variations of a mortgage application.
Once generated the documents are then either returned in RTF format or converted to PDF on request by a Java based service. When converting the documents to PDF it is again essential that neither the format nor content is distorted. To convert the documents to PDF the Java service used a number of 3rd party libraries and completed the process in 2 separate stages.
We started by evaluating the latest versions of the existing 3rd party libraries, but soon identified that they did not support the DOC and DOCX formats, where Aspose.Words for Java did. Our R&D team carried out a comprehensive proof of concept using the evaluation version of Aspose.Words for Java and confirmed that not only was it capable of meeting our requirement, but it would also allow us to simplify our code base, replacing a dependency on three external libraries to convert an RTF document to either PDF, DOC or DOCX format with one and to completely remove the need for Word Automation. The R&D team found the API for Aspose.Words to be well documented with a number of comprehensive examples available online.
By implementing Aspose.Words we have established the potential to extend our product further in the future by capitalising on the comprehensive and feature rich API suite provided by Aspose.Words. We have already identified two additional areas for potential future improvement. Other parts of our application use a combination of templates and Microsoft Word mail merge to generate documents. This mechanism works, but it does rely on having a Windows Server in order to generate the documents – something that we could potentially look to replace with Aspose.Words mail merge capability. In addition to this we are currently investigating the feasibility of hosting our application in the cloud, which would mean the use of Microsoft Word Automation would no longer be a viable option. Aspose.Words comprehensive API would provide us with a viable alternative, creating a solution that is both robust and platform agnostic.
