2020, what a year, right? The impact of the pandemic on our lives and the global economy is huge. But it is also an opportunity to accelerate transformation processes.

Resilience

Since years, companies all sizes are investing into the digitization of workflows and document processes. But the pandemic is a catalyst for a change that accelerates this process. As a pure technology company, we were able to work from home immediately without changing infrastructure or losing productivity. Today, we implemented a hybrid office culture with people working from home and in our offices.

Recently, we designed and built our headquarters based on our philosophy that software development requires two factors: Teamwork and focus. Therefore, our new office building has been designed to provide developers separate offices instead of cubicles and additional large activity-based spaces such as coffee kitchens and meeting areas. This helped in the pandemic to work together safely in our environment.

And we were very productive during this time:

Digital Document Processing

In 2020, thanks to our immediate actions, we were able to help our customers from day 1 to integrate digital document processing functionality into applications.

The integration of digital document processing solutions including collaboration, document sharing and electronic signature processes help successful companies to serve their customers and support business continuity.

Electronic Documents

Having digital processes implemented in business workflows has a huge impact on how successful a company is and will be - not only during a pandemic. The main motivating argument to implement digital document processes was saving costs, but the current situation shows that those processes have a strategic impact on businesses.

Electronic Document Forms Processing

Forms are used in many business and organizational processes to collect data from a specific person or group of people. The streamlined creation and deployment of forms and the collection of that data is a challenge software needs to solve.

With the release of TX Text Control X18, we introduced form field processing functionality to create and deploy forms including MS Word compatible fields such as checkboxes, drop-down boxes and form text fields. TX Text Control X19 allows the easy extraction of form field data to collect results from completed documents.

PDF/A-3b: Electronic Invoices

PDF/A-3b allows the storage of attachments in PDF documents. With the release of TX Text Control X19 this year, developers are able to import and export those attachments from and to PDF documents. Typically, this is used to store machine-readable data as an attachment to the human-readable PDF version.

Electronic Documents

Our core focus is to provide the best libraries and components to integrate document processing into all workflows and processes.

TX Text Control enables the creation and validation of electronic invoices as an integral part of business applications. Our core focus is to provide the best libraries and components to integrate document processing into all workflows and processes. Since years, TX Text Control is no longer only the "best rich text editor". With additional components and services, the clear goal is to provide all required tools to automate document processing and to digitize businesses.

Technology Incubator: DS Server

This year, we also announced that DS Server has entered public beta. DS Server combines the powerful word processing libraries of TX Text Control with an easy-to-use Web API approach to access document services. With DS Server, developers can bring document processing, editing, sharing, collaboration and creation to any app on any platform.

Electronic Documents

This new product marks an important milestone for Text Control to provide developers outside of the .NET world with the best tools to integrate document processing into Angular, React, Blazor, JavaScript, iOS or Android apps. We developed this product inside our technology incubator: 30 years of experience bundled with knowledge, modern development, agile concepts and fresh ideas is the result of building a product in an incubator inside a successful company.

By integrating DS Server into an architecture, developers have access to fast and reliable document services from any application. Various legal compliance or security restrictions, performance or integration reasons require organizations to host those services on their own servers or with their preferred cloud providers. Combining the advantages of an easy-to-access Web API with a local installation provides the best of both worlds.

Conferences

The year started with the fantastic conference NDC 2020 in London. One of the best organized developer conferences in Europe took place in the center of London next to the beautiful royal church Westminster Abbey. 800+ developers from around the globe met to learn from the best international speakers. After London, we had conferences in Germany and San Francisco, USA in 2020.

We will support our community now and in the future.

Today, it sounds unreal that so many people meet at one place to interact, communicate, share and laugh. But this is what a conference is about and what a conference will be in the future. We are committed to our developer community. Very early, it was clear for us that we will support the community and conferences even more during this time. As in-person conferences have been cancelled due to COVID-19, we talked to many conference organizers to discuss how we can help to create an experience on a par with offline conferences.

We sponsored many online and hybrid conferences this year and it was a brilliant experience. Online or offline: We will support our community now and in the future.

We cannot predict the future and the global situation. But what we can guarantee is that we will strive to provide you, our customers, with the best document processing tools and innovative technology to help with the digital transformation.

The Text Control team wishes all of our customers, partners and friends a successful 2021 full of hope and happiness. We wish you health and joy as you welcome new challenges.

Happy coding!

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