LiveDocx in PHP

I am really happy to report that the community interest in phpLiveDocx has been phenomenal. A lot of the questions, which are being posed are very similar in nature, hence a summary here:

Commercial version

In addition to the version which is publicly available over the Internet, we will be releasing a commercial version, which can be installed locally in a client network. The price point of this product has yet to be set. Please read this post for details. I am actively soliciting feedback here. What would you consider to be fair pricing for the LiveDocx Appliance?

Encryption

Technically, I would not see any problem in encrypting all communication between server and client. SSL would be the perfect protocol for such a task. Indeed, when personal data are being sent over the wire, I would recommend encrypting all communications.

Updated on April 21, 2009: SSL has now been implemented. See this blog post.

Supported formats

The following template file formats (input) are supported:

• DOCX – Office Open XML Format
• DOC – Microsoft Word DOC Format
• RTF – Rich Text File Format
• TXD – TX Text Control Format

The following document file formats are supported:

• DOCX – Office Open XML Format
• DOC – Microsoft Word DOC Format
• HTML – XHTML 1.0 Transitional Format
• RTF – Rich Text File Format
• PDF – Acrobat Portable Document Format
• TXD – TX Text Control Format
• TXT – ANSI Plain Text

There has been considerable demand for ODT, ODS and ODP. Currently, these formats are not supported by the backend technology, hence they are not available in phpLiveDocx. At some time in the future, these formats may become available. However, at this time, this is not planned.

For a discussion on the difference between templates and documents, please read this post.

Convert documents

Currently, it is only possible to populate templates with data. Many people have asked how they can use phpLiveDocx to convert documents i.e. convert a DOCX to DOC, or an RTF to PDF etc. In a future version of phpLiveDocx, this functionality will be available as an additional component.

Your applications

I would also be really interested in hearing in which kind of applications you would like to use phpLiveDocx.

At the company for which I work, we use phpLiveDocx to generate invoices, quotations and price lists.

I have spoken to an organization, which is planning on using phpLiveDocx to generate personalized vouchers (as PDF) and which are then e-mailed in a batch job to around 15,000 recipients per day.

What about you? What would your applications be with phpLiveDocx?