Acquiring complementary companies leads to important synergies for Spir Group. The teams from Infoland and PixEdit quickly realized that they could benefit from shared information technology and collaboration.
Infoland, Norway’s largest portal for real estate information, is a service from Ambita. Information about a property is obtained from various sources such as municipalities and housing associations. The information includes floor plans, maps, completion certificates, temporary use permits and other public property documents. The main customer groups are real estate agents and real estate developers.
A need for mass conversion and standardization of documents
The documents collected are of different quality and in different file formats depending on where they are produced. The wide range of formats include word documents, different image formats, scanned documents and several non-standardized PDF versions.
The customers, for their part, prefer receiving the documents in standard, structured PDF-format, enabling them to be read on all digital surfaces – as well as making them more future proof. With millions of documents, it goes without saying that standardization is demanding.
PDF expertise
Developer Dennis Knudsen at Infoland says that they previously had in-house developed conversion solutions based on open-source code. As there are constant changes in versions and standards for these document-types, it was demanding and costly to keep the solutions updated.
PixEdit software originated from a need to create great digital documents from scanned paper documents. The range of solutions now also includes conversion of all kinds of file formats, not just scanned documents, to PDF. PixEdit software has unique capabilities for processing large amounts of documents, combined with a team equipped with deep specialist knowledge of PDF, text recognition and standards for long-term preservation of electronic documents.
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Dennis Knudsen, Infoland
Proven technology established in the cloud
Infoland had an enormous need for conversion and compression of all kinds of file formats to standard PDF, and PixEdit had the knowledge. In addition, PixEdit had at that time started developing a new cloud service. Infoland became the first pilot for this service, which is now in full operation and sold to several customers.
"By leveraging existing PixEdit functionality, we are now delivering well-established technology as a cloud service. This means that the unique PixEdit functionality for document processing can be used by all kinds of document management systems via an API” says Anders Alvsåker, head of the PixEdit development team. The solution can be operated in the customer's own Azure environment or delivered as a service operated by Sikri.
Anders Alvsåker, PixEdit
The future of document processing
Knudsen and Alvsåker say that the next step will be to look at the possibility of extracting structured data from the documents and filtering out documents with sensitive content. This is already being done in a project for a municipality where the PixEdit cloud service is linked to a case/archive system from Sikri. In addition, the teams will look at how they can automatically merge different documents into one PDF document, a feature that is requested by real estate agents and other customers. Again, existing PixEdit functionality will be lifted into the cloud and made available at the request of users through the document system.
Perfect match
The collaboration has led to both cost savings and improved functionality for Infoland as well as new functionality and expansion to new markets for PixEdit. Do we need to say more?
