Saarbrücken and Wolfsburg Every day SoftGuide provides suppliers with hundreds of qualified contacts, either directly or via the contact form. In 2006 more than 6.4 million visitors visited the SoftGuide portal to research commercial software solutions. More than 130,000 customer enquiries were submitted via the contact form alone.

Media partnerships with leading publishers such as the Konradin IT publishing group, IDG, CNET, Hoppenstedt and many others also mean that the coverage of the SoftGuide software guide is substantially higher than that of other comparable software catalogues in the German-speaking market.

Together with a great variety of information and opportunities to download demo versions, plus supplementary information material and user reports, the SoftGuide offers its visitors so-called software exposés for downloading. These are PDF files containing details of suppliers and program descriptions of the software product being investigated, in printable format.

The tool previously used to generate these documents only achieved an imperfect conversion of the existing HTML files into PDF format. Much of the source text data used for illustrations and diagrams in the HTML document was displayed in the wrong place or was incorrectly aligned after conversion. As a result, only around 50% of the potential documents were of sufficiently high quality to be made available for downloading. The remaining thousands of documents had to be checked and revised manually at great expense.

As the software exposés are very popular with users and generate a substantial proportion of all the enquiries for software products, the large number of program entries without an exposé was costing a great many leads - and therefore sales - every day.

After just a few weeks, the software exposés have already become an important element of SoftGuide's lead acquisition. With RealObjects PDFreactor® a high-performance application has been successfully integrated and a noticeable improvement in the quality of the exposés has been achieved compared to the previously used tool.

Please also read the related case study.

About SoftGuide

Since 1996 SoftGuide has been providing online information about software solutions in the area of industry solutions, business applications areas and standard software. The SoftGuide database currently contains more than 8,000 up to date program descriptions plus company profiles of more than 5,100 suppliers, producers and service providers.

About RealObjects

Headquartered in Saarbrücken, Germany, RealObjects is a manufacturer of standards-oriented, cross-platform software tools for content authoring and electronic publishing. The company ranks as a pioneering developer of easy-to-use, affordable and quick-to-deploy WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML/XML editor solutions, which enable content authoring in Web- and Java-based applications.

The privately-held software company has more than 2000 corporate customers in over 30 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and non-profit organizations. RealObjects has a strong network of key business alliances, value added resellers and OEM partners.