- Product
New! Powerful Document Conversion Service (DCS)
It sounds obvious but getting Items into RM Compare needs to be a simple, quick and reliable process. We are pleased to announce that we have completed a significant upgrade to the service.
If we've done our job properly you might not notice much!
The work we have completed has been in the 'back-end' of the system. The user interface (aka the 'front-end') remains unchanged for now and is being considered as part of a larger piece of work (see the Roadmap). The foundations we have now put in place however will allow us to move forward with confidence and speed.
What was the problem?
We have written a lot about our efforts to scale the size of RM Compare sessions, for example with 'connector' and 'competition' functionality. A key element in the system to accomodate this is the Document Conversion Service (DCS) which converts submitted items into small, lightweight files that can be more efficiently used by the system.
The DCS was starting to show its age and was becoming less and less reliable, expecially when faced with a large number of Items. Users were left frustrated when Items randomly failed to convert for no apparent reason. The temporary fixes we were able to apply were no longer adequate.
What have we done?
We have given the DCS a complete and much needed overhaul. The entire end-to-end process has been evaluated, re-designed and rebuilt. In doing so we are confident that end users will now be able to add Items to the system in very large volumes with assurance that everything will be converted reliably.
What are the outcomes?
Our testing has produced the following results
- We uploaded a Powerpoint with 150 slides. This took 90 seconds.
- We created 1500 Items from a .csv. This took approximately 1 hour.
We have also added new Item types to our list that we accept
- AVIF
- TXT
- RTF
Short, medium and long term investment
It is sometimes difficult to prioritise work like this. There is always an extensive list of feature suggestions that look more immediately impactful in providing user value. However, without solid foundations we risk the longer-term viability of the system.
All RM Compare users can now add Items to the system with confidence and with the understanding that system has the firm foundations needed to continue building world class features and functionality that everyone wants and needs.