Aspose Review

At Mindflick, we’re on a mission to make world-class performance coaching available to everyone, so people and teams can be the best versions of themselves, at work, on the field, and in life.

We blend performance psychology, cutting-edge science and scalable technology to fine-tune mindsets in individuals and teams. It always starts with the individual – building a unique behavioural profile for each person. After that, we set up a personalised schedule of smartphone nudges, to help keep them on track. Making sure everything learned in our sessions stick.

At the core of the Mindflick solution is a report processing engine that historically has been reliant upon using Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint via Interop. Excel provided the means to easily implement formula while maintaining visibility of how the results were determined, while PowerPoint was used as an easy templating engine. Reports were also localised into multiple languages and exported to PDF or PPTX files depending on the report. The approach had proven to be versatile and flexible, making it quick and easy to implement changes as the product was developed, while utilising an interface that was familiar to all.

The problem that Aspose Cells & Slides has solved for Mindflick was one of scalability. Mindflick has been undergoing rapid expansion and the number of reports being processed is growing rapidly with anticipated capacity needing to be into the many hundreds of reports per hour. At times there will be sudden high numbers of reports that need to be processed quickly and other times where there will be very few.

In simple performance terms, Aspose is beating Interop by a factor of 2. The previous solution utilising Office and Interop would take approximately 30 seconds per report, the Aspose solution has that down to 15 seconds.

The other main barrier to improving scalability was that Office Interop only supports one instance of Excel / PowerPoint at a time. It was not possible to parallelise the solution which resulted in a hard limit of just 90 reports per hour.

In the Aspose solution it has been possible to containerise the report processor and bring it into the existing Kubernetes cluster. This has the benefit of auto scaling the solution when there are a large number of reports to process and releasing the resources once the reports are processed, cutting down the hosting costs significantly while still providing the means of processing a report every few seconds.

The solution was previously one that relied on quite a fragile inter-process interface, with a high risk of memory leaks and crashes if due care was not taken when making changes. The Aspose solution has resulted in much cleaner, testable code that will be easier to maintain in the future and is much more scalable and performant.?

We can highly recommend Aspose if you are looking for a way to manipulate office documents.