Yarra Ranges Shire has improved the quality, consistency and security of its published communications by standardising on pdfFactory Pro* from Avalanche Technology Group for all external documents.  At a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat, pdfFactory Pro is fully compatible with all other readers and operates flawlessly within the Council’s Citrix thin client environment.

The Shire of Yarra Ranges on Melbourne’s eastern fringe takes in the breathtaking beauty of the Dandenong Ranges and Yarra Valley. Only 50 minutes from central Melbourne, the Shire has a population of 145,000 residents and attracts well over 3 million visitors annually to its food, wine and other natural attractions Covering an area of 2500 square kilometres, the largest area of any Victorian metropolitan council, the Shire features a rich mosaic of urban and rural areas incorporating 55 suburbs, townships and small communities, making it one of the most diverse municipalities in the state. The Shire is sustained by a thriving local economy underpinned by food and wine, industry, tourism, healthy waterways, native bushland, magnificent forests and a rich social fabric and strong environmental values.

Given the geographical spread of the Council, it takes advantage of the Internet to keep constituents informed about the extensive range of services available which includes utilising PDF documents as appropriate.

Cost-Effective Quality and Performance
The Council wanted to introduce a consistent document standard across the enterprise back in 2004, but couldn’t justify the cost of Acrobat for its 600 staff.  Yarra Ranges Shire’s IT Manager, Craig Whalley, said they had a limited number of Adobe Acrobat licences for producing Minutes and other formal documents, and certainly recognised the benefits PDFs offered in terms of quality, consistency and ease of use, but cost was a major constraint.
“We heard about pdfFactory, which was much more affordable, and asked to trial it since the Citrix thin client environment can represent a technical challenge for some applications, particularly printer related issues.  To our satisfaction, pdfFactory deployed without any problems and has continued to deliver outstanding functionality and performance ever since,” he said. 

Yarra Ranges initially piloted the solution in late 2004, rolling it out across the organisation early the following year.  “We purchased an Enterprise Licence so all of our staff have access and today it is the standard publishing format for all documents that are seen outside the Council.”

In the Council’s thin client environment, pdfFactory offers enormous efficiency gains by keeping document file sizes very small and thus reducing the drain on network bandwidth.  There are approximately 80 remote sites ranging from maternity and child health centres to arts centres, museums and community centres that all have a thin client connection back to the Council so PDFs are used extensively for document exchange.

Ease of Use Aids Adoption
Mr Whalley said another benefit has been the extreme ease of use, since Council employees simply select pdfFactory as their printer and print their document to create and save a PDF file.

“At the time of deployment, we just sent out an all-staff email explaining that they could now produce PDF documents and spelling out the process to follow.  It was really simple and even back then there were virtually no issues reported to the Help Desk.”

pdfFactory Pro even solved a technical challenge when the Council upgraded one of its billing systems and found that the new version no longer allowed it to save reports as Word documents.

“This affected our reporting until we realised we could use pdfFactory to create the printed report from the billing software as a PDF file for easy distribution around the organisation and solved that problem immediately.  Now pdfFactory is the standard for creating quality reports and documents from any application. 

“We’ve upgraded the software twice and continue to be impressed with its consistency and reliability.  Considering the low initial purchase price and annual maintenance, pdfFactory is an absolute bargain that continues to perform extremely well in our environment. We have every intention to continue using it well into the future,” he concluded.

* pdfFactory and pdfFactory Pro are developed by Fineprint Software LLC.  Avalanche Technology Group is the Australian and New Zealand distributor of pdfFactory.

For information about pdfFactory, please contact Avalanche Technology Group on 1300 855 005 or www.avalanche.com.au.