Date of Review: December 13, 2006

Author: Patrick C. Rouse

Product Homepage:  Docudesk deskPDF Professional TS PDF Writer

Introduction:

Docudesk is a Texas-based corporation founded in 2001.  Their products include their deskPDF line of PDF Creators, as well as deskFONT, a line of Professional fonts designed for PDF creation.

deskPDF Professional TS, as its' name implies, is a Professional PDF creator for Windows Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server, and works on both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

Test Environment:

Pricing and Licensing: 

deskPDF Professional TS is very reasonably priced for an enterprise class software package.  When compared against the Adobe Acrobat line of PDF products, deskPDF Professional TS is about one tenth the cost of Acrobat Standard, and one twentieth the cost of Acrobat Professional. 

deskPDF Professional TS is licensed per-named user, starting in quantities of twenty, and increasing up to quantities of one thousand.  Like any other product purchased in volume, the cost per unit decreases dramatically the more units one purchases.

One needs only to purchase enough licenses for those who can use deskPDF. 

It makes no difference whether or not one has one terminal server, or ten terminal servers, the product is licensed the same.  If an environment has five terminal servers and needs to scale out to a few more nodes to support more users, or a new application, no extra licenses need to be purchased, so long as the users with access to the deskPDF printer do not change.  There is currently no licensing service to track usage.

Installation: 

Installation of deskPDF Professional TS is simple and straight forward.  The installer is MSI based, so it can be altered with standard packaging utilities, or the included deskPDF Configuration Tool (DCT).

The deskPDF Configuration Tool is a simple GUI program to create a transform (MST) to alter the default installation options.  The deskPDF Configuration Tool is included in the provided Admin and Deployment Kit.

The standard setup is wizard driven, and simple to navigate.  Aside from selecting the installation path, the only noteworthy options are whether or not one wants to add a desktop icon for all users, add deskPDF functionality to the Windows Explorer right-click menu, or to add the deskPDF toolbar to Microsoft Office. 

In this evaluation I found it easiest to install deskPDF after installing Microsoft Office, so the Office toolbar would be automatically added.  Whether or not one would use the desktop icon for drag and drop PDF conversion, or extend the right-click menu with deskPDF functionality would depend on whether clients were using a Published Explorer Desktop, or individual published applications.

After the installation of deskPDF Professional TS is installed, one is prompted to install the GPL Ghostscript converter.  If it's not already installed on the computer, this is a recommended step.

Configuration: 

One problem administrators have with Adobe Acrobat is figuring out how to easily associate PDF files with Acrobat for users licensed to use Acrobat, and associating PDF files with Acrobat Reader for the rest of the user population.  This isn't a problem with deskPDF, as it's only used to convert/print PDF files, not to view them.

For any product licensed to named users, it's important to have a simple way to define who these users are.  Restricting access to deskPDF can easily be done by assigning local or domain security groups to the Access Control List on the printer in the Printers Control Panel.  In this evaluation I created a Domain Global Security Group called "deskPDF" and populated the group with the individual users that are licensed to use deskPDF Professional PDF.  I then removed the local "Users" and "Power Users" from the printer's ACL and added the "deskPDF" group with Print permissions.  This is very manageable, as one can now control who can use deskPDF by modifying the members of this Active Directory Group,

A very pleasant part of the deskPDF Professional TS product is the supplied Administrative Template (deskPDF.adm) that can be added to Group Policy to control the options available to the end-users.  One of the most common features that one would want to set or enforce is the "Default Save Path".  This is included so a shared folder can be defined for a group of users, or something simple like the user's network home folder.

The amount of settings that can be defined via policy is quite extensive.  Being able to lock down what the password and encryption settings are, enterprise wide, or by department is something that is very valuable to businesses need to be compliant with HIPAA or SOX.

The following are the available settings that can be configured via policy, and are excerpts from the deskPDF Enterprise Deployment and Configuration Guide.

Features and Usability:

deskPDF Professional TS is not just a PDF Writer that happens to work on Terminal Server, but rather has functionality that is specifically "TS Friendly". 

Where some products track only the name of the users, IP Address or MAC Address, deskPDF Professional TS tracks the unique Terminal Server Session ID of the client when creating each PDF.  This is particularly important on a multi-user system that could have two different people logged on with the user name.  Without this feature, one could easily send a PDF to the wrong end user's environment.

Single-click PDF Creation is available via the available "Convert with deskPDF" Windows Explorer right-click option that can be enabled in the setup.  This allows for PDF Creation without having to open the document to print to PDF, and also allows for multi-file select PDF Creation.

After a file is converted, a standard save file dialog is displayed allowing the end user to:

Checking the "Display Advanced Options" box, exposes the functions not found in lesser products, i.e.

The "Application" tab includes some nice usability features that control whether the end user want to:

Once all of the desired settings are in place, one can save these for future use with the "Profiles" setting.  This makes it very simple to reuse the same settings each time a document of the same type is printed to PDF.

Microsoft Office Integration - as mentioned in the setup, deskPDF offers a Microsoft Office Toolbar Macro to allow for single click PDF creation, instead of doing File -> Print -> Select "deskPDF".

Converting a document to PDF with deskPDF does more than just print to PDF.  deskPDF automatically creates a Table of Contents and asks if one wants to add links to any hyperlinks found to the bookmarks pane.

Performance:

Performance is always a consideration on a multi-user system like Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, as resource hungry applications are often not noticed on a single-user system.

The deskapp.exe process is a lightweight application that is launched in the context of the end user and uses about 5MB of memory.  After the document conversion is completed, which took about 30 seconds for my 16 page Word Document, gswin32.exe - the GPL GhostScript Writer launched and created the resulting PDF almost too fast for me to notice. 

deskPDF installs no Windows Service or Daemon so the product has no overhead when not in use.

In addition to the resources required to create PDF files, one must also look at what's required to view them.  I opened the same PDF created with deskPDF in both Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Professional and found that Acrobat Professional used twice as much memory as Acrobat Reader.  I mention this because if one were considering deployment of Acrobat Professional, the resource requirements would be significantly more than if using deskPDF to create PDF files, and Acrobat Reader (or other PDF viewers) to view PDF files. 

I printed the same 16 page, 172KB Word Document using deskPDF Professional TS and Acrobat Professional to see how the resulting PDF file size would differ, and how the output quality differed.   Below are my results detailing the settings used and the resulting file size:

In this comparison deskPDF and Acrobat converted the Word Document to PDF files of virtually the same size.

Quality:

When looking at the output quality of the PDF files I created with deskPDF Professional TS and Acrobat Professional, I found that the "Printing" quality setting in deskPDF created a file of equal quality to the default settings in Acrobat.  The image below is a screenshot of the same area of the document I converted to PDF using both products. I zoomed to 400% so one can see any differences in the output quality, which I could not.

Conclusion: 

I was thrilled with the ease of install, configuration and use of deskPDF Professional TS.  The product appears mature, with many features requested by end users.  Use of the included Group Policy Admin Template makes it easy to configure the product in any size environment, and to lock down those settings that need to be enforced enterprise wide, i.e. Security and Encryption Settings. 

I had no problems using the product as a non-privileged user, and had only one problem during configuration.  I could not add the provided deskPDF.adm file to a 2003 SP1 GPO, as I got an error message on each of 3 servers I tested (the problem did not occur on 2000 or 2003 w/o SP1).  One email to docuDesk's support resulted in the receipt of an updated file that resolved the problem.

I found docuDesk Professional TS to create PDF files of equal quality to those created with Acrobat Professional, while using significantly less system resources, allowing for better scalability and end user user experience.

deskPDF Professional TS offers advanced PDF creation capabilities, enterprise scalability and centralized management for a fraction of the cost of Acrobat Professional.

More Information:

www.docudesk.com