Well, from time to time we are getting questions from our customers and not yet customer what do we plan with ReplaceMagic, how development will go and do we have some roadmaps.
In general, most important for us is to support as soon as new Office version is published document types of that version.
Long term we plan to go away from Office automatisation. It works fine and it makes development easier. Document model is well supported and without too much effort we can support new Office version but ... like Microsoft is saying this is not best way to work with Office document thus long goal is to go away from it.
To make this story short - we are currently building new version of ReplaceMagic that will not need Office applications installed on computer where ReplaceMagic is running.
Second - performances - we think that ReplaceMagic works fast but not fast enough. We you compare time needed to make replacements manually and with ReplaceMagic we are comparing somebody on bycicle and somebody driving fast car :).
No matter to this acceleration this is area where we expects additional improvements and that will be done by multi-thread enablements.
Our initial tests with multi-threads (10 threads during our test) and without Office shown that new ReplaceMagic will run multiple times fast. With out test documents (~12.000 documents) we were able to open them and check for hyperlinks in less than 5 minutes.
Next big point will be document types extension. Currently ReplaceMagic supports replacements in Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Project, Visio documents and Windows shortcuts. In the future we will also support replacement of PDF documents, OneNote and maybe also emails (eml and Outlook files).
Almost forgot new version is big jump so we will also change ReplaceMagic design and currently it looks like this:
We cannot provide estimate when this will be finished as we are talking about completely rewritten application but we hope that this will happen during 2015.
Stay tuned...