DATEV eG

DATEV is the software company and IT service provider for tax consultants, auditors and lawyers, including their clients. The range of services predominantly covers the areas of accounting, business consulting, taxation, enterprise resource planning (ERP), as well as organisationand planning.

DATEV, founded in 1966, ranks not only in Germany among the largest IT service providers and software companies with its approx. 39,000 members, 5,400 employees and a turnover of 585 million Euros in 2006.

DATEV has its headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, with 26 Information Centres in Germany, one Information Office in Brussels, Belgium, and associated companies in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy and Spain.

The programs are developed according to the specific legal grounds of the individual countries, or, were adapted to the national standards.

Consulting services, seminars and specialised literature complement the software offer.

For the further Europeanization, DATEV offers solutions for auditors. This professional group is active at an international level, and makes international standards available. Therefore, the DATEV software for auditing is offered via sales partners in Hungary and Slovakia. In this field, the IT service provider focuses its attention to demands from additional countries.

SkyPDF Pro and Basissoftware

One of our aims is, to increase efficiency in the software development process and to standardize functionality in our applications. Therefore we have a department called "Basissoftware" which exclusively deals with common software solutions for areas like installation, licence management, data management and printing. These standardized solutions are used in all our applications.

In my department I have a team which is responsible for the common software solutions in the field of printing and all related topics. All people working there have experience for years. According to this, as PDF generation arrived as a new topic, it was of course located in this team.

We started to look at different solutions in the market and in the end we chose SkyPDF Pro out of many reasons. The most important ones for us were

• PDF generation is quicker than with many other products in the market because SkyPDF Pro does not create an intermediate postscript file.
• The PDF files created with SkyPDF Pro are relatively small.
• SkyCom provided a SDK for SkyPDF Pro with an easy to use interface and a complete documentation in English.

We licensed SkyPDF Pro in 2004 and shipped it to all our customers. So far, SkyPDF Pro runs on round about 350.000 systems with a variety of system configurations:

• Single user systems, Notebooks, Servers, Citrix Metaframe Serverfarms
• Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Basic and Premium (32 and 64Bit), Windows Vista Business / Enterprise and Ultimate (32 and 64Bit)
• Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2 (32 and 64Bit)

In the following we will outline the benefits for our customer and for us as a software provider, using SkyPDF Pro.

Our customers, as already mentioned above, are tax consultants, lawyers and auditors. All these professional groups generate a lot of document output necessary for their customers and the authorities. Also these documents have to be archived for many years. Naturally, the future lies in electronic document organisation. This means not only being able to handle and store documents electronically in their own offices, but also, to exchange them with their customers quickly and secure. In these schenarios it is hard to imagine life without the PDF format and SkyPDF Pro with its fast and reliable PDF generation.

Following the needs of our customers, we wanted to implement a very complete and integrated solution and with SkyPDF Pro we were able to do this.

The most general way to generate PDF files in applications is using a PDF driver when you print the document. Afterwards you have to handle the PDF file manually.

We decided to implement a more comfortable solution for our users. Basically we provide the PDF generation via an export function in our DATEV software. The user can set parameters for the present export or define first profiles in advance, which contain among other things the resolution, a password for security, a watermark, and the location where the PDF file has to be stored. It is also possible to integrate different PDF files. This solution was possible using the SDK of SkyPDF Pro. In the future we will surely use the planned enhancements of SkyPDF Pro, like PDF/A for storing documents in archives.

Beside the integrated solution we provide in our DATEV software, our customers can use SkyPDF Pro as a “normal” printer driver in other than DATEV software, like e.g. Microsoft Office products.

In the long run we have to provide additional functionality in this area than creating PDF files. E.g. we want to give our customer the possibility to search in PDF files very comfortable or display PDF files within our software in a more integrated way. Out of this reason we licensed SkyPDF Tools SDK recently.

In total we consider SkyPDF Pro and the available SDK as an excellent solution for us and appreciate the cooperation with SkyCom. The company is very customer oriented. We always get support in time when we need it from the qualified and friendly staff working in the support area and we can discuss ideas and further developments with the experienced developers at SkyCom.

Also our customers are very satisfied with our solution and SkyPDF Pro because it works fast and stable and therefore it makes their daily work easier and more efficient.

Gisela Maul
Head of development Basissoftware
DATEV eG

Our success is based on the success of our customers and partners. We are proud of the benefit achieved by customers who deploy innovative solutions based on SKYCOM technology.

If you are interested in our products,and have any questions,you can reach us at: skypdf_sales@skycom.jp