10 Years of Muhimbi - A look at the past, present and future

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! I cannot believe that as of September 2018 we are celebrating Muhimbi’s 10th anniversary. As is usual with milestones like this, it is a good time to reflect on the past and have a look at what our team has achieved over this period.

When Muhimbi was founded in September of 2008, we didn’t have a clear plan about the kind of products we would focus on, other than SharePoint products. With the introduction of SharePoint 2007, the platform had really matured and we all agreed a healthy 3rd party market would develop in the next few years. Boy, were we right!

We initially focused on building a robust - Enterprise ready - PDF Converter for SharePoint, which was quickly adopted by the market as the de facto standard for doing any kind of PDF Conversion, Merging, Security, Watermarking and OCR in SharePoint.

Like Rome, the PDF Converter was not built in one day. During the next few years we worked closely with our customers to make the product truly Enterprise ready. Support for additional file formats, workflow engines such as Nintex Workflow and K2 were added as were the latest and greatest SharePoint, Office and Windows versions. I can count 25 public releases on our release history page, with a 26th coming out soon.

Muhimbi PDF Converter for SP2007-2019 - Via SharePoint UI, Nintex Workflow and even SharePoint Designer

As my mum used to say, you cannot walk on just one leg. Sound advice, so we decided to start development on a completely different product line. The first version of the Muhimbi SharePoint Audit Suite was released in 2009 with the initial focus being a friendly viewer around SharePoint’s built in auditing facility. As always, customers quickly demanded more, resulting in a comprehensive product that fills in the many gaps in SharePoint’s own auditing facilities. It even audited page views, very useful.

It soon became clear that - in order to provide our demanding customers with the service and feature set they required - maintaining 2 major product lines was perhaps a bit too ambitious. As a result the Audit product line was acquired by Idera for inclusion in their SharePoint range of products, which was subsequently acquired by Metalogix.

Muhimbi SharePoint Audit - Good old times

With the focus back on the Muhimbi PDF Converter, we innovated rapidly. Adding support for non-SharePoint based PDF server platforms (C#, Java, PHP, Ruby), additional file formats including InfoPath, MSG, AutoCAD, HTML, URLs, Images and many other file types.

Customers being customers, that wasn’t quite good enough :-). In 2014 it became clear that the world was moving to SharePoint Online and other online cloud-based platforms. We decided to invest heavily in this area - and I’d be liar if said it was easy - resulting in the first release of the PDF Converter for SharePoint Online in June of 2015.

Since that initial Online release, we haven’t exactly sat on our hands. The pace of innovation is high and - as I write this - we are about the push out the 13th Online release. Some of the highlights include full support for Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps, support for real time watermarks when files are downloaded, a full featured REST based API and the ability to convert and archive SharePoint Online URLs such as List Items.

List Item PDF Conversion in SharePoint Online - Brilliant for sharing and archiving

Whether you need to create meeting or board packs, automatically archive documents in PDF/A format for regulatory purposes, secure and track PDF files after downloading, or share files in PDF format for any other reason, we’ve got you covered. New versions of the PDF Converter for SharePoint on-premise, Online and non-SharePoint (API) versions are imminent, and a completely new PDF related product line is under development….. stay tuned.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the various teams in Muhimbi, our partners and our customers, we couldn’t have done it without you.