Kenna File Format Conversion Improvement

The Kenna Group is a Toronto based corporation specializing in the delivery of sales and marketing solutions. Kenna provides services from the analysis and storage of client data to the creation of client websites. Kenna’s technology group provides programming and technology based services to in-house requests and its clients. Kenna sends out daily newsletters to subscribers. They receive the content of the newsletters as a Microsoft Publisher file.The information must be converted into HTML before sending out to subscribers. Kenna’s current solution for conversion involves copying and pasting text and tables manually from the Publisher file to the HTML editor. However, as there is incompatibility between Publisher and HTML, Kenna personnel must use a word processor to format the text before pasting into the HTML editor. This process is inconvenient, and Kenna wishes to find a more efficient conversion method.

Matt Books, a first year electrical and computer engineering co-op student from the University of Waterloo, was asked by Kenna’s technology group to investigate methods to improve the file conversion process for the daily newsletter, with the ultimate goal of developing an application that can perform the conversion automatically.

Conversion process outline