Consulting Firm Reduces Operational Overhead, Replaces Four Individual Products with a Single Solution

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Company Background

Our client helps organizations confront critical legal, financial, and reputational issues. They offer specialized expertise in five separate areas that operate as a coordinated whole, including corporate finance, economic consulting, forensic and litigation consulting, strategic
communications, and technology. The company also provides investigative services to companies confronted with problems such as fraud in order to assist them in legal defense or pursuit of recoveries.

Challenges and Requirements

Our client was looking for a way to reduce operational overhead and standardize current decompression processes with a single solution. They sought an application that could be
embedded within an existing technology used by the organization.

The company did not have a standardized method of processing the multitude of file types they handle daily—totaling 14 different types. Using four separate products (Polarzip, Winrar, Omnizip, and Dynazip) to achieve a single task was proving to be time consuming and cumbersome. The company wanted to streamline their application and reduce overhead by finding a single solution to handle all of their file types, making their processing easier and more efficient.

The company also had other requirements that needed to be met by the chosen product, including the ability to:

• Extract files from Zip, Rar, Tar, Gz, and Jar archives while preserving the original file paths
• Correctly identify a corrupt archive file
• Correctly identify an empty archive file
• Correctly identify a password-protected archive file
• Communicate when it can partially extract an archive because it has encountered archive corruption during extraction or long path exceptions while preserving folder structure
• Extract an archive that contains Unicode in the folder path or file name
• Preserve the last modified date after extraction if the archive preserved the last modified date of the compressed files

The company also had a list of additional benefits they felt would enhance the usability of the product, especially for future projects. These benefits included the ability to:

• Extract files from Lzh and Lza archives while preserving original file paths
• Communicate when it can partially extract an archive because it is out of storage space or part of a spanned volume
• Run extraction for multiple archives in parallel
• Return a list of extracted files and their paths
• Preserve the creation date after extraction if the archive preserved the creation date of the compressed files

Competitive Landscape

In addition to PKZIP, the company also investigated 7-Zip as a possible solution. 7-Zip was not able to process all of the possible types of compressed files that our client receives and fell short on meeting the other requirements as well.

As an open source community, 7-Zip does not provide customer support. Since accessing data is critical to business, the need for technical/customer support was an obvious benefit to implementing PKZIP. Once again, PKZIP came out on top as a result of the customer service and technical support provided by PKWARE.

The Solution - PKZIP Standard Toolkit

Our client found that they could replace all four of their current products by implementing the PKZIP Standard Toolkit within their application. This solved their immediate need to find a single solution to replace the four currently in use. In addition, PKZIP met the technical requirements outlined at the onset of the project.

The flexibility of the PKZIP solution to fit into the company’s current and future technical requirements was another primary reason the product was selected. Not only would PKZIP meet the “must-have” requirements, it met all of the “nice to have” requirements for future projects.