OfficeWriter Improves Client and Developer Productivity by Providing Real Excel Reporting

Critical to Residential Survey Management System Customer Profile

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Residential Land Services (RLS) is the only national coordinator of residential land surveys in the country. While not involved in the actual practice of land surveying, RLS bridges the gap between their clients' requirements and the surveyors' responsibilities. A company that stresses the use of technology, RLS continually looks to automate their processes as the surveying profession becomes more technical and survey requirements become more demanding.

Situation

In 2004, RLS began looking to develop a system to coordinate the process of ordering, receiving, and delivering residential surveys for home buyers throughout the United States. The system would serve as both a project management and CRM database.

Named the Residential Survey Management System upon its completion, the solution utilizes a user-friendly Web form that is visited by staff, clients and vendors. With just one click, the application hits the database and generates an .xls file that reflects the selections made by the user in the browser.

Given that RLS depends on Excel features to generate and work with various reports, they were faced with a difficult challenge in creating these reports from a relational database.

Solution RLS attempted various homegrown solutions with XML and also evaluated several commercial solutions, before choosing OfficeWriter. RLS first tried to generate Excel files using the XML format provided by Excel (Excel XML), but unfortunately, it only preserves about 25 percent of the functions you get using real Excel with OfficeWriter. They also evaluated Crystal Reports, Excel Anywhere, Worksheet Server, and other competing products. According to Sargent Hatch, manager for Software Development for RLS, OfficeWriter "is the most powerful and efficient solution for our needs."

System Requirements Server System: Windows 2000 Database: Access/SQL Server 2000 Client Requirements: Internet Explorer v6, Firefox, Safari Excel/Word 2000-2003

"We could not find a better way to generate native Excel and Word documents with any solution other than OfficeWriter," said Hatch. "We love it. Our Client Managers live and die by it. It is critical to our operation running effectively. The ability to easily create Excel templates and populate them with information from the database server was the deciding factor in our decision to purchase an OfficeWriter for Excel license."

"SoftArtisans OfficeWriter has helped our company solve the most difficult of reporting issues. After working extensively with Crystal Reports and other such products, we have determined that OfficeWriter contributes to a very productive development environment with regard to document and report generation." Sargent Hatch Manager – Internal Software Development Residential Land Services, Inc.

OfficeWriter serves as the primary rendering engine for RLS’s reporting and document needs. At approximately 500 reports per day, the software plays a critical role in providing up-to-date information from their database to all parties. One Excel application, in particular, is accessed approximately 200 times a day, rendering spreadsheets that contain as many as 3,000 rows. It takes less than 10 seconds to render these huge reports. Another application that utilizes Word takes just 1.5 seconds to produce a complex document, which contains 42 fields.

In total, approximately 1,500 end-users receive the benefits provided by OfficeWriter.

Benefits

Easy for End Users

With OfficeWriter, RLS can generate anything from contracts to performance reports using only ASP/ASP.NET. By using existing templates with OfficeWriter, their users never lose valuable time designing new Excel or Word documents for each report.

When the idea of using Crystal Reports was initially presented to users of the Residential Survey Management System there was a negative reaction. They asked "Why are we using this? Why can’t we keep using the Excel formats that we already know how to use?"

Version Tracking

One of the prime impacts of OfficeWriter is that RLS can now precisely track the generation of every document used in their Project Management workflow. The ability to implement version tracking via the database would have been nearly impossible without the robustness of OfficeWriter.

Document Protection

A major benefit of OfficeWriter is that RLS can tightly protect and control the creation and modification of standard documents, such as contracts and reports, used by their staff.

Improved Staff and Developer Productivity

OfficeWriter has improved staff productivity since they do not have to create spreadsheets to track data, which is a common practice at companies of all sizes.

OfficeWriter has increased developer productivity because they do not have to generate Excel or Word files from scratch. According to Hatch, the template model provided by OfficeWriter is second to none – and that "includes the developer tools provided by Microsoft."

Hatch also praised the OfficeWriter API, describing it as the "easiest thing we have ever worked with." "It builds on our previous experience of using Word and Excel in applications," explained Hatch. "We’re able to leverage the investments we made in Microsoft Office all of these years. Plus, our Client Managers can now design their documents in Excel and Word and then hand them to developers, saving incredible amount of development time. It takes the design piece out of the developer’s hands."

"SoftArtisans OfficeWriter is so robust and easy to use that our development team can generate new reports for managers within minutes. I would recommend this product to any developer wanting to provide a true solution to Web-based document and report generation." Sargent Hatch Manager – Internal Software Development Residential Land Services, Inc.

Without OfficeWriter, RLS would have been forced to hire additional developers. They are now able to stay within their annual development budget of $150,000.

"SoftArtisans continues to be the most developer friendly software vendors I have ever dealt with," said Hatch. "The quality of the product and the support that comes with it is far beyond competing solutions. SoftArtisans proves time and time again to truly understand the needs of rapid application developers."

In their next generation application, RLS will be generating contracts in Microsoft Word format directly from the database. It’s currently impossible to write Word files out of HTML and/or XML, but RLS will soon be using OfficeWriter to overcome that deficiency.