|
|
 |
 OfficeWriter Home > Customers Home > officewriter-346.aspx |
 |
OfficeWriter Improves Client and
Developer Productivity by Providing Real Excel Reporting
Critical to Residential Survey Management System
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 |
Client
Requirements:
Internet Explorer v6, Firefox, Safari
Excel/Word 2000-2003 |
Database:
Access/SQL Server 2000 |
|
|
"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."
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. |
| |
|
 |
System Requirements:
Server
System: Windows 2000
Database: Access/SQL Server 2000
Client Requirements:
Internet Explorer v6, Firefox, Safari
Excel/Word 2000-2003
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
 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.
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| 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.
|
|
| |
| |
|
| 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."
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. |
|
|
|
|