Overview
Customer Profile
The Linc Group is one of the nation’s most successful single-source providers of high-value facilities management and building systems services. The company offers premier on-site facility operations and management services, mission-critical government support, mobile HVAC preventative maintenance service programs, lighting and electrical services, and bundled energy solutions and related renovation and retrofit projects.
Business Situation
Linc’s geographically dispersed sales force was challenged by generating inconsistent proposals and contracts that led to lengthy legal reviews, reinvention of existing product and service descriptions, and reduced productivity. Without quick access to pre-approved product descriptions and services, the sales team had to research and assemble proposals by searching file shares, e-mails, public Web sites, and internal information portals.
Solution
Neudesic designed Document Canvas, which is a custom solutionbuilt on top of Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite that uses SharePoint Online to host an online library of approved, versioned content fragments. The geographically distributed sales team can work in Microsoft Word and access these online pieces of content to quickly stitch together complete, pre-approved corporate documents.
Benefits
- Reduced legal fees
- Time savings
- Standardized documentation
- Business agility
-Greg Lush, CIO, The Linc Group
The Linc Group is a highly-distributed organization that relies on its geographically dispersed sales force to drive business. Field sales personnel tasked with proposing a salecontaining15 different pieces of equipment were faced with the challenge of producing a concise, professional propsal that contained in-depth product details andarticulatedthe company’s value proposition. Without quick access to pre-approved product descriptions and services, each sales person was forced to research and assemble proposals by searching files shares, e-mails, public Web sites, and internal information portals.The inconsistent documentation led to lengthy legal reviews, reinvention of existing product and service descriptions,and reducedemployee productivity.Authentication and authorization issues also limited Linc’s ability to meet the requirements of their regional sales organizations.
Neudesic designed a custom solutionfor the Linc Group called Document Canvas, which leverages Microsoft®Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite Standard services, including Microsoft SharePoint® Online, Microsoft Exchange Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Document Canvas allows users to work in Microsoft Office Word and access a SharePoint Online library of preapproved document fragments to quickly create standardized contracts and proposals,and then submit them for legal review.
Document Canvas’ document library can be easily modified to reflect the current customer and services being offered. In addition, because the Business Productivity Online Suitemanages the solution’s security, Linc gained the benefits of their custom solution without having to invest in hardware assets, setup, or maintenance.
Solution
Neudesic’s Document Canvas leverages a series of Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite Standard services including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Live Meeting.
Document Canvas uses online services in conjunction with Microsoft Office Word for proposal management, assembly, and approval. Sales team members are able to access preapproved document fragments that are stored online directly within Microsoft Word. Users can also connect to SharePoint Online to quickly review their current proposals and their relative approval status.
As new proposals are added to the system, an automated workflow notifies the legal team that a document is available for review.
Document Composer
Many times employees will spend countless hours preparing the perfect proposal. In a traditional environment, the creating of a new proposal typically begins with copying an older proposal and attempting to make appropriate changes.
However, this methodology can be a risk for the company: the length and complexity of proposals and contracts make is easy to miss changing every entry. The potential of sending Customer A content to Customer B should be of significant concern.
A key feature of Document Canvas is the Document Composer. Document Composer is a Microsoft Office Word add-in that communicates with Business Productivity Online Suiteusing Web services to allow the user to quickly search, preview, and insert preapproved document fragments of corporate approved Terms and Conditions, Product and Service Offerings, and Reimbursement terms.
When working with Document Composer, users start with a template version of the proposal and can be assured that the document fragments they add from their SharePoint Online Document Library are standardized and have been approved for use by the legal team. Document Composer ensures starting drafts with a clean slate; there is no risk of providing one customer’s information to the wrong client.
Solution Development and Implementation
The implementation of Document Canvas used a traditional Agile software development process that included a series of iterative releases.
Development began with envisioning how the solution would function within the context of a distributed user community, including identifying the scenarios in which Document Canvas would be used. Once the basic requirements were identified, the technical implementation was executed using a suite of technologies that included the Microsoft Visual Studio® Tools for Office, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Office Word.
Developing the Solution
As illustrated in the flow chart on this page, the development effort to build the contract approval workflow was divided into the following main tasks.
Step 1: Solution Envisioning
Requirements were gathered to determine the exact functionality that would meet the business objectives. One significant consideration was the operational environment: the solution had to leverage SharePoint Online Web services, and it could not include any custom server-based code.
Step 2: Configure SharePoint Online
Once requirements were defined, they were categorized as either a server requirement or a client requirement. The server requirements included:
- Ability to create and maintain fragments of preapproved content
- Ability to search from a library of proposals and contracts
- Ability to initiate the creation of a new proposal or contract
Based on these requirements, a series of content types and lists were created to store the fragments and proposals on a SharePoint Online site collection called Sales Portal.
Step3: Develop the Word Add-in
The most significant process was to develop the Document Canvas Microsoft Word add-in. Requirements included:
- Ability to insert fragments stored on SharePoint Online
- Ability to search for fragments stored on SharePoint Online
Additionally, the solution could not result in extended start-up times for Microsoft Word. The architecture chosen was a multithreaded Word add-in that leverages asynchronous communication with the SharePoint Online Web services.
The following illustrationshows the solution architecture:
Step 4: Provide Add-in Installer
Because Document Canvas requires the deployment of a custom Microsoft Word add-in,users can download the add-in installer from the site and run it locally on their computers to configure their copy of Microsoft Word to access the document fragment library.
Benefits
Customer Benefits
- Enforces document consistency
- Enhances productivity
- Reduces cost and effort of legal review
- Changes can easily be pushed to the sales force
- Controlled data (terms and conditions, declarative statements)
- Specific product details
Partner Benefits
- Provides new revenue stream by offering the service to other Business Productivity Online Suite clients
- Ability to brand for either internal or external customers
- Quick deployment of extranet environment
Introducing the Business Productivity Online Suite
Microsoft Online Services provide software delivered as a hosted service directly from Microsoft data centers, managed by Microsoft staff, and with a guaranteed 99.9 percent Service Level Agreement. These standardized solutions are designed so that partners can rapidly deploy services to their customers at a low, up-front investment with predictable, recurring costs.
The all-new Business Productivity Online Suite provides streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security. The customer can order this service for as little as five seats at a time.
The Business Productivity Online Suite includes the following services, which can be purchased on a monthly subscription basis either separately or as part of a suite:
Microsoft Exchange Online, based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, offers businesses e-mail, calendaring, other messaging-based capabilities, and archiving. It also enables coexistence, which means new online users can interact with users on local servers.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides a single integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search, and manage content and workflow.
Microsoft Office Communications Online enables people to communicate easily with their colleagues across locations and time zones via instant messaging (text), voice, and video.
Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a hosted Web conferencing service that connects people in online meetings, training, and events through a reliable, enterprise-class hosted service.
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering protects businesses’ inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations.
About the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite
The Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite provides businesses with virtually anywhere access to rich communication, collaboration, and productivity applications via subscription-based, Microsoft-hosted, online services. This hosted solution helps organizations offset the burden of managing and maintaining business systems, freeing information technology (IT) resources to focus on initiatives that can deliver competitive advantage to the business. The solution is part of the Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services delivery model to provide customers more choices than traditional, hosted or on-premises solutions, allowing them to make deployment decisions that best fit the needs of their organization.
For more information about the partner opportunities provided by Business Productivity Online Suite, see