Service Software Uses Aspose.Words Enabling Users to Create Custom Word Files for Communication

About Service Software

Service Software, creators of Punchlist Manager.NET™, Restoration Manager.NET, and Inspection Manager.NET, have been automating work order management, service, and inspections for:

• Fire & Water Restoration
• Inspection Services
• Fire & Safety Inspection Companies
• Home Builders
• General Construction
• Trade Contractors

Service Software has been providing services since 1993 and now serves more than 10,000 users and 1,500 companies worldwide.

Customer Focus

Our mission is to make your customer service organization responsive and consistent to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction from the buyer and ensure repeat business and strong referrals.

Background

Based in Denver, Colorado and Founded in 1993 - Service Software, LLC was created to meet the needs of the construction community. Inspired by design recommendations from the user community over the last 15 years, the product has evolved into a flexible and adaptable tool that combines field collection devices such as Laptops, Tablets and PDA devices with web and desktop-based solutions.

Requirements Scenario

Service Software’s customers require a great deal of interaction and communication in order to keep owners, job loss owners and contractors apprised of the status of their jobs. Communication with forms and documents has to be embedded within the overall management system for the staff to be able to quickly and easily generate and send communications to customers and also for them to be able to view communications that have been sent to customers.

In the past this involved manually exporting data from the membership system into Microsoft Excel, manipulating the data in Microsoft Excel and finally generating the letter via a mail merge in Microsoft Word. By the time the communication has been sent it’s taken a lot of user time, it’s potentially out of date and worse still, there’s no record of the communication in the membership management system.

We evaluated several products and selected Aspose.Words because of the speed of Implementation, functionality (Word and PDF output) and ease of use.

Solution

We used Aspose.Words to speed the implementation of a web-based mail merge component to our .NET solutions. We used it in the following ways:

• Generate document templates enabling users to create custom word documents for communication on “Repair Authorizations” and included such data as title, first name, last name, full name, address, Zip code, telephone number, email address, date of loss, adjustor, referral, an insurance company, deductible and other user text (specific text added at time message is generated and sent).
• Record the communication that has been sent and the date and time it was created in our correspondence log.
• Send bulk letters or emails to selected contacts (prospects, owners, vendors) within the .NET system.

Benefits

We found the implementation to be simple and easy with the examples provided for integrating it into our application very straightforward. The speed of implementation was a great benefit and improved our delivery time. The benefits of using Aspose.Words for .NET include:

• It provides a simple, streamlined process that is easy for customers to use to quickly send emails or word or PDF merged documents.
• Increased speed of development
• Better document model for interacting with Microsoft Word documents
• Better mail merge interface
• Reliance on Microsoft Word for interacting or printing documents is removed, it’s only required for creating templates, so reduces licensing costs for customers
• Easier debugging and troubleshooting

Future Implementations

Aspose.Words for .NET will continue to be used in the development of our .NET applications. We plan to support additional communication requirements (particularly email) in the next release, the automated scheduling of communications according to individual user’s requirements.

As we get ready for implementation of Framework 4.0 we will evaluate all of the Aspose products as we found the experience using Aspose.Words to be very cost-effective.

Conclusion

This was a great experience, having used many tools and add-ins over the years, our team was impressed with the speed, help files, and examples for implementing this product. We are evaluating Aspose.Barcode for .NET and Aspose.Tasks for .NET because of our experience.

Dan Long
Marketing Manager
Service Software, LLC