About Ipsos
Ipsos is a global market research company that sets high standards for its own research and conduct. They help their clients gain insight and intelligence from the research they do. The company’s slogan, ‘Nobody’s unpredictable’, is supported by an approach that helps Ipsos’ clients understand their customers and markets in a changing world.
Ipsos has five core specialties - advertising research, marketing research, media research, opinion, and social research – and adds data collection and delivery as a sixth specialism. As part of their activities, they collect and process data from thousands of surveys.
Overhauling Existing Systems
Michael Sevast, now Vice President, Ipsos Information Technology, joined Ipsos in 2006. The company had a toolset that worked but it was made up of many different tools and needed to be overhauled a standardized. After some research, the team found Aspose.
The first tool the team looked at was Aspose.Cells for .NET. Even before downloading and installing Aspose.Cells for .NET, the team knew that it could do much of what they needed to achieve. The clear and detailed documentation showed how important it was to the Aspose team that the tools were easy to use. Like Aspose, Ipsos has dispersed teams and one-to-one training opportunities are limited. Standardized documentation and easy to use tools are particularly important when team members are individually responsible for picking up and using the tools at their disposal.
The performance was also important to Ipsos in the search for a new solution. Ipsos tested a number of different components and Aspose.Cells for .NET performed the best. When you work with a huge number of records, performance is paramount.
A Good Licensing Model
It wasn’t just functionality and performance that convinced Ispos that Aspose’s tools were the solution they were looking for. The licensing model was also more cost-effective than other options. In 2007, Ipsos moved from a 10 developer license of Aspose.Cells for .NET to a 10 developer license of Aspose.Total. They have been using Aspose.Total for .NET in their applications ever since.
Operational Efficiency
Ipsos performs and analyses over 10,000 surveys per year. This means interacting with, collecting, and analyzing data from a very large number of participants. By using Aspose.Total for .NET for internal processes Ipsos has improved its operational efficiency.
Time Savings
The greatest time savings that Ipsos have made by using Aspose tools have been around address verification. Ipsos works with online and offline panels. The addresses of each member of an offline panel need to be verified. That means verifying the addresses of tens even hundreds of thousands of people every year. With Aspose.Cells for .NET, the panel teams can automate this process: they read the panel data from spreadsheets, verify it, and can then save it out to another file. The offline panel teams use this process to ensure the integrity of the address records. It saves them considerable time.
Sharing Targeted Training Plans
Ipsos work is advanced. It takes training and insight. Ipsos provides on the job training in the form of learning plans that include a list of tasks. A short learning plan may contain fifty tasks; a long plan can contain hundreds of different tasks.
After a teacher at Ipsos updates or adds new material to the curriculum, their students must be informed of the changes as quickly as possible. Students should not reach the end of their training only to find that there’s a new plan, with tasks they’ve missed. The solution is to create training plans on the fly.
Using Aspose.Cells for .NET, Aspose.Words for .NET and Aspose.PDF for .NET together, Ipsos implemented a system that makes it easy for teachers to update training plans and send them directly to their students. Because the plans are formatted as Word documents and saved as PDFs, they look professional and are easy to read and use. Despite the seeming complication of using several tools together, the implementation was easy. The clean API, useful examples and thorough documentation meant that the developers at Ipsos learned how to work with the tools quickly, and how to extend them for their own use.
Customizable PowerPoint Decks
Ipsos had a large number of slide decks that they wanted their staff to be able to customize the content while keeping a consistent look and feel of the slides. Aspose.Slides for .NET helped them do this. Staff can now pick and choose which slides they use and make customized and professional-looking presentations.
Summary
After using Aspose.Cells for .NET to work with large data sets, Ipsos upgraded to Aspose.Total for .NET to get access to the other tools in the Aspose toolbox. We use Aspose products in our internal software to get:
- An integrated, stable and coherent system
- Performance when dealing with large datasets.
- Time savings on administrative tasks through automation.
- Flexible and fast updates when documents change.
- Presentations that look right and contain only the information a presenter needs.