e-doc offers a simple yet powerful document management solution with VWG

"Choosing VWG reduced largely the time of development and gave us an easy way to create an interface similar to windows. Our developers almost forgot they were developing a web application."

Overview
e-grou’s provides software solutions to aid organizations in optimizing day to day tasks. Its core business is software development and distribution, especially in the document management area. e-doc was developed in order to provide enterprises with an efficient document management software. The specifications and development of this software solution are the result of over than 10 years of experience in consulting to implement third party solutions in our customers.

Business needs
Daily activities pose a number of difficulties that often are at the origin of enumerable errors. Those supposedly simple activities eventually turn out to cost so much time and money to the organization. In the document management area, for example, searching for documents or repairing the problems caused by using the wrong version of a document is a major unnecessary time consumer.

e-grou looked to develop a solution that will solve that problem by answering the following problems:

• Do you know with ease when, where from/to, and which version of a document was received or forwarded?
• Do you have unified access over all incoming and outgoing mail regardless of being on paper, email or electronic file format?
• Can you route/dispatch electronically your mail and have a complete audit trail of the routing/dispatching workflow process?
• Can you organize the mail registers and the documents in smartfolders dynamically created and maintained?
• Can you identify if you are using the “right” version of a document?
• Can you locate and access with ease the documents that you need?
• Can you approve electronically a document and have a complete audit trail of the approval process?
• Can you access documents through a common user interface regardless of the workstation you are logged on?
• Do you know that there is a solution capable of giving an answer to all these questions and more?

In addition to solving those issues, e-grou looked for a powerful solution which would be at the same time fast and simple to implement without compromising on flexibility. It was also important to develop a solution that would present low investment costs for organizations.

The Solution
The web client development of e-doc initially started with standard asp.net. After a major effort the team found it developed a web client with just a small fraction of all functionalities of the windows client. In addition, the interface developed with standard asp.net was also too poor to carry on. "To do all this interface with standard web development tools we needed much more time and expert web development knowledge." Said Rui Oliveira from e-grou

As a result, the team realized that rather than trying to develop a so complex application using just the standard web development, it should look for a different solution. The development team checked any of the possible options that will allow developing the e-doc application as planned without losing any more time and then decided to use Visual WebGui. After the development was switched to Visual WebGui, the e-doc development team was amazed with the productivity they were able to achieve while accomplishing even more functionality. "With VWG we could in just a pair of months develop a web client with full functionalities and with an interface similar to windows". Added Rui Oliveira from e-grou

Benefits
As a result of using VWG and being able to implement the entire original features, e-doc offers a large number of functionalities and a simple and yet powerful configuration for a low investment cost. There is no limit to the number of mail registers and documents and to the number of users that e-doc supports.

The fast and intuitive development in VWG over Visual Studio allowed to deliver a highly, stable easy to use UI in less time and effort. "Choosing VWG reduced largely the time of development and gave us an easy way to create an interface similar to windows. Our developers almost forgot they were developing a web application." Said Rui Oliveira from e-grou

This full document management application gives the total flexibility in access to documents and all system. It also presents e-doc with a total OS independency and the possibility of integrating e-doc with other products, either developed in-house or by third party companies and warrants access and recovery of your documents. E-doc can be initially implemented in a small group or department to fulfill specific document management needs and later on be extended to other departments and wider needs. The similarities between e-doc and other Windows applications make it simple and easy to use for anyone in the organization.

On the other hand, more advanced options can be configured to controls access to mail registers and documents, preventing users to access documents directly through the network. System administrators can configure both the backup of the document vault and the backup of the MS SQL database to automate the creation of security backups.

In conclusion, the main features that differentiate e-doc from other document management solutions are:

• Can be implemented in a shorter period of time allowing for shorter payback times
• It is extremely simple to configure and maintain and does not require significant and continued investment in consulting and programming;
• Due to its flexibility and ease of configuration e-doc may start by solving a departmental document management problem and progressively being extended to the overall organization.

Screen shots
Import a document

Routing a document to a process

Insert a new entity

Reply a task in a process

Add references between documents

Define a document type

Create a complex search

The original article can be found here