Bespoke Application Example - Letterhead Generator
Suddensource can provide you with bespoke software at a standard price.
| Type | Bespoke Windows application |
| Client | Financial services group, London |
| Brief | Create a program to generate letterheads in Word based on a user’s department, office location and the legal entity on behalf of which they are writing. A stationery refresh was looming and the group didn’t want to spend money on the vast array of new letterheads that this would require. |
| Description | We designed a letterhead generator wizard for a group of companies with numerous legal entities under which it operates, various offices around the country and myriad departments. The system we devised automatically generates an appropriate letterhead, fax or memo based on the user’s choices or defaults. |
| Platform | VSTO for Word 2003 VSTO for Word 2010 |
| Details |
A financial services company had several dozen letterheads and often these were not to hand or had
obsolete wording in the heading or footer. New companies are often added to the group, and a decision had
been made to re-brand, so the stationery expense was increasing beyond budget. An existing letterhead
wizard did a number of things including faxes, memos and fee notes, but all the data necessary to give the
user the choices required was embedded in a series of macros across a wide range of Word templates.
The maintenance overhead on these macros was sufficient that nobody wanted to ‘own’ the maintenance project.
We quoted for a system where details of legal entities, locations and departments, along with the necessary
small print for their letterheads was stored in a database along with details of font faces and sizes.
Over a period of months various other options were added concerning the use of graphics, position of items on
pages, and lists of which entities, departments and locations are valid combinations. A dot.NET (VSTO)
addin was developed for Word which was rolled out round the organisation using central application management
tools. The addin reads from the database and offers the user a choice of legal entity, department and
location, which they can save as a default. The user also saves his or her own email address, DDI and name
as defaults. Having selected those, the user can (optionally) select a pair of Dear/Yours options, a subject,
references and so on. The system then generates a letterhead based purely on the information in the database for
the selected document type. No Word templates are used.
The system also has the following features:
|
Case Studies
- Energy billing
- Claims management
- Software user group utilities
- EDI processor
- Electronic MIS reports
- Management reporting
- Insert manager
- Mailing management
- Paper planner
- Future profits calculator
- Petty cash return
- Commodity trading application
- Commission calculator
- Simple reports
- Results collector
- Results processor
- Stock locator
- SQL Server reports
- Stationery wizard
- Complaints system
- Suddensource utilities
- Vendor analysis
- Task monitoring application
Contact Us
To find out more contact us on +44 (0) 7772 963057