MetaDesign Solutions
MetaDesign SolutionsEnterprise software add ins for a leading Indian financial services company
Overview
The company is a leading financial services firm, founded in 2006 and has its headquarters in Mumbai India. With a team of 500 employees and customers across the country it is a growing business seeking standardization and consistency.
about the client
The business wanted to make sure that for all the documents its employees worked on, they would follow the same guidelines as agreed with their clients. So they started looking for a plugin for word, excel and powerpoint that could control the document templates according to the brand guidelines for its employees working on different projects.
Brand guidelines include font settings, color, chat styles, object styles etc. and all of those styles are to be pre-configured on the plugin and should restrict the user to only use the styles allowed by the brand for that project.
As there was no ready to use solution available, they decided to hire a development company and have it custom developed. They contacted MetaDesign Solutions and contracted us for the development of these plug-ins.
Industry Domain
Financial Services
Service Category (Service-line)
Value Added Services (Plugins)
Technologies Used
Microsoft Tools
Asp.Net
AWS
Challenges
- The plugin should work on Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
- It should retain the formatting when the data is copied between Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
- It should restrict the user to use the style settings depending on the project he/she is working on.
- The plug-in should integrate with active directory and fetch user profile details based on his AD user.
- Admin Panel should be a web based application hosted on cloud.
Solution Scope and Services
The team at MetaDesign Solution came up with the solution that involved two components:
Component 1: Web based Admin
The functionality of web based admin was to allow admins to configure the users and different style settings and associate styles to different projects, and then those projects could be assigned to different users. To do this the web admin panel was integrated with an active directory for login. Web based admin panel is currently hosted on AWS in Mumbai. Admin panel was developed using Angular in the frontend and ASP.Net MVC for backend API.
Component 2: Office Add-ins supporting Desktop PC
The second component of the solution involved Add-ins for word, excel and powerpoint supporting desktop PC versions. User is identified based on his Active Directory profile. When the user starts any of his Office Applications such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint, a list of projects is fetched from the central admin application and shown to the user to select the project he wants to work upon. Based on the project selected, office application is configured to use the style settings defined for the application. If he is working on project xyz then the plugin will restrict him to only use the styling associated with xyz project in the admin panel. The Add-in also allows users to copy past items within office applications retaining style information.
Results
In its implementation, the new solution has resulted in better efficiency and accuracy.
The users are more efficient, they are able to save 40% of their time and are able to do more projects in the same amount of time. Now they are able to produce more accurate documents, which are in line with the brand guidelines of the customer. This has helped reduce the number of review cycles from 4 to 2. Thus, saving time for the client and employees.
The new plugin has also impacted the business in terms of reduced cost of doing a project and they are also able to reduce the time taken to complete a project, i.e., the same person can do more projects in the same amount of time. Accuracy level has also increased which is making it less painful for the customer to review the documents.