DWG, Inc, specializes in electrical, mechanical, plumbing and fire protection engineering. The firm required an upgrade to their MS Outlook application, which links various MS Word document templates to a central Outlook contact list, producing document shells based on selected DWG projects. 

Business Opportunity
The Outlook Application to be upgraded was a "macro" produced by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, and it was placed in each workstation's Outlook program using a long sequence of steps, such as copying and pasting code, creating menu buttons, etc.

The application allowed users to select a contact and select a project, and then it set up a Word document template for the project, with the contact's information filled in.  The application did this by referring to text-document lists of templates and project folders.

DWG wanted an application that would do all this, yet would be easy to install on new workstations, and would have the ability to maintain lists of templates and project folders on its own.

Solution
PST developed the application as an Outlook Addin, which is a compiled assembly that can be installed into Outlook by double-clicking a single icon in a network folder.  In addition, the new Addin monitors templates, along with the DWG project folders associated with the templates, rather than depending on a text-file list, as did the original VBA applicaton.

The Addin application was built with the brand-new Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 development tool.

Benefits

• Easy-to-install Outlook Addin.
• Addin maintains its own lists of document templates and DWG project folders associated with the templates.