Introduction

Shannon ECM is a Limerick based company that was established in order to develop and bring to market a new document management software application called DocMan.

DocMan is aimed at bringing the advantages of electronic document management to the small to medium enterprise. Its focus is to deliver a feature rich document management application at a lower price point than any competitors.

Problem: Established Competition

Shannon ECM has entered a field with many established competitors and mature products. The challenge is to find an untapped niche and to build a product that will fill it. Some key features were identified that would be major differentiating factors over the competition. Shannon ECM needed to collaborate with a software development team that could bring their product vision to market quickly and fulfil their key requirements.

Challenge: Flexible Requirements

Shannon ECM maintains a strong longterm vision for DocMan, but the short term feature list is constantly evolving based on the changing demands of customers. Shannon ECM uses their ability to respond to changing needs as a competitive advantage, but this approach presents a major technical challenge.

Action Point software must develop an application against constantly shifting requirements, while ensuring that there is a regular stream of milestone releases in order to deliver promised features to customers. All milestone releases must also provide for a smooth upgrade path for existing customers.

Solution

DocMan is a Windows desktop-based application that uses a SQLEXPRESS or SQL 2005 database. DocMan will mainly be deployed onto corporate networks. It is unacceptable for a rollout to cause any downtime for a company’s employees. As such, the rollout process has been streamlined to support many disparate strategies from a desk-to-desk install through to automated installation via Active Directory.

DocMan will manage all of a company’s documents and hence it must be 100% reliable and secure. Furthermore, modern accountability legislation (such as Sarbanes Oxley) means that a reliable historic audit trail is a key feature for many companies. DocMan provides a complete audit trail of every interaction every user makes with each document. It is trivial for an administrator to review exactly who has viewed/printed/emailed and so on any given document.

Action Point has enabled Shannon ECM to realize and refine their vision for the ideal Document Management System, ensuring they have a product on the market from the earliest possible point. This approach has minimized risks and maximized customer satisfaction for everyone involved.

Technologies Used

C# WinForms, Managed DirectX, DotNetMagic, TCP/IP

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