 Case Studies |
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Tri-Lakes Marketing
Introduction
My name is Lon Weekly, and my company is Tri-Lakes Marketing. After selling my dental software company
in 2000, I had a 5 year non-compete agreement that kept me out of that
industry. But, once the time was up, I was chomping at the bit to get back
involved. I have been a Basic/Visual Basic programmer for over thirty years
and continue to develop desktop apps for customers. Two years ago, I was
quite fortunate to get involved with KSB Dental, Inc. which is actually an
off-shoot of my old company. I re-did their website and started developing
add-on products for their main package.
Project
Most recently, we decided to expand the website capabilities to include
on-line supply ordering, software downloads and access to product-specific
information for our users. As is usually the case, the project was bigger
and more demanding than the available time to work on it. I knew that I had
to make everything easy to update and maintain, as well as easy for our
users to navigate. The biggest hurdle was to incorporate a shopping cart
capability into the site, without it looking like an add-on.
When you combine the facts that I had never created any active server pages
(using Master pages and css), never done any ecommerce and had only a small
amount of time to get this project done, I needed all the help I could get.
I bought a lot of books on various topics, watched tutorial downloads and
Googled everything in-between. Slowly, I got the basic site functioning,
but it didn't have much pizazz. I found a good shopping cart
component that got me rolling on that end, but it took me so
much time to get it working, that I had less and less time for aesthetics.
I still wanted to make it look nicer and have more capabilities.
One of the key areas that I struggled with was site navigation. I spent
days poring over different ways to do it, but couldn't really reach a
desirable result. I only had a fews days left to get that phase of the
project ready. During one of my Google searches, which led me to a forum,
someone mentioned Karamasoft UltimateMenu. I clicked the link, and took a
look at the demos. I saw more than I could have hoped for and even got some
ideas I'd never even thought of. I figured anything this good would have
to cost a lot, but I was amazed at the reasonable price. I figured it would
be worth every penny to get a nice looking menu system and be able to move
on with other parts of the project, so I went to the order screen.
Then, a great thing happened: I saw all the other components and the
UI Suite package. I was intrigued, so I went through all of the
demos. I started seeing things I could do to the site and realized this
could be what saved me. This happened to be right around Christmas and
playing with this stuff was like opening presents! I ordered the UI
Suite and was ready to dig in.
Experience
Now for the best part: support. The download and install went smoothly, but
I had some problems migrating my new menu pages to the production site.
Karamasoft Support Team helped track down what the conflicts were, and I actually made it on
time for the customer "show and tell". Maybe the only problem with the UI
Suite is that it can do so much, I kept wanting to change things (lol). I
got to looking at UltimatePanel, and realized that they would be a better
fit for my menus. So I switched and even placed an UltimateSearch on one
of the panel groups. Throughout every step of the way, I have been able to
post my questions on the user forums, and without fail have been able to
resolve my problems with Karamasoft's help. Unlike some other companies
which either never respond or tell you "it's your problem, they can't
duplicate it", Karamasoft Support Team seems to always come up with the answer!
The demo programs are a real life-saver, too. Almost anything I want to do
has already been done in a demo, so I can see how to do it.
Not only do these products perform individually as advertised, they play
very nicely together. As a result, I have now been able to incorporate
UltimateMenus (now replaced with UltimatePanel) for site navigation,
UltimatePanel for Marquee ads and teasers, UltimateEditor for content
creation by the customer, UltimateTabstrip with UltimateEditor windows for product
detail display, and am starting to utilize UltimateAjax for a nicer user
experience. I
made the whole site dynamic for the users to create their own content with
UltimateEditor and save to the database.
UltimateSpell is a built-in part of UltimateEditor and UltimateSearch. Future plans
call for the use of UltimateEmail for communications with our users, and
UltimateCalendar for scheduling training. We will have a lot of pdf's for
the users to read, so I plan to use UltimateSearch on those.
Conclusion
Although still in development, I have been able to accomplish my original
goals thanks mostly to Karamasoft. My shopping cart has a nice look and
feel thanks to the use of UI Suite components throughout. My customer can
create their own page content with the editor which keeps me from having to
re-do pages all the time. We are actually going to have a lot more
capabilities than we had originally planned.
I don't think I can say enough about Karamasoft. Karamasoft produces incredible software,
sells it at a reasonable price, and most of all, backs it up with fantastic support.
Their support forums are a great
resource. Personally, it has been worth much more than I paid. Even if you
only use two or three of the components, UI Suite is the way to go. Just like
in my case, I was looking for one thing and ended up with several great
components that I am using.
In this day and age, most software companies just don't have the whole
package like Karamasoft: Quality, Value and Support. I have and will
continue to recommend UI Suite to anybody for their web development
projects.
About My Company
I do contract programming in VB.Net and ASP.Net. I have developed entire
dental practice management packages, real-time stock option trading software
and even boat dock design and pricing software. I would be happy to share
anything I have learned during this project with anyone interested. You can
email me at trilakes@sunflower.com or post your question in the user forums.
I check them almost everyday.
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FundTrack Software
Introduction
Hello I'm Charles King, our company is FundTrack® Software. We have been designing software for the nonprofit community for over ten years. Until recently we have always built what is sometimes called traditional software, in short meaning that it is not directly available over the Internet. We had designed and built some small web based applications using the original asp (active server pages) technology. When Microsoft® released the .NET framework we decided to try our hand at the new ASP.NET. And that is how this project was born.
Project
We decided that it was time to rebuild our flagship product, PhilanthrAppeal®. In order for the nonprofit community to benefit most from this project it had to be built using ASP.NET and had to draw its data from SQL Server 2005. We wanted the application to be as easy to use as possible and to have a consistent look. This part was accomplished in a fairly straightforward fashion, using Master Pages, CSS, and some great Icons from VirtualLNK. Next we wanted the application to provide a rich user experience, so we added AJAX 1.0 to the project. Using AJAX means that we could provide the user with a more responsive and robust feeling when using the application.
A key element for the application was being able to do mail merge. There were two types of mail merge we needed, Email and USPS mail. The USPS mail merge part was easy, just have a user export an Excel or XML file to their local PC and use Microsoft Word® or some other word processing program, to do the merge. However, for the Email merge part of the project we thought we would need to create an in house tool. Before taking on that undesirable task we decided to see if there was a third party tool available with this functionality. We looked at several HTML editors that are used mainly for content management projects. At first we were discouraged by the amount of code that would need to be written in order to make the HTML editors do what we wanted. We kept looking.
Then we found Karamasoft and their UI Suite of tools. The suite included an HTML editor (UltimateEditor) and a tool they call UltimateEmail. With these two tools combined we were able to add the Email merging functionality to our project, in a very short time and without writing very much code at all. Most of the code we needed could be found on the Karamasoft website live demo area.
Experience
Our experience with Karamasoft has been great from the very beginning. Downloading the UI Suite and installing it was very easy. We ran into a couple of small issues along the way that were quickly addressed by the support team. Then we found that we needed to be able provided our users with a process beyond the normal sending email and merging to a custom HTML document. We needed to let the user merge an email to a different document, possibly for each email being sent. We presented this problem to the Karamasoft support team, and in no time at all they had added the ability we needed to the UltimateEmail tool and sent us a new build of the tool for testing. It worked great and we were on our way again. Karamasoft continues to help us and we are looking at how we might incorporate some the other great tools from the UI Suite into this and other projects we will be working on.
Conclusion
This project is on going and will continue to evolve. As long as we have the support of Karamasoft and their great UI Suite of tools we think the project will be a great success. It's not often these days that you can find a company of any kind that provides a quality product and that will stand behind that product with great support. Our hats are off to Karamasoft.
If you have questions or would like to find out more about our products or service, please feel free to email me at cking@fundtracksoftware.com or visit us at www.fundtracksoftware.com.
Our Mission at FundTrack Software
"To develop and deliver comprehensive, quality software at competitive prices to nonprofits in pursuit of an enhanced quality of life and environment"
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truelogic
Introduction
truelogic introduced its dedicated communications technology to the market over five years ago. A process of continuous improvement has made it one of the most simple to use, yet feature rich communications platforms in the world, used around the world.
The team at truelogic has worked with leading companies at the highest level for several years, using web based technology to expedite not only email and SMS campaigns, but also print and press advertising.
Our knowledge of this technology is our core competency and the backbone of everything we do.
Project
After having used other online editors in our products, as well as developing our own we needed to find a solution that provided increased functionality and cross browser support, while still enabling us to customize the editor to our unique needs.
One of the key items we needed to find in an editor was the ability to customize and enhance the editor so that it not only worked within our product, but did not require users to re-learn or change habits based on what they had previously used in our product.
We researched all the major online editors, putting each one through a series of tests aimed to discover usability issues and functionality shortcomings. One editor stood out about the rest… and after having worked with Karamasoft's UltimateSpell component we decided to go with that editor... UltimateEditor.
Experience
During our initial integration of UltimateEditor into our flagship product campaignlogic, we had a number of challenges to overcome, least of which being the need to separate the editor canvas from the toolbar as seen in the below screen capture.
We expected that when we contacted Karamasoft support about some of our needs and unique issues with integration we would be told that it was not possible… Imagine our surprise, when as a result of our request Karamasoft released an update to their UltimateEditor which enabled us to do what we needed.
It did not stop there, 12 months after going live with UltimateEditor we needed to change the way the editor handled CSS and HTML, again Karamasoft were able to accommodate our needs with another updated version of their excellent product.
Of course, a product like UltimateEditor’s ability to be customized is one thing, how works for the end user is really where it matters. UltimateEditor is fast loading and offers the user the most accurate reflection of offline editors such as Microsoft Word which they are familiar with.
Conclusion
Out of the box UltimateEditor is a fantastic editor, our need to customize it is driven largely by the fact we implemented it
into an existing product that is used around the world, by some 100,000 users ranging from home users, to some of the largest organizations in the world.
UltimateEditor has not only met and exceeded our expectations, but those of our end users as well!
About truelogic
We are a software company, focused on delivering market leading software to enable companies to streamline and take control of their marketing. With clients located around the world, we continue to refine and enhance our products based on their feedback and our vision. www.truelogic.com.au
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