About Oracle Consulting Services
Oracle Consulting Services delivers solutions for companies. When building an on-demand reporting system for a Customer Relationship Management system they needed to be able to save the customized reports as Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint files. In order to accomplish this, Aspose.Cells for Java and Aspose.Slides for Java were used on the recommendation of one of the project team members.
Aspose APIs integrated into Oracle’s Java environment and produced the documents they needed without being dependent on Microsoft Office applications.
About Oracle
Oracle provides a number of products and services to industries as diverse as retail and natural resources. The company is famous for its database solutions and enterprise applications. Oracle Consulting Services is the industry leader in certified consultants and have over 13,000 consulting experts. They implement solutions using Oracle’s best practices and make sure they are aligned with their client’s strategy and goals.
Challenge
Oracle offers consultancy services as well as software and hardware. Working with a leading integrated technology company, they developed an on-demand reporting system for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
CRM systems are complex. They keep track of complex relationships and a multitude of transactions. If used well, they give an organization a real boost by allowing them to learn about the relationships they have with customers and streamlining their sales and marketing activities. Central to any such activities is, of course, good intelligence. The data held in any system is useless unless you can interrogate it to learn from it. The reporting side of the system is therefore very important.
The Project
Part of any reporting system is document delivery. It is not enough that users can create their own reports, they need a way to save and share the results. Specifically, users wanted to be able to create reports that could be used for presentations and spreadsheets. Some customization was built into the document delivery module.
Aspose.Slides for Java and Aspose.Cells for Java were used to save reports in Microsoft Office compliant documents. The Aspose Java APIs fit perfectly in a Java environment. The fact that they produce Microsoft Office compliant documents without being dependent on Microsoft Office was a huge plus.
Several people worked on the report system and one person was solely responsible for the document delivery module. That developer had some interesting challenges. For example, adding report data to presentations is not as easy as it might sounds. Under normal circumstances, presentations are created manually and someone is there to judge that what is on the slide can be read, that everything fits on it and looks good. When reports are created automatically it is up to the document delivery system which needs to ensure that the final result looks good. This aspect was one of the most challenging for the developer.
The proof of Oracle Consulting’s success is in the client’s acceptance of the system. The reporting system has been deployed in several countries and will be rolled out worldwide.
Finding a Solution
For some projects, sourcing a solution is a time-consuming part of the process. The on-demand reporting system had many complexities, but what tool to use for document conversion, wasn’t one of them. Aspose.Slides for Java and Aspose.Cells for Java were recommended by a team member who already had experience working with Aspose APIs. The decision to use Aspose was a simple one.
Document formats have their own logic. Learning to work with one can take time, even when you have the help of a class library that does most of the work for you. Even with a learning curve, using Aspose products saved Oracle a lot of time.
“It was worth the money with regards to purchase: it would have been nowhere near as fast without these products.“
Jens Gehrke
Principle Senior Consultant
Summary
When implementing a document delivery module for a complex reporting system, Oracle Consultancy used trusted applications: Aspose.Slides for Java and Aspose.Cells for Java. It integrated smoothly with the existing development environment and did not require Windows Automation, and it also provided powerful document controls. Importantly, they saved valuable time compared to building the document management system from scratch.
