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1.1 A New Way of Working

   You will soon view applications in a whole new way.  New technologies that 
   are being introduced will be the catalyst for software developers to focus 
   on delivering software that is focused on solutions, not only as lists of 
   features.  Software will be delivered in components, made easy to use and 
   will work the way you work. 

   Imagine the following scenario.  You are a financial advisor, and want to 
   quickly create monthly reports for your clients with their current 
   portfolio balance.  In the portfolio you will have a letter, a current 
   balance in the form of a statement, some historical data, and the current 
   stock and mutual fund prices.  You prepare your work by creating a 
   template letter that you fill in with specific information for the letter 
   to each client.  Your next step is to link in the mail-merge components 
   from your mail database so that it will automatically fill in the name, 
   address and other information into the letter for each of your clients. 
   Being a power  user, you also have set up the database used for the 
   mail-merge to include the current portfolio balances for the client, so 
   they can be included in the letter as well.  Collecting the balances from 
   the database or spreadsheets adds another step to the process, but makes 
   the letter useful to your clients. 

   Your customers like the monthly report better than the terse statements 
   they received before, as it is easier to read a written report than going 
   through a list of numbers.  Therefore you have to link the application or 
   part of an application that will be able to retrieve these values from 
   your database, and incorporate these values into the letter instead of 
   listing them as a terse spreadsheet.  And you will use a simple formula to 
   calculate the totals.  Your customers like the letter even better, because 
   the portfolio details and historical data are both included.  This is done 
   by linking another part of your database to the letter. 

   Up-to-the-minute information can be included into the letter.  You can 
   include recent prices of stocks and mutual funds with a simple hook into 
   the stock exchange, such as Dow Jones industry average.  You may even send 
   the letter in a soft copy format, on a disk or via the Internet.  Then 
   your customer can display the stock prices as a ticker tape running across 
   the screen displaying the most recent stock prices received via the 
   Internet from the stock exchange.  A ticker tape is similar to the screens 
   at the stock exchange where they have the stock name and prices running 
   across the screen from one side to the other side.  An example of what the 
   soft copy financial statement could look like, including the ticker tape 
   at the bottom, can be seen in Figure 1. 


 


                                             



 
   Figure 1. An OpenDoc Document Showing a Portfolio 

   Any recent news clips, such as political announcements that affect the 
   customer's investments, can be included in the letter.  This includes 
   video and audio clips.  If your customer received the letter as a soft 
   copy, then he can view the latest video clips taken from television 
   business shows.  The possibilities of what you can do with the letter is 
   endless.  It all depends on how much information you want to include in 
   the letter. 

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