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Usage scenarios

Sample scenario #1: accelerating the debugging and the updating of Microsoft Office Add-Ins in a highly reactive environment such as a trading department of a financial institution.

The situation:

A financial institution has an IT department that develops Microsoft Office Add-Ins for use for example by a group of traders.

One of the traders finds a bug in an Add-In or has a particular request.

The typical workflow:

This is what usually happens in this situation, without our solution:

  1. The trader reports the bug to the developers.
  2. A developer goes to the trader's computer to see the bug, or makes a remote connection to that computer, or logs into another trader's computer that has the same bug and that is not being used.
  3. The developer cannot debug the Add-In directly from the trader's computer because there are no tools for that.
  4. The developer goes back to his/her development computer and tries to reproduce the bug in a test environment. This is sometimes difficult and time-consuming because the developer needs to reproduce all the conditions that cause the bug to appear, such as entering specific values on a spreadsheet, connecting to an external data source, etc.
  5. The developer thinks he/she has fixed the bug and sends the new version to the trader.
  6. The trader quits Microsoft Office in order to install the new version of the Add-In. During the time that Office is closed, the trader cannot work on his/her documents and the company loses money.
  7. The trader installs the new version of the Add-In.
  8. The trader restarts Microsoft Office and reopens the documents he/she was working on.
  9. If the bug is still there (on the trader's computer), the process starts over from step 2, with the developer going back and forth, and submitting new versions of the Add-In until the bug is resolved.
  10. When the bug is finally resolved, the developer submits the new version of the Add-In to all the other traders. The process may force the traders to quit Microsoft Office, install the update, and then reopen the documents that they are working on.
 The need:

Speed up the process described above: reduce the time that it takes to solve the bug or to satisfy the request of the trader.

 Our proposed solution:

If the bank has adopted Userware for Office, this is what happens when a trader finds a bug in one of the Add-Ins developed by the IT department:

  1. The trader reports the bug to the developers.
  2. A developer goes to the trader's computer to see the bug, or makes a remote connection to that computer, or logs into another trader's computer that has the same bug and is not being used.
  3. The developer can fix the bug directly from that computer (no need to go back and forth between a development computer and a computer in production).
  4. Directly from the computer where the bug was fixed, the developer can instantly deploy the new version of the Add-In to all other traders. The update is transparent and there is no need for the traders to restart Office or to close their open documents in order to get the bugfix.
 Main benefits:
  • Improved business responsiveness (no need to go back and forth between a development computer and a trader's computer)
  • Increased productivity (no need to restart Office to receive new Add-Ins and updates)
  • Cost reduction (no need to set up a dedicated development computer and to purchase licenses for development tools)