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Northwind Products Services Case Studies Ordering Free Utilities |
Timeshare Resales Worldwide |
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Founder Larry Hayden has been a Timeshare Industry leader and licensed realtor since 1969. Proud to have been the first timeshare broker on the internet, he revolutionised timeshare resales with the No Upfront Fee program. His California based company has over 12,000 resale timeshare listings in locations worldwide. The listings search page is updated daily |
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TRW was using a Lotus Approach system over a small office network to maintain the resale timeshares listings. There are over 12,000 records, each with over a hundred fields. Active listings are uploaded daily to refresh the web server database (Oracle) by means of a delimited text file. Prospective sellers can add their properties to the listing by submitting a web form. New listings are downloaded from the web server as text files for import into Approach. Prospective buyers can search the resale listings online and submit a web form to request more information about a specific property or ask TRW to carry out a search based on their requirements. When a buyer submits a request form, the web server sends an e-mail to TRW containing the form content. TRW uses Microsoft Outlook 2000 for e-mail. Larry Hayden contacted Northwind in March 2001 with a view to integrating the resales listings (in Approach) with buyer enquires (in Outlook) and improving his office efficiency. The problems he faced at that time were:
We quickly analysed TRW's requirements and proposed that the Approach system be expanded to include relational tables to hold buyer and inquiry details and our OLServices add-in provide the interface to Outlook. Once the database structure was in place we developed LotusScript routines to retrieve inquiry e-mails from Outlook, parse the contents into Approach database fields and import into the database. We created the Approach views to maintain, track and analyse the incoming inquiries. Even at this early stage of development, several office workflow problems were solved. All information concerning sellers, buyers and inquiries was now centralised in Approach, removing the need to search both in Approach and Outlook to manage an inquiry. Office based staff could now share the same data over the network. The next stage was to add a facility to
assign each inquiry to a sales agent and for those agents who are not
office based, forward details to them by printed form or e-mail. The
manager responsible for the assignment must also take into consideration
which resorts an agent normally handles, whether the prospective
buyer has made inquiries before and which agent dealt with them. We used
LotusScript and dynamic SQL queries to display recent buyer history on
demand and OLServices to retrieve previously imported inquires from
Outlook and forward them to the assigned agents. |
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The final part of the integration with
Outlook was to make available, directly from Approach, those day to
day tasks that used to be done in Outlook with data copied and pasted
from Approach. We used our popup menu add-in to provide all this
functionality from a single button click.
The major requirement was a bulk mailing facility that could take a found set of buyers or sellers and send each one a personalised e-mail containing merge data from the Approach database. We added tables to store e-mail templates (so they can be reused) and to track mailing history. Merge data can be incorporated in a template by entering the Approach field name in angle brackets, e.g. <<ResortName>>. LotusScript and OLServices does the rest! Now TRW can communicate with thousands of buyers and sellers at a time with a few mouse clicks. |
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Since then, development has continued apace. We've added more functionality and more tables to record information about completed sales which are processed through an escrow procedure. TRW has recently opened a second office to accommodate the extra staff required by its growing business. This has presented new challenges to the current system which now has to function over a wide area network with a "slow" connection speed (DSL). Future developments may require the migration of the Approach system to SQL Server and a full-blown, three tier architecture so that we can develop a thin client in Visual Basic to replace the Approach front end. |
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