Thomson Financial’s Investment Management Group is a leading provider of information and technology solutions for global financial services professionals in institutional money management. The company provided its clients with a Microsoft Excel add-in to access financial information, but wanted to improve the product’s performance and expandability. After replacing the communication layer with XML-based Web services, Thomson Financial created a smart client application that has improved performance and is opening the door to new business opportunities. Moving forward, the company plans to inject even more power into its smart client solution by implementing smart tags and extending it across Microsoft Office programs.
Financial firms are driven by the need to stay on top—if not ahead—of market trends. Having dynamic access to financial information, such as broker research and analyst forecasts, within a familiar toolset is the key to their success. The Thomson Financial Investment Management Group develops and deploys applications that this client base can use to access a comprehensive repository of financial data gathered by Thomson Financial.
Thomson Financial’s Web application, Thomson ONE Analytics, provides access to a broad range of financial information and analytical tools in a structured way to match clients’ workflow. To offer clients more flexibility and immediate, dynamic access to any item or field in the database, the company developed First Call Link—a Microsoft® Excel add-in that enables clients to pull financial information into an Excel worksheet and use that program’s powerful toolset to analyze the financial information in detail.
The add-in had been built using the latest technologies of its time, but to address performance issues and sharpen its competitive edge in the market, Thomson Financial took the initiative to go beyond the current application to achieve a more far-reaching, forward-thinking solution. Leveraging the code base, the company updated the communication layer of its add-in by implementing Web services, and ultimately will build a powerful, smart client solution on Microsoft Office XP.
Explains John Eliseo, Product Development Manager for Thomson Financial, “Implementing Web services in our solution has enabled us to turn Excel into a dynamically functioning application for our clients.”
In developing First Call Link into the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in, Thomson Financial had three design criteria: The add-in had to be fast, easy-to-use, and powerful. To help achieve these design goals, Thomson Financial worked closely with Microsoft Consulting Services, and by implementing a smart client solution, Thomson Financial met all three goals.
By definition, smart clients:
- Use Web services. A smart client acts as a client for a Web service. Web services allow users to capitalize on the value of the connection to multiple devices and the network.
- Take advantage of local processing power. By using the processing power available on the local PC or mobile device, smart clients can deliver improved performance and functionality over browser-based client applications. Smart clients aren’t subject to bottlenecks on the network or Internet servers.
- Enable offline/online scenarios. Smart clients allow users to work with data even while they are not connected to the Internet or the network that hosts the Web service. Because the application logic resides completely on the client computer, smart clients provide full functionality even while offline—unlike browser-based applications, which depend on their connection to the server for both processing and data.
To successfully build its smart client solution, Thomson Financial replaced the communication layer of First Call Link with a Web service. The Web service provides a seamless and powerful way to exchange large amounts of information over the Internet, simplifying how client applications generate requests to the data layer and enabling developers to build intelligence into the application. When a user accesses the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in, adds stock ticker and forecast data fields to the worksheet, and specifies a stock, a Web service supplies the current forecasts for that stock and pullsthem immediately into the worksheet. This can occur whether usersare accessing the application from their local desktop or from a mobile device, and with or without an Internet connection—thus offering financial clients an innovative, effective, and efficient method of working.
Building a Fast Solution
Developers built the new Web service using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system on top of the existing data access layer—Virtual Financial Database (VFDB)—a capability that Eliseo describes as providing a significant benefit. “Using Web services in our smart client solution helped us achieve a fast development cycle because we were able to leverage so much of the work that had already been completed. We didn’t have to recreate the data or business knowledge pieces. Instead, we could build our Web services right on top.”
When a client makes a request for information, the add-in queries the Web service, which in turn passes the request through the VFDB, queries the database for the requested information, and passes the information back to the requesting client. The Web service also completes screening functions. For example, if a client only wants to see information for stocks with a 20 percent growth, the Web service layer filters the appropriate information back to the client.
Explains Eliseo, “The Web services let us pass content through the data access layer without needing the cumbersome wrappers that slowed down the process before. Now, we’ve achieved a streamlined flow of information between the client application and the database.”
Building an Easy-to-Use Solution
The smart client solution further enhanced the customer experience by enabling them to seamlessly call information from a Microsoft SQL Server™ database and pull it into the familiar, Excel-based application. It was imperative for the success of the solution that it remain an Excel-based application, because Excel is the tool of choice for the financial community. Thus, enabling users to consume the new data structure in the toolset that they work with every day would only help them to be more productive. Thomson Financial also improved the easeofuse of its application by incorporating the following enhancements:
- Thin-client installation. Customers can install the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in on their computer by accessing the installation program through a secure Web interface.
- One-menu functionality. Once the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in has been installed, clients can access all its functionality through a single menu, which makes the application significantly easier to use than are other add-ins currently available to the financial market industry.
- Drag-and-drop editing. Clients can use this feature to customize spreadsheets quickly and seamlessly. Through a single function, clients access any field within the Thomson Financial database and simply drag the information into their Excel spreadsheets.
- Templates. Clients can access templates to perform quick financial information analysis.
Building a Powerful Solution
By implementing Web services in their solution, developers also built in power for the customer because they had time to make the solution intelligent. Rather than make a separate request for each item, the add-in pools together the items needed and bundles them into a single request. The Web service returns the data as XML, which makes it easy to rapidly parse the content and populate the spreadsheet.
Building a Plan for the Future with Smart Tags
As the success of Thomson ONE Analytics grows, Thomson Financial plans to continue to enhance the add-in so that it provides the comprehensive functionality that its clients need.
For example, the company is piloting a project to incorporate smart tag and Web services functionality into the Thomson ONE Analytics add-in. Smart tags are dynamically created buttons in the user interface in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word that allow users to accomplish simple tasks or connect to the Web from within an application. Custom-developed smart tags that reference information stored in Thomson Financial’s database will soon make it faster and easier for users to pull financial information into Excel and Word.
Specifically, a Recognizing feature will be implemented, which will distinguish and tag items of critical interest to a Thomson ONE Analytics user, such as a company’s name. After this information is “recognized,” the Action feature will activate the company name by attaching a smart tag to it. Thus, each tagged item presents the user with a list of operations—such as requesting the stock price or a performance chart of the stock over the past 52 weeks—which the user can invoke to add the resulting information to the document. The smart tag uses a Web service to execute the request and pulls the information that is stored in Thomson Financial’s SQL Server database into the document. To ensure that the added information is dynamic, every time the document is opened, the data that was requested using the smart tag operation is automatically refreshed with the most current information from the database.
By evolving the Thomson ONE Analytics add-in from an Excel-based tool to an Office XP smart client solution and by implementing Web services, Thomson Financial now has a fast, easy-to-use, powerful application that will carry the company forward in its quest to deliver enhanced solutions to its existing and future customer base. The company also succeeded in quickly building a solution that performs unlike any other product on the market.
Increased Business Opportunities
Historically, financial industry add-ins tended to be complex and cumbersome. Given this concern, Thomson Financial set out to develop a new version of its previous First Call Link add-in that could deliver information with the speed necessary to satisfy the demands of the financial industry players. By implementing Web services in its solution, Thomson Financial expects to gain a competitive edge and expand its client base as an increasing number of potential clients realize the ease and speed with which they can access financial data using the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in.
“One thing that has really caught the eye of our clients is that the Thomson ONE Analytics add-in consists of just one function, something that is unusual in this market,” explains Eliseo. “Web services ultimately allowed us to build the add-in so that clients no longer have to guess which function is the right one to add to their Excel worksheet. With the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in, they only need one, making the whole application very easy to use.”
Superior Performance
Thomson Financial has a unique user base, much of which needs access to very detailed company financial information. Providing fast access to the content for a single company is important, but those same clients also track portfolios that consist of 1,000 to 2,000 stock tickers. Therefore, to meet client needs, Thomson Financial set its initial threshold of updating this portfolio content to just a few seconds—a goal that has been achieved by using the clean structure of Web services, which pass XML content from the database quickly and directly to the client worksheet.
Eliseo explains how the performance of the application continues to impress clients: “Performance has exceeded [that of] every add-in that we had developed previously, and we’re better able to meet our clients’ needs for financial information. Our solution is faster today primarily because it has not been built on old technology but, instead, is a smart client application that leverages the power of Web services.”
Fast Time-to-Market
The new version of the add-in was developed in just eight weeks. This was not only a remarkable feat, but also one that met all the project’s business objectives: fast, easy-to-use, and powerful. The developers achieved success primarily because they implemented a technology that they could work with easily and test quickly. In addition, instead of being forced to re-create work, they were able to build a solution on top of existing work. Doing so helped the company deploy the new Thomson ONE Analytics add-in quickly, and will continue to benefit the company as it moves forward and deploys new functionality and solutions. For example, choosing Office XP has enabled Thomson Financial to leverage the same technology in both Excel and Word. Thus, for its smart tag project, Thomson Financial can use the same Web service and smart tag components in the Word-based and Excel-based applications.
“Overall, building a smart client application and implementing Web services has been a great success story,” explains Eliseo. “From a development perspective, we didn’t have to tie up a lot of developer time to get the solution out the door and, from a business perspective, there’s very little functionality that we can’t provide to our customers.”
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
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