Trustmaster is a unique blend of a traditional office database application coupled into a workflow management solution. Most workflow solutions are stand-alone packages that are completely divorced from the corporate database but in the year 2005, such separations should not exist. The office CRM or data warehouse should be able to integrate directly with the workflow solution.

The new Smart Document technology utilised by Microsoft’s Office 2003 and Windows Server 2003 product range makes all this possible.

The backbone of Trustmaster is a legacy database which manages a common fund solution for client financial management. As with most office and CRM systems it generates standard letters and responds to incoming requests for financial transactions and deals on-line with a range of institutions. What has made Trustmaster compelling as a solution is that all these features now directly integrate with Windows Sharepoint Services, MS Outlook and other MS office products.

As with all workflow tools, documents start life as either generated standard letters or scanned images using Microsoft Imaging. By using combined OCR and image scanning , the images become searchable along side corporate data, emails, libraries and generated correspondence. Trustmaster then makes good use of a custom built workflow engine in Sharepoint Document Management solution to set up business rules around the drafting, approving, printing and storing of documents. Of course all this information is available directly out of the legacy application which also uses Outlook 2003 for mail integration, task management and diary management. The office benefits from using well known interfaces familiar right across the business community. This means less training and faster staff integration.

But the smart document interface goes two ways. Using components built with C# in Microsoft’s Visual Studio.net, a range of web services and document scripts give MS Word documents the power to interrogate and present legacy data into those documents. The users now benefit from not having to use multiple applications to get access to routine client data.

And finally, all these solutions are MS SQL Server based which means a common data access point for all search queries over documents and data together..