Case Studies

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Law Society of Upper Canada

How a professional association solved a Word automation problem in a very short period of time, with absolutely no margin of error.

On the surface, a simple mail-merge problem, the type of thing you might run at home every Christmas. But this time it was different.

There used to be seven reasons for membership rejection, there are now eight. There is an AS400 data run involved, a Word mail merge works, a set of Access queries and Access VBA to help with that. When the user wants to add a new code, they are unable to see the new code take effect.

No documentation exists, especially no maintenance documentation. The original project was written by an external programmer, now long gone, and involved the generation of PDF files through an intermediate postscript file process.

The original program is hard-wired to write to drive C:, whereas the organization discourages use of the local hard drive for any storage.

In summary:

Penalties of current system

• It uses Access database when there is no need for Access.

• It makes use of seven hard-coded queries that must be maintained or augmented manually by someone versed in Access.

• It uses path names hard-coded in the program code.

• It is suitable only for the immediate problem – that of producing suspension notices.

The Proposal

• That the AS400 deliver standard “comma-delimited” text suitable for direct use by Word’s mail-merge facility. AS400 data in this format would be immediately available for use by Word-processing staff for, perhaps, 90% of the letter-generation requirements of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Creation of the merge takes typically 15 minutes or less. We can train Law Society of Upper Canada staff to generate regular mail-merges to satisfy their schedules of development.

• A simple pre-processor be written for specialized tasks such as Suspensions. (This has already been done; we map seven “reason codes” to two “section texts”).

• We carve out the PDF/archive code from the current Suspensions bundle and make that available for future generic use. This code MUST exist already within the current Suspensions project. It should be a simple task to disable or remove the existing “Preprocess” and “Mail merge” code, leaving us with a generic processor.

The Result

As Neman Syed said:

“Chris Greaves through Front Runner not only solved this problem, but enhanced the efficiency of the system and dramatically reduced the complexity of the code.

The original, less expensive, programmer we had used took weeks to create the system, but hadn’t implemented all the logic or features.

• Chris fixed it up in three days.

There’s no substitute for 35 years of programming experience”

Neman Syed, IS Training Specialist, The Law Society of Upper Canada, 416-947-3300 x 2095, nsyed@lsuc.on.ca

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