Microsoft Office Integration
Integration between applications within the Microsoft Office suite can provide a valuable increase in productivity by utilising the best features of each application to achieve the necessary tasks. This also means that all of the tools needed to build a system could already be in place thus minimising expenditure.
As an example, if a bespoke Sales Order Processing application is written, Sales Orders can be raised within Microsoft Access (or SQL Server if the number of users and quantity if data require this), customer details transferred and invoices posted to Sage, email confirmations sent via Microsoft Outlook, sales reports created in Microsoft Excel and marketing letters created in Microsoft Word - all using a simple push-button approach and without the user ever having to enter the same information twice, or to have an in-depth knowledge of any particular application.