This IT Support Company with over 200 clients had an urgent need to save time by automating various aspects of their job control database.

Each morning they had to manually update their access job database by inspecting all the email messages received from the backup and server monitoring programs such as Hound dog. They also wanted their staff to be able to email the job database with updates of chargeable time when they were away from the office.

It was realised that by enabling and automating these processes , more than an hour per day of time could be saved.

On a more technical level. . .. .. .. . . . . .. . ..

A special 'jobs' mailbox was created to which all messages designed to update the jobs database are sent. Outlook was programmed using its inbuilt VBA feature to save each incoming message as a file. Winbatch, a very rapid software development language, was used to develop a program that monitors the files created by Outlook and update the jobs database. The Winbatch program uses ADO to connect to the database which means that it does not interfere with the day to day database updates & enquiries by staff members.