Due Diligence on Pacel, Part 1 of 3: Visual Writer
==================================================
As we all know by now, Visual Writer is Pacel Corporation's flagship product. Technically speaking, “Visual Writer” is not a software program but rather the name given to a group of four software programs: Visual Builder, Visual Worker, Visual Manager and Visual Analyzer. Together they are Visual Writer.
Visual Builder is the key. It's the authoring tool. If you're going to create something, it's Visual Builder that you use. Visual Worker is the run-time version of what you build in Visual Builder (So, obviously, Visual Worker is what people in the field use and Visual Builder is most likely not on their laptops at all). Visual Manager and Visual Analyzer are, in a sense, supplemental tools. The first is a Systems Management tool and the second is a reporting tool. Mr. Calkins and I focused on Visual Builder, which was the right thing to do. Understanding it means that one can understand, intuitively, the needs the other three serve.
Within 15-minutes of Mr. Calkins talking to me about Visual Builder, I understood how the whole thing worked. As a result, I understood how Pacel worked, and what the whole purpose of the company was. It was a great moment. I will now attempt to duplicate the moment and teach in my own words how Visual Builder works. Sure enough, it is difficult to describe something that is simple and revolutionary. I have never seen any software quite like Visual Builder. This is perhaps because in my line of work I have never been involved with work that had step-by-step regulations to follow and just about every action or step had to be documented. My career work has been more goal-oriented: I'm given the task of accomplishing such-and-such goal--I should solve the problem (do the work) whichever way I think is best. If my workflow were more regulated (i.e., I must do this step first, then this, then this, et cetera) Visual Writer would be a strong, paperless solution to that process.
Continuing on, here's a play-by-play of what happened in the Visual Builder demo:
1.) Mr. Calkins double-clicked on the Visual Builder icon and the program appeared on the screen.
2.) It looked incredibly similar to Microsoft Word: Menu choices at the top, small toolbar icons underneath, a “Format” toolbar (font style and size, etc.), a tab strip (for setting tab-stops) and underneath all that a vast white space for where to type in text. Like I say, just like MS Word.
3.) At this early stage of the demo, Visual Builder did look a little unclear. I turned to Calkins and asked, “How would I know what to do next? How would I know what to type?” He said, “Well, we give training and also there's a help file...” So he showed me the help file a little and then got back to the demo proper.
4.) [Back to the demo] In the “white page” part of the screen he typed in about five lines of text. My wording here is not verbatim (I'm going on memory and notes) but, basically, it looked like this:
This is what we can do:
Reference documents
Data entry
Video
Picture
5.) With that typed on the screen, he highlighted the word “documents” and right-clicked on the mouse. A pop-up menu appeared with many standard choices like “Cut”, “Copy”, “Paste”, etc. However, there was one unusual choice in the list: “Information Link...”
6.) When Mr. Calkins chose “Information Link...” a special response window appeared asking you to select what should happen when the user clicks on the word “documents” when in run-time mode. Should a Word document be brought to the user's attention? How about a bitmap? Perhaps the user should be forced to read and acknowledge a message...or perhaps only given a warning that he should read such-and-such message. In any event, there were lots of choices to scroll through but it was all quite clear what was going on on this response window for defining an Information Link. You simply chose what you wanted and then closed the definitions window. [Mr. Calkins chose that a Word document be shown to the user if “documents” was clicked on.]
7.) Then Mr. Calkins moved the cursor to just after the words “Data entry”. He didn't highlight any text, just left the cursor resting after those words. Then he did a right-click and again a pop-up menu appeared. Same as before, there were standard word processing choices, but one special choice: “Data Link...”.
8.) He chose “Data Link...” and similar to before, a response window appeared allowing you to define the data-style for user input. There were many styles, such as radio button, checkbox, mask, et cetera. As a programmer, I understood what was going on. The window was asking you to define the input style of the data you were to receive from the user in run-time mode. Calkins chose radio-buttons and defined the buttons to say “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe”.
9.) Next, Mr. Calkins clicked a “play” button on the screen to put our small little document into run-time mode. Now I was seeing what Visual Worker would be like. Sure enough, when he clicked on “documents” in the sentence “Reference documents” it jumped to the Word document he had pre-selected.
10.) He closed the Word document and we were still in run-time mode. Next, the attention turned to the radio-buttons. I could clearly see how the radio-buttons would work. The user would choose “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe” and that would become part of the data for the document. It was all becoming so clear and simple: A user (with Visual Worker) is out in the field with his/her laptop and runs a document created with Visual Builder. All sorts of questions come up (remember, Visual Builder is mainly a word processor, so the questions just get typed in) and after each question is one of these Data Link fields to hold the answer (perhaps it's a radio-button answer, a checkbox, an edit field, etc.).
Demo over! Well, I mean Mr. Calkins did show me many more whiz-bang features (like how you can write an email to the author, or how you can program an Information Link to be voice activated) but the gist of how it all worked in its essense had been shown. Very simple, yet very powerful.
The answers, or the data, for each document are held in a Microsoft Access database file. I asked Mr. Calkins if the laptop needed to have Microsoft Access on it and would it have to be running in the background. The answer to both of these was no. Visual Writer comes with the MS Access engine built into it. Pacel had to get some sort of arrangement with Microsoft for this feature. Anyway, MS Access may be the database behind the scenes, but I tell you it was all transparent to the user.
To complete the picture of how the workflow goes, a user in the field (again, with his Visual Worker) fills in all the answers and then saves the document. When he comes back to the main office, he uploads the data into the main system. Paperless workflow from the field to the central database.
I asked Mr. Calkins how companies (or, more realistically, government agencies) are currently solving their business needs (since many, of course, are not using Visual Writer). The answer is that they go out into the field with paper (forms, documents, etc.) and return with the appropriate papers filled out. They hand these papers off to a data-entry person, who then puts it into an automated system (e.g., Oracle database/PowerBuilder front-end).
The Visual Writer system was originally invented to satisfy needs in the Energy sector. In that field there are a ton of regulations and everything must be documented. If I understand the story correctly, Calkins asked someone in the Energy field, “If we build a system that handles all your regulatory workflow without paper, would you want that?” and the answer was a resounding, “Yes! We would buy that!”. And Visual Writer came to be born.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've written a lot for the day and my discourse on Visual Writer as a product to be marketed will have to wait for another day.
Chris
|
