Trade secret.

IPC Systems provides innovative trading technology and networking solutions to financial marketplaces around the world. Investment banks and hedge funds of all sizes rely on IPC’s dealerboards and turrets for quick, seamless communication.

Search party.

At IPC, employees at all levels of the company use Microsoft Outlook to respond to inquiries about customers, purchase orders, support tickets, and invoices. Finding the relevant documents, however, can be time-consuming since they are stored in different databases. To increase productivity, IPC employees need a way to find this information without leaving the Outlook interface.

Exactly what they’re looking for.

SD wrote a VSTO plugin that lets IPC employees search for files in multiple databases directly from Outlook. Search results are displayed in a custom sidebar that we built with WPF technology. It displays orders, projects, customer names, invoice numbers, and support ticket IDs, along with the latest field alerts, knowledge base articles, and KPI reports.

WPF is a great language for this type of interactive interface because it can build user-friendly tools like “drag-and-drop.” The tiered architecture of the plugin we created is flexible enough to accommodate this functionality in future phases of the project. It allows us to incorporate additional search facets without having to test for group policy deployment each time.

Positive findings.

Over 100 of IPC’s employees are currently using the Outlook Toolbar, and we’ve received positive feedback from all levels of the company. We are currently planning a roadmap for developing additional features, so stay tuned.