Take a look at the WPF App I wrote

philz1982

So, my sales people have been complaining how hard it is to create a proposal and that they don't have time. Well, I recently had surgery and had a few days off. So during this time I decided to teach myself WPF and created an application that allows the sales person to enter some data and to create a proposal document based on a template document.

I have included my GitHub, video, and blog link below. I'm not making anything off this, all the code is free. I just thought you all might find it interesting.

Github Source
Video
Blog

Let me know what you think. If you have any questions feel free to PM me.

-Phil

Iristheangel

Interesting. One thing I have a question on is the sales proposal process. I would assume it has to have more than just the customer information and financial data, no? Typically, in a sales proposal a customer might want to see some of the following:
- Different choices and pricing
- Comparisons
- A personalized plan
- Business objectives
- Deliverables
- Why your company - since they might be getting multiple proposals from other companies
...and more.

I took a look through that video and it seems pretty interesting in concept but the fields added are pretty basic. It probably would account for an outline or the beginning of a sales proposal that gives the hard numbers but 80-90% of the content and the sales aspect should be personalized for the customer. I'm not sure if there's an "easy" way to automate something like that and have it still be effective or without sounding too generic. It's a good exercise though and definitely a way to think outside the box

Cyberscum

Very interesting. Long vid, but very informative. Would be interesting to see how many variables and comparisons can be added for actual business usage. All in all very well done!

philz1982

@ Iris,

Completely agree, the real application that I built out has multiple different selection options based on boolean flags that then trigger either switches or if statements that populate text. Additionally this is not an engineered solution but rather a turn key product. In the case of an engineered solution this application would be less practical. However, for turnkey solutions that require little engineering this creates a quick way to generate proposals.

As for the business objectives and competitive marketing, that is built into the word template and rarely changes.

The sky is the limit on complexity, I am working on a version of this tool for the Cisco Energy Manager integration we developed and am trying to figure a way to pull all of the Cisco CEM License options into a drop down selection box. I am thinking I will build a table based DB that has does an initial population of the data and then does a monthly sync to refresh values.

The cool thing is that I have gotten into smart buildings and my next application I am hoping to take the NEST, Philips, and GE Lighting API's and pull them into the application to create a converged Smart Building Management GUI. That is the next app I am going to put up on git and I will be working on that over the next several weeks.

Thanks for watching the video. How's you're blog going?

-Phil

Iristheangel

My blog is going well. Almost 20 posts in and I still have about 250 pages of content I still need to translate over to more posts when I have time. Time being the key issue. I'm a week behind on a class I'm taking so that takes priority

philz1982

@ Cyber,

Thanks! I orginally had it broken up into 3 videos but I got tired of waiting for Camtasia to upload them so I consolidated it into one video. I am going to modify the git source to add a few changes and record a video about it. Mainly I will focus on validation, using boolean checkboxes to trigger Switches and If Loops, and drop down menus for variable pricing.

Once you have the skeleton in place adding meat in the form of XAML elements for the GUI or back-end functions is pretty easy.

I also need to do a video on how to setup GIT for VS and how to setup the VS installer to create an executable.

philz1982

@ Iris,

Ya, the blog is a time sync, especially if you want it to look decent, that's why mine looks so Ghetto . I gotta say, I met a lot of cool people through my blog so keep at it, its worth it.

Iristheangel

Well... I've already had a couple training sites offer me money to write for their blogs but it's a conflict of interest with my current employer. It's just something fun on the side I can do and I can share it out with clients who I know are going to need help configuring this stuff. Plus it helps the community

philz1982

@Iris

Yep that's why I started I get to learn stuff and help folks out at the same time. I've been considering pod-casting but its a matter of taking the time to do it, that and the cost of adding another site subscription...