For most of our history, HFS specialized in Microsoft enterprise software. We built standalone and web-based applications, Microsoft Office solutions, enterprise databases and workflow and messaging systems that ran at Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and other Fortune 500 companies. That experience still shapes how we build today.
Microsoft Office as an application platform
Office is a full development platform that is already on every desktop, and employees already know how to use it. We built complete financial applications on it, including portfolio management and asset allocation models, and packaged them for company-wide deployment.
- Excel
- Enterprise spreadsheet applications that used Excel as the presentation and business logic layer, with user data kept in local databases and updates delivered as XML from the network, so a new pricing model could reach every salesperson at once.
- Outlook and Exchange
- Custom Outlook forms with built-in validation, routed through Exchange Server, replaced faxed and phoned-in processes such as course enrollment, sales forecasts, purchase requests and inventory reporting. Results flowed straight into a database for reporting.
- Access
- Database front ends and report switchboards that let people choose a report, set date ranges and sort orders in plain business terms, and run every report in a single batch.
COM add-ins
We built compiled COM add-ins for Excel and Outlook in Visual Basic and VB.NET. Compared with VBA macros they were more secure, faster, worked under high Outlook security settings and installed with a standard setup program. One Outlook add-in ran an entire newsletter subscription process, processing hundreds of incoming forms at a time. Our Excel add-in work produced US Patent 7,073,133.
Databases and reporting
Our database work spanned Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL and other enterprise databases, reached through ADO and ODBC. CDXSmartView, our standalone reporting application, paired a Visual Basic interface with Crystal Reports and exported to Excel, Word, PDF, HTML and XML.
Web and .NET
We built secure web applications in ASP and ASP.NET with ADO.NET, XML web services and SSL, AES and DES encryption. CDXWebSpace, our hosted client collaboration platform, gave each client a password-protected site for project discussions and encrypted file exchange.
Where it led
- Our Excel add-in work continues in CDXZipStream and CDXGeoStream.
- The same Microsoft experience runs through our current work on Azure and spreadsheet add-ins.