Doug Mahugh wrote some very nice things about myself and our new case study:

PSC Group LLC is a Chicago-area professional services consulting firm, a Microsoft Gold Partner, an IBM partner, and active in a wide range of technology services and projects.  I’ve gotten to know John Head, PSC’s Director of Enterprise Collaboration, fairly well through DII workshops and other activities, where he is a perennial force to be reckoned with.  John’s a hands-on expert and is definitely not the kind of guy who ever leaves you wondering what he really thinks -- it’s great to get that kind of direct informed feedback when we participate in DII events.

One of PSC’s clients is RDI (Research Director, Inc.), a Maryland-based radio-research consulting firm that analyzes, interprets and presents Arbitron audience research data for over 200 radio stations.  RDI came to PSC with a problem: they had been using the same custom system for 10 years, and their needs had grown so much that it was taking three weeks to build the presentations they needed to generate each quarter.  As Marc Greenspan of RDI explains, “Taking three weeks to process the data was no longer an option.  By the time we’d be done, the next set of data would be coming in, and the presentations would be close to useless to our customers. We needed a scalable, sustainable production system, and our motivation was literally business survival.”

PSC developed a custom Open XML solution for RDI that now delivers these same reports in just three days, enabling RDI to offer its analyses 13 times per year instead of 4 times per year, and dramatically reducing the cost of generating their analysis.  John Head explains that “We were able to improve the application performance so drastically by not having to automate PowerPoint, because it’s not involved until the user actually opens the file.  We couldn’t have done that without Open XML. We couldn’t support document generation on the server with binary formats. It was too hard and it didn’t always work. Open XML changed that.”

There’s a new case study on our web site about the system that John’s team has built for RDI.  It’s a good example of how the world of automated document assembly is rapidly changing with the advent of standardized XML-based document formats.  I had the opportunity to learn about this system early on, when the PSC team gave us a demo in Redmond last year, and it’s great to see it rolled out and in production.

Thanks Doug! And don't worry I will do my best to continue to be a "perennial force" at future DII events :-)