Powerful Contract Management Software Contract Assistant

Powerful Contract Management Software Contract Assistant is affordable, feature-filled software that's easy to install, learn and use. Our Standard, PRO and Enterprise Contract Management Editions provide contract management software for any size organization or budget. With Contract Assistant you can quickly access important information, generate reports, receive automatic reminders of critical dates and more. Enterprise Contract Management System Contract Assistant Enterprise Edition, is our most comprehensive, powerful contract management solution. Scalable for Large Installations - Same Intuitive User Interface - Multi-Level Security - Email Notification of Alarms - Full-Text Searching - Custom Reporting - and More Product Information | Request a Demo | Request Free Trial Multi-user Contract Management Software Contract Assistant PRO Edition allows 5 networked users access to your company's Contract Assistant database. Additional user licenses available. Multi-User Version - Same Intuitive User Interface - More Features - More Power Product Information | Request a Demo | Request Free Trial Single-User Contract Software Contract Assistant Standard Edition provides easy-to use tools to help save time, organize contract information in one place and manage contract details with confidence. Affordable, Single-User Version - Flexible - Intuitive Interface. Featured Contract Management Software Contract Assistant by Blueridge Software ( 4 reviews ) Contract Assistant is affordable, feature filled software that's easy to use. With Contract Assistant you can quickly access important information, generate reports, receive automatic reminders of critical dates and more. Standard, PRO and Enterprise editions are designed to help individuals, small to mid-sized businesses, and large enterprises manage all types of contracts and agreements with confidence. More Links: Download Free Trial Product Information Request Online Demo Novatus Contracts by Novatus ( 2 reviews ) Novatus' contract management software provides sophisticated control and visibility for every contract type and industry. Known for ease of use, fast deployment, competitive costs, and customer support. SOX, HIPAA, GLB contract compliance. Proven contract data migration methods. SaaS or On-Premises delivery. Integrate to financial systems to enforce financial terms. Built by contract managers and known industry leaders. Demo systems available for customer access. More Links: Schedule a Demo More Information Contact Us Find Out More EnterpriseWizard by EnterpriseWizard ( rate this product ) EnterpriseWizard has everything needed to manage your company's contracts while integrating contract information into your other processes. Whether you supply service contracts to your customers or receive service contracts from vendors, EnterpriseWizard makes it easy to manage the contract workflow and to integrate contracts into related processes, such as customer support, asset management, and sales with no per module costs. Web-based, SaaS 3.0, fully customizable, robust feature set.

The good news is, you probably already know. The bad news is, you probably know too much. This article describes Service Oriented Architecture in a simple and easy to understand way that is devoid of buzzwords and vendor spin. It’s the introduction to SOA that you haven’t been able to find anywhere else. There are things in a business that don’t change very often. Gas stations in the U.S., for example, still sell gasoline by the gallon. Restaurants still sell meals from a menu. Dentists still sell cleanings every 6 months. Every business has these aspects that don’t change very frequently. They often represent a huge part of the business. We’ll call these things the _core business functions. There are other things in a business that change very frequently. Prices, tax rates, catalogs, new products, new marketing campaigns, advertising, new business areas, new customer areas, etc. Indeed, businesses must be able to change, and change quickly, in order to survive. And yet, it is vital that those changes do not adversely affect the core business functions. Software developers have known for years that software that changes frequently should be decoupled from software that changes infrequently. When applied to individual programs and systems this principle is sometimes called The Common Closure Principle. When it is applied to the information management of an enterprise, it is called SOA. SOA is the practice of sequestering the core business functions into independent services that don’t change frequently. These services are glorified functions that are called by one or more presentation programs. The presentation programs are volatile bits of software that present data to, and accept data from, various users. To make this clear, imagine an internet store-front. Customers use a browser to talk to the presentation software that displays the store’s website. The presentation software interprets the gestures of the customer and invokes services that do things like acquiring the data for the current catalog, or registering the customer’s order. Note that the services have no idea they are talking to a website. They could just as well be talking to a thick client, or a 3270 green screen. They simply accept and return data in a standard format that the web system happens to be able to use. That’s really all there is to it. The rest of SOA is just a matter of details. At the highest level, SOA is nothing more (and nothing less) than separating changeable elements from unchangeable elements. But why is this important? Consider that internet store-front again. It presents the user with a catalog, allows the user to move items into, and out of a shopping cart, and accepts the eventual order. The presentation of these concepts is very volatile. Marketing people are likely to want to change it frequently. For example, they might want to change from a shopping cart metaphor to scrollable receipt on the sidebar. They may wish to present more or less descriptive data in the product list. They may want to experiment with different colors, font-faces, and layouts. Indeed, it’s feasible that they’ll want to try applets, JStart clients, Ajax, and a myriad of other presentation options. But none of this has anything to do with the core business functions encapsulated by the services. Those services that acquire catalogs and register orders remain unchanged despite all the presentation thrashing. That’s why the separation is important. It protects the information processing assets of the business from the constant jitter and spin of the presentation. But presentation is not the only thing that jitters and spins. So do the business processes. Again, consider our store-front. Perhaps our business has decided to offer fine wines as one of the products it sells. Selling alcohol requires that the age of the customer be verified. Let us say that we have a service that provides this verification. This service must be called for any order that contains alcohol products. The decision to call this service is neither a presentation decision, nor a service decision. Rather it is part of the business process for a particular kind of order. Business processes are volatile and they breed like rabbits. As businesses evolve they add more and more steps and forks to their business processes. The services being used by those processes don’t change much; but the pathways through the processes do. Therefore we want to separate the business process from the services and from the presentation. Smalltalkers had a name for this separation when it appeared in a single program. They called it Model-View-Controller. Notice that we have yet to mention even one of the plethora of technologies that are so commonly associated with SOA. That’s because SOA is not about any particular technology. Rather it is a design philosophy that decouples well heeled business functions from volatile processes and presentations. It is the MVC of enterprise software. In my next blog on this topic, we’ll look at the next level of detail in an attempt to understand HOW services can be constructed, and how the decoupling of presentation, process, and functions can be achieved.

Soa

SOA ROI: FASTER, PROVEN—WITH THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY Few executives and their IT leaders dispute the necessity of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as they seek the holy grail of business agility. In fact, businesses that have adopted the right SOA infrastructure and started their SOA with the right business-change projects are experiencing significant business agility breakthroughs: returns on their SOA projects in weeks or months rather than the traditional enterprise initiative timeframe, measured in years. For example: Starwood Hotels achieved dramatic improvements in its “look-to-book” ratio— the relationship between room availability inquiries (look) and room reservations (book). The company developed an SOA infrastructure to ensure that Web site visitors known to be more likely to book rooms at individual hotel Web sites were serviced with higher priority than those shopping for price at aggregation sites like hotels.com. As a result, the company increased the number of full-price reservations by 10%, reduced IT costs by 35%, and raised satisfaction ratings from its most important customers. Using an SOA, Axfood, a retail company with 1300 stores across Europe, reduced its replenishment cycle time (the time it takes to replace an item purchased in a retail store from supplier to store shelf) from three days to two, decreasing its annual costs by $10-to-$15 million. Pacific Blue Cross dramatically improved its business performance in two key process areas: payments and member enrollment. Pre-SOA, payments processing took three-to-four days, and enrollment took five. Now, payments are processed within a day, and new member enrollment takes less than three days to complete. Customer service levels have also improved because of visibility into process bottlenecks and automatic problem remediation. THE “RIGHT STUFF” FOR FASTER SOA ROI Clearly, the right SOA technologies are the fuel accelerating visible and strategic business change projects within the enterprise. In fact, this repeated proof of near-term return on investment is driving the move to SOA. But the key to receiving optimal—and faster—breakthroughs is making the right choices about infrastructure to support a new SOA design center. How can you start on an SOA now, begin to get the benefits, and build a solid foundation for future SOA growth and escalating benefits? Copyright ©2007. Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved. 3 DISTRIBUTED BUSINESS PROCESSES, HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEMS Getting an SOA right isn’t obvious or easy. Today’s extended enterprises are distributed. Business processes execute across functions, organizations, and geographies and involve suppliers, partners, and customers. In the middle of these enterprises are numerous heterogeneous platforms, systems, applications, databases, and networks. The challenge is to connect the people, processes, and technology: to keep them working together, yet make them flexible and responsive to changing business needs. In other words, you need optimal integration and interoperability—to be able to integrate functionality from the existing IT environment, including silo’ed legacy systems, and to be open to business and IT evolution tomorrow. Since business change is now the norm, and adapting to change is critical to winning, you need IT agility to support business agility . WEB SERVICES AND SOA INFRASTRUCTURE: THE FLEXIBLE CONNECTION Web services or business services and the SOA infrastructure that manages them promise to provide this new level of integration and agility. Services are coarse-grained units of business logic, developed on a wide variety of development platforms and deployed throughout the extended enterprise. They are ready to be orchestrated in real time, dynamically reconfigured, and artfully managed through lifecycles involving an unprecedented frequency of changes. However, companies need the right SOA infrastructure to truly support the business and deliver on the SOA promise of business agility and lower IT costs. This infrastructure should be able to support a high-change environment—as well as the broadest possible service deployment for enterprise-wide SOA adoption. That means that it must fundamentally be integration-centric: to make fast, seamless, reliable connections across heterogeneous systems (including legacy computing resources) and link people, functions, and computing resources distributed across and, often, beyond enterprise boundaries. As a result, as you develop plans for an SOA within the enterprise and decide on a strategic technology partner, you need to focus on several critical issues related to the flexible, fastchanging, cross-boundary nature of SOAs—to realize the full potential of your SOA. You need optimal integration and interoperability to be able to integrate functionality from the existing IT environment. Copyright ©2007. Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.