Project: Marketing Resource System

	Resource Matrix

Organization

Interactive Intelligence*, a manufacturer of business interaction management software for contact centers, enterprises, and service providers.

Project Description

The Marketing department at Interactive Intelligence routinely produced materials such as product feature lists, brochures, artwork, pricing guides, and more. However, these materials were not being stored in a central location, which made it difficult for salespeople and others to find the materials they needed. In addition, due to the ad-hoc method of distributing materials, there were occasions when obsolete versions were being used by people who were not aware that a new version had been released. Members of the Marketing department also found it difficult to keep track of which materials still needed to be produced for a given product or category.

	Admin Interface

Solution

The Marketing Resource System was created which met all of the Marketing department's needs. Features of the system included:

• Marketing materials were stored in a single, centralized location which made it easy for users to know where materials could be found.
• Materials were displayed in a spreadsheet-like matrix, making it simple to see at a glance which materials were available, and which ones still needed to be produced.
• Each available file was represented in the matrix by an icon that indicated its type. Hovering the mouse over the icon caused the file's date, size, and name to be displayed.
• Hyperlinks to internal and external web-based resources were also included. These resources could be simple web pages or pre-defined database queries that displayed data from the company's customer relationship management system.
• Some of the matrixes grew to be quite large. To facilitate easy resource location, users could click on row and column headings to highlight them in a bright yellow color.
• Updates to the structure of each matrix could be performed by Marketing personnel using a simple web-based form.
• Adding and updating files and hyperlinks simply required them to be dropped into the appropriate folders in the file system.
• To conserve server resources, each matrix was automatically updated each hour, or could be updated at any specific time with the click of a button.

The Marketing Resource System was created using ASP, extensive use of the Windows File System Object, HTML, and JavaScript.

Current Site

The document search system is an intranet application for internal use only.

* Unless otherwise noted, projects at Interactive Intelligence were performed by Paul Woods as a full-time employee of the company. See Paul's resume for details.