Merging Process Data into Word Documents

By: Lachlan Aldred

h3. Scenario

We want to send a tailored MS Word Document to the production print house for each meeting invitee, as part of a CRM process.

The obvious challenge is to ensure that each customer is sent content in that Word document that is relevant to them. The hidden challenge is how to do it with the minimum amount of custom coding, and at an appropriate level of abstraction suitable for business analysts; as opposed to application developers.

As a template we can use an MS Word document containing mergefields.

!StartForm.jpg!

Note that the MS word template shows that the mergefields refer to dynamic information such as the specifics about the attendees and about the meeting.

h3. The Initial Form

The details about the meeting and each attendee are entered in as part of the workflow form shown below:

!Form.jpg!

To configure the Word Manipulation step we have identified:

# An MS Word template containing MergeFields - these are special markers inside the MS Word document that identify exactly where the data is to be merged. They can be created using MS Word.
# A mapping from customer data into the particular Mergefields in the MS Word Template.
# Finally we have elected an output location that receives the newly created MS Word document created.

h3. Resulting Document

!FinForm.jpg!

The result of executing this process is shown above. Note that the data entered into the initial process form is now merged into the MS-Word template.

h3. Obtaining Word Manipulation

An archived copy of this process will be released once Avoka releases the Word Manipulation component. For more info contact [mailto:sales@avoka.com?subject=WordManipulationComponent]

The MS Word template we are using is available from [here|^DemoDocument.doc]. NOTE: that the process expects this MS Word template to be found at C:\demo\BristolMyers\input\DemoDocument.doc and make sure that you have created a directory called C:\demo\BristolMyers\output in whic the process can save the created documents.


This process is, of course a toy example. In actuality the first two steps would be replaced with a database query that builds a list of customers.