Tikit releases Template Management System v6

Global News

01
Oct
2013

Editor

The latest version of Tikit's Template Management System (TMS v6) was released on Thursday at the BT Tower, London - a complete redesign of the previous award-winning version. Template Management has traditionally been about helping firms manage multiple templates across multiple languages, in multiple offices. Tikit have a good reputation for this, with plenty of firms in the top 100 using their software, including 6 in the top 20.

Mark Garnish, Development Director, Tikit commented “One of the difficulties with template deployment in general is that most firms want so much from their standard templates, including integration with document management systems, CRM system and even PMS systems. When they want to provide several options to users, (sometimes involving complex VBA or C# dialogues), what results is the need to get developers involved to provide the functionality required. This restricts firms when it comes to rolling out new versions of Office (and many firms are upgrading to Office 2010 or 2013 now) as they cannot take advantage of the latest native features of Office without redeveloping their templates - often at great expense”.

Tikit have addressed this issue with their “no code” approach to template development in TMS v6. They claim to have reduced deployment times of template solutions by in excess of 75%. 

Whilst TMS v6 still supports traditional dialogues (albeit using XAML based designers rather than traditional Winforms), Tikit have made extensive use of the native Office content controls and the MS Office task pane. This is a new approach which allows users to take advantage of the latest features of MS Office whilst retaining control of their templates. Tikit carried out focus meetings early in 2012 to ask firms how they wanted to use MS Office if there weren't any restrictions and this was one of the key findings.

The flexibility of TMS v6 is based around Tikit's use of Windows Workflow allowing users to determine how their template workflow should be designed - again all without code.

Unsurprisingly, given Tikit's recent promotion of a new way of time recording (capturing time as the work is done rather than immediately afterwards or at the end of the day / week), TMS v6 integrates with time recording software and also has an “activity” as part of its workflow which allows users to automatically post time spent as a result of creating a document. This reduces the time taken to capture the details and makes sure that time is captured immediately.

TMS v6 includes native connectivity to any document management system with specific additional connectors for iManage and InterAction and several more planned including SharePoint.