ToolTwist Software Development Solution

Customers

Every customer is different. Corporations are always looking for ways to differentiate their products and services, and as a result the IT needs of each corporation vary. To sell your enterprise application effectively, customers must be able to modify your application for their specific needs.

ToolTwist provides enormous benefits to the customers of an Enterprise level softare package.

In the past, customers wanting to alter the way a package works have often needed a source code license for the product. To modify the source code to do what they want, they've had to replicate the skills of the software vendor and become familiar with the internals of the application. This is usually a costly and risky endeavour with significant implications for support. Modifying the source code also has a serious repercussions on the time and effort required to upgrade to future versions of the package.

With a ToolTwist-based application however, customers alter the way that the package works with an incremental approach. In effect, they say - "Do what the basic product does, but do this differently". Customisations can be developed and tested using the ToolTwist Customisation Environment, without access to the source code, and in many cases without the need to write any code.

Modifications to a package are loaded into UAT and production environments in a safe and controlled manner using Plugin Archives. A Plugin Archive contains all the code, configuration files, data model definitions and other changes required to modify the behaviour of the original application. However, they do this by overriding the base application, not by altering it. This is a significant difference.

The biggest advantage of this approach is seen when the customer wishes to upgrade the application. Since the customisations are defined in an incremental manner, the same plugin archives can be applied to the new version. In many cases, customisations can be installed immediately with zero need to repeat the customisation work. This is great news for customers and vendors alike.

Benefits

• Customizers can concentrate on one area of the application, without potentially corrupting other areas of the application.
• Customizers require a lower skill set than if they were modifying the full application.
• Customers can upgrade, and in most cases retain all their customisations, without doing any extra work. There is usually no need to repeat customisation work after an upgrade.
• The vendor can still support the customised version of their product, since it's easy to determine if any bugs lie in the base product, or are introduced by a plugin archive.

The end result is that faster, safer customisations can be performed, the vendor can support the customised product, and new releases can be installed without repeating customisation work.