.NET Smart Clients

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The next generation in business value

Combining the usability benefits and power of rich clients with the manageability of thin clients, smart clients represent the next generation in business value for your organization. Smart client applications provide support for offline use, enable advanced data management, and seamlessly integrate into users' normal computing environments and workflows.

Traditionally, Windows applications have been somewhat difficult to deploy and update, and web applications have tended to be clunky, server-dependent, and slow. We help companies build smart client applications to get the best of both worlds without the problems of either.

Smart client capabilities

Unlike browser-based applications, smart client applications live on your PC, laptop, Tablet PC, or smart device, and they can operate remotely via Internet connection or in disconnected mode.

Easy to deploy and manage, smart client applications provide an adaptive, responsive, and rich interactive experience by intelligently connecting users' desktop computers to remote data sources. Smart clients also give you the following:

  • Ability to leverage local resources
    They provide rich, responsive applications by taking full advantage of your local software and hardware.
  • Connectivity
    They provide applications that are connected to your enterprise, giving you timely access to live and relevant data, and allow applications to take part in business and collaborative processes.
  • Offline capabilities
    They provide useful functionality when offline or in low-quality connectivity situations, allowing your users to remain productive.
  • Intelligent deployment and update capabilities
    They provide easy management of applications, allowing for seamless deployment and updating, while retaining the benefits of thin client architectures.
  • Device flexibility
    They provide applications that are tuned or tailored to specific client devices, making appropriate use of screen real estate, user interface facilities, and local hardware.

Your business and technology benefits

With smart clients, you can better extract, consume, analyze, and distribute information to help streamline business processes, make better decisions, and improve operational control. Your company realizes numerous benefits:

  • Increased productivity
    Move beyond viewing information in a browser and remain productive, even while disconnected from the network.
  • Expanded access
    Make data available at employees' fingertips so they can glean insights, make better decisions, and anticipate changes. Smart clients enable you to move beyond the "one client/one application" approach. They can easily access XML data from web services, line-of-business (LOB) applications, and legacy systems.
  • Reduced training
    Smart clients give your employees a familiar user interface, like Microsoft Word or Excel, which reduces costs and time for retraining.
  • Ability to develop better user experiences
    You can deliver rich user experiences by taking advantage of local PC resources. By building smart clients, you can now create user experiences that were impossible within the web browser — and with the same ease of deployment as web-based applications.
  • Reduced operating costs
    You can remotely deploy smart client applications with little effort, reducing your overhead and some of the strain on your IT resources. By utilizing the powerful processor and resources on the local client, smart clients offload much of the processing to currently underutilized PC processors.

Four ways smart clients can help

Smart clients are really a way to join the best of the thick client with the best of the thin client. You can develop an endless number of smart client solutions. We've highlighted four typical ways that our clients use Office XML smart clients, so you can see how they might help in your organization:

1. Streamlining and integrating access to enterprise systems

With a smart client front-end, line of business (LOB) applications within your enterprise can deliver improved usability, performance, and responsiveness. The smart client integrates information from disparate enterprise systems into a single user interface that can match your users' normal workflows. The complexity of the LOB back-end is hidden from users — they see only the enterprise data that is relevant to their activities, enabling them to take action faster and make better decisions.

2. Empowering the mobile field

Smart clients are ideal if your business users depend on information even though they're only occasionally connected to your corporate network. There are many situations where your remote workers (i.e., your mobile sales force, repairmen, or technicians) cannot be guaranteed reliable network access. For these workers, the use of smart clients and mobile devices helps increase productivity. They can access critical data on your company systems, bring data offline and to remote locations, and synchronize and make updates or modifications to that data when they regain connectivity.

3. Integrating Office XML documents in enterprise workflow

Smart clients enable a streamlined document creation process, facilitate the incorporation of line of business (LOB) information into documents, and integrate into your enterprise workflow through the use of XML and web services.

4. Delivering a smart client (enhanced web) experience

Smart clients provide the highly interactive and engaging user experience your customers increasingly demand from web properties. While the browser experience delivered by HTML has inherent limitations, smart clients deliver a differentiated experience — richer user interfaces, greater responsiveness, and enhanced functionality — while maintaining the benefits of centralized deployment and management.