Quadrus was awarded Microsoft's MEC 2000 Solutions Award for Best Exchange 2000 Solution by a Partner for our work done with Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) on this project.
CPR is one of North America's largest railway systems with a history dating back to the 1880s when it completed Canada's first transcontinental railroad. With offices located across the globe, CPR's environment is indeed distributed. Understandably, it has amassed an epic collection of documents over the last 120 years—maintaining this collection has been no small feat.
CPR understood the benefits of developing an Internet-based document library system to improve the access and organization of its internal documents. As such, Quadrus was engaged to create a prototype using a pre-release version of Microsoft Exchange 2000. But CPR wanted more than just to web-enable their document library system. All operations against the document library needed to be handled solely through a browser, increasing organization of documents and ease of access. Users needed to be able to search for, open, edit, and save documents, all from the Internet. The solution also needed to incorporate collaboration tools and messaging functionality, and demanded stringent security requirements.
Elements of Exchange 2000 were extended and adapted to suit CPR's specific needs. Quadrus developed a custom navigation bar and viewer which permitted access to the document library as well as other Exchange items such as Inbox and Calendar. Outlook's Deleted Items folder was adapted to allow familiar deletion and recovery of files and extended drag-and-drop support to allow copying items between different database stores and even different clustered servers.
The traditional Outlook Web Access toolbar was also extended. The new version performed all the traditional tasks, plus additional functionality. Users could now search for documents, filter a list of documents, edit and save documents using the native Microsoft Office application, and send a document as an attachment in a mail message.
The net effect was a document library system that allowed employees to easily browse through a list of documents, search for a particular item, attach an item to an email message, or drag-and-drop it to another location in the library. This was truly an award-winning project using and enhancing features of a product that was, at that time, a leading-edge tool.