Well the time has finally come. In partnership with Digital Assistant Solutions, Sharp Notions is happy to announce a beta version of its first product is now available. Insurance Digital Assistant (I.D.A. for short) is an Insurance Agent’s Dream come true because I.D.A. takes insurance leads from multiple lead source providers, imports them, and then provides an easy to use management system for those leads. I.D.A. also sends out automated e-mails, keeps communication histories, expenses, and provides reports.

Find out more at IDAAssistant.com

Our Role

Our role with I.D.A. was simple: plan, design, build. Bi-weekly meetings and tons of iterations we arrived at our current beta state.

Technologies used to make I.D.A. work

Microsoft .Net 2.0 C#. We are a DotNet shop so this only makes sense for us to use it.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. SQL Server with a light footprint (1.40 megs), fast, and works great as I.D.A.’s database.

CastleProject.org’s ActiveRecord. Take a relation database server (i.e. SQL Server), create a few base classes, and your Database Access Layer is basically done. ActiveRecord was able saved us a ton of time in regards to development while providing great flexibility and very good sql statements.

Third Party Controls

We would like to say we built completely from scratch but that would be a lie. We used the following third party controls to save time and resources. We would like to thank them for their great products.

DevComponents’s DotNetBar

advancedintellect’s AspNetEmail, AspNetPop, and AspNetIMAP

DevExpress’s Scheduler Control

More to come

I.D.A. is only about half way done so there is a lot more to come but beta was designed in effort to get feedback on the current state of the program so we can move forward. Time frame for final release is currently scheduled for mid to late May 2007 which should give us a good amount of time to build the new stuff and fix any issues that may arise.