Comstor, Herndon, VA

Comstor is the world’s largest reseller of Cisco products, with over 3,000 agents worldwide. Comstor was in need of a lightweight reseller solution specifically in Microsoft Access that would allow the agents to store, generate and manage their customized quotes for customers on an ongoing basis. The Access database would require regular pricing updates from a server managed by Comstor. Additionally, the tool was required to generate all quotes to agent customers in a Microsoft Excel format for portability reasons as well as a statement of work that was generated in Microsoft Word. The solution would reside on over 3000 laptops and provide the agent with the capability of generating an accurate quote on the fly to their customers.

The DRG development team responded with an elegant solution that supported Microsoft Access versions 97, 2000, and XP/2003. With over 3,000 agents participating, our team found it necessary to incorporate a unique updater solution that would allow an administrator to provide new and updated copies of the database as well as pricing data in a completely transparent methodology to the reseller. The solution could custom generate a quote from the MS Access database into MS Excel and a statement of work document in MS Word in seconds! The total time savings for Comstor agents were enormous – taking the quote generation time down from 20 minutes to under 2 minutes!

Initial paradigm: Word Document, Excel Spreadsheet(s)
Solution paradigm: Client, MS Access with VB bootstrap updater

Rich quote generation form


The resulting quote, in Microsoft Excel