Frequently Asked Questions

Alphinat SmartGuide makes it easy to deal with an organization. It allows building interactive tools that guide customers, partners and employees through complex procedures, tasks and information silos. By helping people quickly get things done, SmartGuide drives greater cost-effectiveness, customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

Alphinat SmartGuide is designed for organizations that are looking to increase the quality and cost effectiveness of service delivery.

The public sector, healthcare, banking, insurance and retail industries can benefit from the SmartGuide technology to cost-effectively modernize and automate a wide range of business processes at a fraction of the cost of traditional custom-built solutions.

Alphinat SmartGuide allows building a wide range of people-centric applications. For instance, you can use SmartGuide to:

• Create self-service tools and online troubleshooters to reduce the load on your call center;
• Automate your forms-based processes for better compliance rates and efficiency;
• Create guided searches that deliver 100% relevant information - twice the industry average!
• Build mashups and composite applications that unify disparate information and processes;
• Dynamically generate PDF files from collected data - making it possible to create personalized documents without the need for a specialized application;
• Build multi-step surveys;
• Reduce sales costs by building product configuration guides, calculators, quote generators and assisted selling solutions.

Alphinat SmartGuide requires much less time and ressources to build people-centric applications resulting in a better return on investment.

People-centric applications

• Make it easy to deal with an organization;
• Allow presenting a single face to constituents and masking any hidden complexity and silos;
• Drastically improve user adoption, conformance and satisfaction rates.

50-66% reduction in development cost and time

• Much less code to write thanks to SmartGuide Designer that allows non-technical personnel to be fully involved in the application building process;
• Maximizes and extracts unrealized value from existing applications and systems through its SOA (service oriented architecture) approach.

Interoperability

• Strict adherence to standards and norms;
• Platform-agnostic;
• Very portable, allowing you to reuse applications developed with SmartGuide even in the event of a platform or infrastructure change.

Alphinat SmartGuide logically divides tasks related to building applications:

• Content, business logic and rules can be managed by knowledge workers with SmartGuide Designer;
• The SmartGuide API allows developers to create custom functionalities;
• Graphic and web designers can create presentation templates using a familiar technology such as JSP, ASP or XSLT.

Alphinat SmartGuide can be deployed as servlets or portlets in a J2EE environment as well as in a .NET environment. There is no feature-lag between versions.

The system requirements vary according to the platform on which SmartGuide is deployed and to the type of user that is accessing it. Please consult the system requirements page for more information.

SmartGuide's SOA (service oriented architecture) approach allows maximizing the value of existing systems and services by simplifying their reuse within people-centric applications.

The SmartGuide suite also natively supports web services, extension functions and XML files which accelerate bi-directional integration with disparate systems. The same data, content and processes can therefore be reused across an unlimited number of applications.