US developer Windward claims to have come up with  a document creation and management tool that extends the native capabilities of SharePoint and turns it into a “unified, comprehensive and easy-to-use system.”

The complete solution is composed of three parts: the AutoTag tool for designing document templates, the Windward engine for generating documents, and Windward's open-source SharePoint add-in, Arrow, which offers additional SharePoint functionality such as scheduling and version control.

"It's rare that the code for a full-blown commercial product is turned over to the end users – but that's exactly what we did here," said David Thielen, Windward's founder and CTO. "We made Arrow open source so users are better able to customise it to work with their unique SharePoint setups."

Designing, formatting, and editing documents takes place in familiar Microsoft Office programs; and users can schedule items to be created and run automatically, so documents are being generated while they're working on other business tasks.

The scheduler offers a range of options and timetables, allowing documents to be generated daily, yearly, and anywhere in between. And because the Arrow component is open source, users and SharePoint consultants can tweak the code so it easily accomplishes tasks critical for their organizations.

For more information on Windward's SharePoint docgen tools, please visithttp://www.windward.net/sharepoint_docgen.php