ActivePatch is much more than a simple collection of executable programs which are used to generate and apply patches. It is a complete software development kit for both creating and applying patches. As a developer, you are not limited to using an external utility to build or apply the patch, and you do not need to learn a proprietary scripting language. Instead, you can use your own favorite programming language to build and apply the updates that you've created. If you choose, the patch application process can be built directly into your software, providing a seamless updating experience for your end-users, ensuring that they always have the latest version of your product.

While software updates are the most common application for ActivePatch, patching technology has a wide variety of uses beyond software updates. For example, consider an application that uses a Microsoft Access database and a collection of Excel spreadsheets. This application is used both within the corporation and remotely by a sales staff using laptop computers that do not always have Internet access. To update their laptops, each evening they would download updated versions of the database and spreadsheets from their company FTP server. Even when compressed, the database is several megabytes and requires a significant amount of time to download over a dial-up Internet connection. The developers responsible for maintaining this application want to reduce the download times, and have a couple of options. One would be to write new code which would extract those changed database records, publish them to the server and then write additional code on the client side to integrate those modified records back into the local database. The other solution would be to use ActivePatch to generate patches of the database and spreadsheets, and distribute them as packages. Because ActivePatch works at the byte level and may be used with any type of file, there is no concern about modifying the existing application code. In fact, the software that actually downloads and updates the local system could be written as a completely separate module. The end result is a simpler, faster implementation that has all of the flexibility of a custom-built solution without the inherent complexity. It also significantly reduces network usage, which results in a lighter load on the servers and reduced operation costs.

So regardless of whether you're updating software, databases, word processing documents or any other type of file, ActivePatch can be used to save money, time, network bandwidth and resources.