Volume III #20
IN THIS ISSUE:
A D M I N I S T R I V I A
A I V I R T S I N I M D A
The various 'fixes' include:
1. The SAFE Inactivity Timer now gives you a 30 second warning message before it automatically boots users out of the program. If you have SAFE open, but have been inactive for 9:30, a window pops up letting you know that, very soon, SAFE will exit. You are given the choice to cancel or to proceed with the Exit.
2. You can now select any e-mail address you like for E-Mailing any report or form in SAFE (unless the form is hard-wired to automatically send to a specific address.)
3. Several mysterious problems with the Query Window were eradicated. Big Thanks to everyone who provided detailed help on this. To those of you who simply sent flames: that's the spirit.
4. Before attempting to print tagging records, in several browses, SAFE would often tell you (incorrectly) that there were no tagged records. Now, before telling this lie, SAFE re-counts the tagged records to save you having to press the green Tag Counter and do it yourself.
The New Feature?
1. In the Sites browse, there is now a 'Location' tab which is visible when selecting a Customer Ship To Address. This allows you to instantly locate a customer's shipping address by Location (bank branch #, for example).
SAFE 4.2 New Features
1. Cost Center Identification of each order. You can now enter a cost center for each order which is automatically linked to a particular group of Contacts assigned to this Customer and Cost Center. Your Forms Management reports may be re-designed now to take advantage of this ability and subtotal by Cost Centers for each Customer!
2. You can also link orders to a particular Contact assigned to the selected Customer. Coupled with the new Cost Center feature, you now have a complete cost center management system when selling to larger customers with several orderers!
3. Numbered forms can now be tracked per release. So if you ship, for example, 200 checks to a particular location, you can review what the next starting number should be for that specific location within a larger organization!
4. There is now a separate customer value for each item you sell and release. In other words, you can assign a value to your customer's forms as they are released, which is independent of the price they actually paid for the item. This allows you to provide customized Customer Value reports for each customer which may be revised without affecting their sales history or your actual inventories!
5. User Specific Tagging can now be turned 'on' and 'off' for various modules. In other words, you can have User Specific Tagging for check printing, but global tagging for Sales Invoices!
6. You can now add Voided Checks directly to the Check Register. If you hand write a check and void it before it is entered into SAFE, you can now simply add the check into the Check Register as a Void without having to enter it, print it, then void it. Additionally, this may be done quickly for a whole range of checks. Say, for example, twenty checks are ruined because of water, you can enter the range 39000 to 39019 and void the complete list in a single step!
Check out the complete list of new SAFE 4.2 features by going to http://www.suntowersystems.com/new442.htm
.ThinSAFE Beta
3 Available. Pricing Set!
With the release of Beta 3, ThinSAFE now is quite near to final release. To review, ThinSAFE
is a thin client version of SAFE which allows users to run SAFE from virtually any machine
using the same interface as SAFE. The difference is that your machine is connected to your
main server over the Internet! This means that you have a real-time connection to SAFE no
matter where you are.
ThinSAFE works well even on slower computers and 56k modem connections, but with DSL or Cable Modems the performance is virtually indistinguishable from using SAFE in your office over a LAN! (In fact, we had to change the user interface slightly just to remind users that they are indeed, connected over the Internet and not using local data!)
ThinSAFE will be priced at $4,000 for unlimited users over a single Internet connection. Although ThinSAFE does not replace Remote Office Extensions, current ROX customers may receive a $495 credit for each office they wish to convert to ThinSAFE.
Our second beta is very stable and we are now simply optimizing for more speed before final release. As always, beta testers will recieve a substantial discount on the gold release in exchange for their vital help in polishing the product.
Editorial: Tragedy!
We had a fairly large customer in
Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I mean that literally, before September 11th, we had a
fairly large customer in WTC Ttower #2. On that date, the entire company simply
was no longer there. Except for one guy in a mini-van who was out making deliveries. For
some reason, this fact is what brought the tragedy home to me. Not just that some lives
were lost, but that an entire group of people and their surroundings could be instantly
removed from existence. They may as well all have been transported to Mars.
As many of you know, most of us are Irish citizens. Unlike Americans, we, (as does most of the world), have for a long time had first hand experience of terror and the irrational acts of extremism. In fact, at the same time the WTC was being blown up, in the Ardoyne neighborhood of Belfast, near where two of my partners were born and raised, a group of Catholic school children were kept from crossing the road to go to a new school on the Protestant side of the street by torch-wielding parents. About the same time a reporter was being shot a few miles away by some para-military group for writing anti-Unionist editorials.
I have gotten a lot of feedback from customers on how we should launch a crusade against those guys. And while we definitely want all these idiots locked far, far away, the truth is that I am not certain who those guys are. The people who do these things are not some how inherently different from you or I. Their feelings are real and they aren't going away no matter how much force we attempt to apply. So before we go off on a crusade, let's try to remember something about the original crusades: I believe they were referred to as Holy Wars.
If you see how England has dealt with terrorism over the past thirty years, you'll see that it hasn't really worked. I mean, they tried everything, 30,000 troops, suspension of civil liberties, counter-assassinations, jailing people for years without trial; all to no avail. And the IRA and Unionists are not nearly as desperate as these Islamic Fundamentalists (no suicide bombers in Ireland, thank God.)
Our conclusion is that pretty much all of us can be whipped into a frenzy over something. And the fact is, that we may not be able to do all that much about Afghans or whoever, except to be a bit more careful ourselves in the future. This insanity is everywhere. That's a hard pill to swallow for a nation such as ours which is not used to taking a lot of stuff from anyone. But, in our humble opinion, the really pro-active thing to do, would be to go out of one's way to be nice to one another and not fall into the same trap of attack and revenge. Unlike other crusades, this is a policy which really does have some scriptual foundation.
---JCH
CIARAN'S CORNER:
Windows XP And Security Tools!
First Tip: Get Windows XP on your new
PCs. I've said it here before, and it's really true. XP is certainly the best version of
Windows yet. Faster, much more stable (especially when compared with Windows 98 and ME),
and far more manageable. My only warnings would be to those who use their PCs with various
multi-media thingees such as cameras and color laser printers. To those people I say,
'make certain the drivers are available first before installing XP. I have one
more warning (rant) which comes two paragraphs below, but in spite of all that, XP really
is a big improvement. Read carefully: not as an upgrade, but for new PCs, get XP.
Second Tip: Check out www.microsoft.com/technet/mpsa/start.asp for a really good tool which scans your NT 4.0 or W2K system for security leaks in passwords, intenet explorer, outlook, missing patches you should have.
Third Tip: Stop using Hot Mail or any other service which requires Microsoft Passport. Passport is evil. No joke. You want nothing to do with it. If you don't know what it is, here is an, only slightly, ranting overview: Passport is a central repository of data about you and your computer which Microsoft keeps stored on it's own servers over the internet. It started in Windows 95 with the 'Microsoft Wallet' as a convenience feature. This information includes, are you ready, your name, address, important dates, social security, credit card numbers, etc. Once you have set up a Passport account, then any on-line company from which you purchase does not need to ask you for all those annoying little things like name, address, credit card #, in order to sell you something. What they do is look up your 'Passport' on an MS server and then you need do nothing to complete the transaction; because the Passport 'verifies' who you are and presents them with all the data they need. Unfortunately, Passport has already been hacked in several ways. Doubly unfortunate is that Passport is almost a requirement with XP. At several point during setup, you have to intentionally tell XP to not activate a Passport account. Also, some services, such as Hotmail, require Passport! So no Hotmail here, thank you! Worst of all, on older systems (Windows 98), if you try to buy something on line using a Passport account, all data may be unencrypted. For example, let's say that you set up a Passport account on your new XP system in the office. You then take your old Win98 laptop on the road and access your HotMail account or buy something from Amazon.COM using the same Passport. While doing so you have just made all your Passport data available to any hacker as simple plain text, as in 'Hi, my name is Fred, my Amex number is 3123-2333-34980, my address is 123 Main Street...'. Passport is Big Brother, ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake. I predict whole books and industries being written just on coping with it's nasty effects. Don't be surprised if Norton and Macafee come out with an 'Anti-Passport' add-on to their Anti-Virus programs just to calm people's (justified) concerns about sharing their personal data so freely.
And on that cheery note...
---Ciaràn
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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume III #20