Happy Thanksgiving!
From all of us at Suntower Systems, have a very happy and SAFE (no pun intended) Thanksgiving holiday. In a fairly unusual move (for us, anyway) we will be closed on both Thursday and Friday to get caught up (and recover). As always, if there are genuine emergencies, Technical Support will be there for you.
 

SAFE 6.0 Progress Report!
A few words to discuss our progress with SAFE 6.0. Although we list upcoming features, we have traditionally been somewhat tight-lipped about the actual process while we are under development. But this is a sea change and so it pays to keep you up to speed on what we need from you and what we will be delivering in return for your help.

1. Programming on SAFE 5.1 is closed. There will be no more updates, fixes, patches, whatever. Any bugs you have reported by November 1, should be addressed in 6.0. Any posted after that date will have to wait for 6.1 in April, 2003.

2. All Hands Mode. Speaking of which, after we get back from Thanksgiving, we are going into 'all-hands' mode. Which means that everyone, including the dog, will be asked to be put in hellacious hours testing, tweaking SAFE 6.0. I tell you this because I expect that tech support response times will increase as we ask our techs to devote more time to testing and working with beta-customers. Also, believe it or not, they have to learn the new software and that takes a significant amount of time.

I have gotten angry notes about this in the past, but it's simply a fact that every software company has to deal with. The only difference with us is that we tell you that's how it's gonna be ahead of time. I liken this to visiting a doctor's office. Some people don't want to know when something is going to be uncomfortable. Personally, I would rather the doctor tell me up front. I don't think there will be too much of a change, but...

3. The feature set for 6.0 is closed. Thanks to all who sent in suggestions. Gift certificates from Sharper Image have been mailed to the winners and we got some great ones. Here are some examples:

Cash Expectations Report I love this one. There is now an option which will predict cash receipts based upon each customer's payment history. In the current report, cash is expected based on the terms you sell under. In the new report, you can elect to have the report present cash expectations based on how your customers really pay. In other words, even though you bill some big customers Net 30, they may actually pay more close to every 45 days; that's just the way it is. The new report will take that into account when displaying the periods into which your cash can be expected.

Back Dated Aging    Standard equipment in 6.0 will include a Customer Aging Snapshot, which will let you recall the Aging for a given customer as of any prior month end. So when your accountant asks you for your A/R by customer as of last December and you can't lay hands on the copy of your Aging Report, you can simply re-generate the Aging as of December 31 and print. This is also great if you need to enter some credits or other adjustments way, way after the fact and see the results reflected on a prior Aging Report.

Combine Audit History Report    You can get a complete audit trail for a range of products. So, for example, if you want to see every 'in and out' for all of one customer's inventoried items over a range of dates, just set a Query and there it is. If you need a complete audit trail for all your stocked envelopes, set another Query and: there it is. In short, any Query you can apply to the Product Master can generate a complete audit trail for all matching Products.

...actually that last one is not a single customer suggestion, but one which has been asked for by lots and lots of people over the past year.

4. The two (not one, two!) new technologies we are using (Microsoft SQL Server and MacroMedia Dreamweaver) are working out very, very well.

First, the speed of Queries is phenomenal. I ran a Sales Line Item Query to display all of one customer's orders where the word 'Envelope' was anywhere in the line item description (sound familiar?) With that type of Query in SAFE 5.1 I would expect to be able to go get coffee while waiting for my PC to return the results. With SAFE 6.0, the Query took 35 seconds. Now here's the killer: When I went back and ran it again a few minutes later it took 2 seconds. Two. The Query Manager has a system to 'remember' the fastest way to retrieve data. So, when you run the same Query repeatedly, it gets faster and faster. Amazing.

Second, the possibilities with Dreamweaver are fantastic. Many of you have complained that Ollie and WebSAFE are dull. As my daughter would say, 'Well, yeah'. They were made intentionally 'plain vanilla' so as to past muster on every type of browser and operating system. Unfortunately, the really cool looking effects one sees on so many sites now are limited to Windows or Mac browsers. But lots of your end users are on mainframe or Unix systems where these things simply will not work, or are blocked by various corporate security devices. The good news is that Macromedia tools have become so prevalent on the internet that we can develop sites with Dreamweaver and achieve all the 'Flash' which impresses your end users and be certain of compatibility on virtually every system out there.

Thirdly, these two technologies are a really good way to cover all our backsides. Yours and ours. We expect SAFE to be even more reliable than SAFE 5.1. This may be because SQL Server is quite 'industrial strength', but it may also be simply be due to the fact that it forces users to have a basic level of hardware in order to run SAFE. We have always known that SAFE ran better with certain hardware than others. But because SAFE will install on any Windows machine, we were forced to try and get it to work reliably for customers, even under, shall we say, less than optimal conditions. Frankly, there were those of you who simply could not (or would not) upgrade their hardware despite our pleas to do so. Thankfully, this controversy ends with SAFE 6.0. If you have the proper horses to run SQL Server, you have the horses to run SAFE and run it optimally. If you don't have the horses to run SQL Server, then SAFE simply will not run. No more gray areas.
 

Ciaran's Corner
I'm taking the weekend off My cousin is demonstrating the authentic way to cook Turkey, which of course, includes obtaining a live bird and butchering it yourself. Yikes! So, while I am off trying to avoid my knife-wielding cousin, you know the drill: If you can still walk after the holiday meals, here are some IT tasks which are always good to be doing:

1.    Make certain you have the latest patches from Microsoft available from http://www.microsoft.com. I have counted five in the past two weeks as various security holes have been found. Do not ignore this! We have received a couple of dozen amusing little viruses over the past month and guess where they came from? You, you, you! Actually, not you, but in every case, your attachments. So many of you have found it oh, so convenient to send us attached Microsoft Word and Excel documents and they are simply littered with nasty critters. We catch them upon receipt in our e-mail server, but what are they doing to your system? Maybe it's time to think about getting that network anti-virus program at one of the after Thanksgiving sales!

2.    A number of you still report various SPOOL32 errors while printing under Windows 98. (If you've gotten it, you know what I mean; the report never makes it to the printer and your Printer Queue fills up for ever until you receive a SPOOL32 error message. This is not a SAFE bug so stop asking! <g> This is a Windows bug so go yell at them! I have heard anecdotal reports that the following can help:

1. Go to a PC which has experienced this problem

2. Open the Startup folder and create a new Shortcut to the file SPOOL32.EXE

3. Restart the PC so the change will take effect.

Til Next Time!

Ciaràn Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume IV #21