SAFE/8 Preview: Timing Is Everything
A big advantage of Simple Accounting For Forms Experts (SAFE) has always been it's flexibility with regard to time.

TRANSACTION TIMING
Unlike most other systems (of any price) it has always been quite easy to back date (or forward date) various types of transactions to best fit your work flow. After all, we have long recognized that it isn't always convenient (or possible) to enter the information exactly when it occurred (or will occur!)

But there was always a bit of a chink in the armor... This ability only extended down to the day but not to the precise time. So you could never force SAFE to say these two events occurred on the same day, but this one occurred before that one.

This could be a really big deal for inventory control, where you needed to make certain that, for example, a purchase order was received before a release on a forms management report.

Similarly, it could also affect a customer's aging by being too harsh if the customer went over their credit limit on the same day as a large payment was received.

Now, surely, SAFE has always followed standard rules for ordering events which occurred on the same day, but now you have the control so such conflicts are now completely avoidable.

So SAFE/8 addresses this by allowing you to specify an exact time (down to 100th of a second) when an event occurred.

PUTTING THINGS OFF
SAFE has long had a Batch Reporter, so you could print a group of reports all in one go. Well SAFE/8 ups the ante with a Batch Processor that allows you to schedule various lengthy tasks to run when they will have less impact on the system. These include:

• Customer Aging
• Vendor Aging
• Customer Invoices
• General Ledger Rebalance
• Inventory Calculate Usage
• Any report printable from the Batch Reporter
• Data Backups
   

BACKUP
Yes, you read that last one correctly. We've decided to bring back the venerable 'Backup' function from earlier versions of SAFE. What this does is simply call the data backup facility built into the database so we're not really doing much, other than saving you from having to learn how to schedule a backup yourself in the db management program (SQL Server's Enterprise Manager for example).

Our Backup function simply lets you schedule a complete backup to a disk file some place on your network. It's up to you to provide the disk space.

We decided to re-include this function because, frankly, disk space is so cheap now, it behooves all of you to have nightly backups of your complete database. (We have a separate backup for every night on a dual-layer DVD.)

Til Next Time!
 

New Products
Some interesting products that we've found very useful here.

SonicWall's (formerly Lasso Logic) CDP 1440i. This very cool $1,999 gizmo is what is known as a 'network backup appliance'. It will automatically backup important files on all your servers and desktop clients to local disk drives or offsite via the Internet! (We're currently sending copies of our personal data to our homes for weekend work without having to come into the office.) An important plus (as we've so often harped!) is it's ability to backup files while they are in use, such as SQL Server and Microsoft Office data. Get information here: http://www.sonicwall.com/products/cdp.html then call us to order at our special introductory pricing.

Spamwall DS200 from Deep Six Technologies Lists for $999. Another 'appliance'. This one protects your in-house e-mail server from spam. In tests run at several large trade papers (and corroborated here), this thing can almost completely remove Spam from all your in-boxes. But unlike other pieces of software we've tried? In over two months of testing, this thing generated zero false positives! (We thought it wasn't working for a while there after we first installed it!) This is huge... Until we installed the DS200, we always felt the need 'just to check' our trash bucket to make sure we weren't missing anything, so we were still wasting hours every week on useless e-mails. Now? Those days are over. It's amazing how much time one can save by simply not having to worry about Spam! Get information here: http://d6tech.com/prod.html then call us to order at our special introductory pricing.

New Document Regs For 2006
Big opportunities for all of us who are committed to Document Management. A couple of new laws are soon to go into effect which will dramatically alter how your larger customers will retain important documents--specifically electronic ones. We all know that e-mails, unlike paper documents,  can be easily altered ex post facto. In the wake of various corporate scandals, your government has decided that larger companies will need to maintain an immutable audit trail of correspondence so that in the case of any legal action, what was originally communicated will be available for legal discovery.

Can you say opportunity? If you've been selling e-forms, e-mail systems, scanners of any kind and archival software you now have a once in a life time chance to get in on the ground floor with customers who previously shunned archival solutions. Thanks to your friendly federal government, any customer you have which is subject to Sarbanes-Oxley will likely be required to purchase the very products you've been touting as crucial to properly archive and retrieve information. Will you be up to the challenge? Will you upgrade your skills to sell the latest archiving technologies? Will you be pro-active and identify customers and educate them on the new rules before they go into effect?

The two new changes to the Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure are about money. Big money. How big? Here are two links to stories that demonstrate the problems (and your opportunities).

Infoworld Magazine, December 12 2005

Zubulake Vs. UBS Warburg

We encourage you to digest this material and then contact us for help with products that enable your clients to get into compliance with these new rules. As we said, this is a big opportunity and in fact, could end up being as lucrative as off-site storage of hard copies has become.

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: On Break This Week
I'm taking a break this week. More questions, answers and rants when I return!

Til Next Time!

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume VIII #4