Editor's Note: Yes, I know. This issue is late, late, late! Sorry. We're redoing the web site in preparation for SAFE/9 and the newsletter had to take a back seat. Don't worry, though. There's a bunch of new information we want to get out about SAFE/9 and Ollie/9 so you can expect a Super-Size E-Newsletter next time as a make-up present. --MO'D

SAFE/9 Feature Discussion: Calendars And Business Reminders!
The next major update to SAFE is soon to be released. Here is another in a series of articles discussing new features.

As we said last time, SAFE/9 features many improvements to the Business Reminders functionality.

More Types!
In addition to the traditional types of reminders, you can now be 'reminded' of the following new things:

And then, of course, there are all the returning Reminder Types

• Sales Orders Due To Ship

• Recurring Vendor Bills

• Recurring Sales Orders

• End of Customer Forms Management Period

• Activities To Follow Up On Today

• Sales Tax Payments Due

• End of G/L Period

• Vendor POs

• Customers With Past Due Balances

Overall, we're trying to get you to a place where your users can go to one place and see all their major tasks for the day.
 

User-Defined Reminder Types!
But maybe we left out something you need. Well then, there's a good chance that you can add that thing to be reminded of (sorry for the poor grammar.)  Using our Query Manager technology, you can now create your own rule-based Reminder Types.

Example: You've set up a workflow where one particular customer should be sent an Acknowledgment Notice whenever their orders enter production at the Vendor. You can open the new Business Reminder Types Query Editor and enter the following:

FILE: ORDER HEADERS
QUERY STRING: Order Status = 'A' AND CustomerID = '0123456'
OPEN ACTION
TAG ACTION:
PRINT ACTIONS: Print:AR:OneAcknowledgment
EMPLOYEE IDS: Bob, Jim, Lisa

All Greek? If you can use the Report Query Window you can do this! Let's go through it line by line:

Hopefully the concept is clear, even if the exact steps aren't (don't worry, we've included a fairly complete list of possible Query Options in the Online Help.)

Calendar and Reminder Sharing!
Note that in the above example, we've enabled you to set up which SAFE Operators will be able to use this new Reminder Type. We've taken it one step further in that you can now share or transfer your reminders to other SAFE Operators. This is in response to something we've noticed over the past few years: some of you like to go on vacation! It's uncanny how many things can fall through the cracks when you're away. So, we took a page from the US Postal Service and provide you a way to temporarily move your Business Reminders to another person. Just enter a Start Date, an End Date and an Employee ID and your Business Reminders are transferred to them for that length of time.

Faster, More Intelligent Scanning!
Although it sounds great having all your 'to dos' in one place, you may be concerned about how long it will take to scan through all this stuff. You may think you can click through various screens in SAFE faster than the B/R Browse can find them. Not true. If you're using a properly configured installation of SQL Server 2005, you'll find that you can perform a complete scan, with all options enabled, in just a few seconds. Even if your company processes thousands of orders every month.

Additionally, a scan need be performed only once during a SAFE session. You can close your B/R Browse, go off and do other things and return to it without having to re-scan.

Something A Bit Esoteric: Saved Scans!
You can now also save the results of Business Reminder Scans for a given day. In other words, you can save how the Business Reminders looked on a given day and go back to it at a later time. Now, why would you want to do that? Primarily for management purposes. For example, you could use this to see which customers you were going to call for A/R and then compare that to what you actually accomplished.

Anything Else?
Sure. And we'll cover more things like the Universal Locator next time. But for now, we'll leave you with the following quick summary:

• Business Reminders allows you to scan for, review, and act upon many of the most important daily tasks.

• Many common Reminder Types are included in SAFE/9, however you can add new ones yourself using the Query Window.

• You can now share your Reminders with other SAFE Operators, either permanently or temporarily.

• Scanning has become much faster

SAFE/9 is scheduled for lift off on our twenty second anniversary (May 12, 2007).

Til Next Time!

 

SAFE Tutorial: Masters/Contacts: My Addresses Keep Changing!
Over the past few months we've had questions from some latecomers to SAFE/8 over customer and vendor addresses 'changing all by itself'. Obviously, such mysteries cause users to immediately freak out but like most unexplainable phenomena there's a fairly simple answer:

You're doing it, but you're not realising you're doing it.

And it all has to do with the linkages between Customers, Vendors and Contacts. So instead of just answering the user's quandaries, we thought it would be well to review how this all works together---especially since these links will only grow tighter with SAFE/9.

Ancient History: 2002
Starting with SAFE/5 we told you that we were moving to a data model where all Customers, Vendors, Employees and Online Users would be stored as Contacts. And we provided two years where we gave you the option to clean up your data because the day was going to come when we would start forcing this synchronization. So when SAFE/7 came out, SAFE started taking care of business:

1. By forcing you to have a Billing Contact linked to your Customer Master and Vendor Master.

2. By synchronizing edits between the linked Contact and the Customer Master or Vendor Master.

Now let's review why we did this:

1. We thought then (and still do) that contact management should be tightly bound into SAFE. It took a while, but now most all of you find the Activities Browse indispensable for documenting the lifecycle of Sales Orders through A/P. Salespeople can view CSR Activities on their customer's behalf from their own Calendars and on and on and on. We're taking this even further with SAFE/9 by adding Instant Messaging (see above).

2. For many of you, the roles of people you deal with at Customers and Vendors changes quite often. People are here today and gone tomorrow. It's important to be able to track not only a change in address, but also a change in personnel. For example, it can be important to know that, up until February 10th, Janet was your Billing Contact, but thereafter Frank took over. That way you know who to talk to regarding various invoices.

3. Until SAFE/6 we had no way to store the state of address changes. For example, if a customer changed their billing address we wanted you to have a complete audit trail of those changes. and you re-printed a customer invoice, the re-print would print the new address and while this is perfectly acceptable according to GAAP rules, it definitely annoyed some customers who expected that when an invoice was re-printed it would print exactly like the original. (Of course there are just as many of you who want to be able to re-print an invoice and have the address reflect the changes. Different strokes.

What Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong
For most of you, this was not particularly life changing. However, there were (and are for new converts from very old versions of SAFE) cases where it would look like data was changing all by itself. And that would be because the Customer Master was linked to the wrong Billing Contact. For example, Bob opens a Customer Master and accidentally assigns the wrong Billing Contact. Oops! Bob just changed the Customer Master address to match that Contact. Similarly, Nancy edits the Billing Contact with the wrong zip code. Oops again! That just updated the linked Customer Master as well.

Editors Note: As of SAFE 8.1 you are warned whenever you are editing a Billing Contact that any changes you make to that Contact will update the Billing Address of the Customer Master.

So How Does SAFE Know Which Address To Use For Invoices?
It's simple: Whatever the address was in the Billing Contact when the sales order was converted to an invoice. We refer to this as Time Of Invoicing (TOI).

When Does An Address Become A New Address?
OK, so this brings up an interesting question: Exactly how do you tell SAFE that an address is 'new'; not every edit you make to a Customer address qualifies as a new address. In fact, most of the time, when users edit addresses it's simply to fix typos. You can do this in two ways and you choose which method by doing in SAFE what really happened.
1. By changing the actual Billing Contact linked to the Customer Master. You would do this if the person really does change.

2. By clicking Save Address button in the Contact Master under the Alternate Addresses Browse. At that time, all previously invoiced Sales Orders are linked to that address. And any edits you now make to the Contact Master will be reflected on any upcoming invoices.

What If I Goof?
Perish the thought! By 'goof' you can mean a couple of things:
1. You were too quick to click the Save Address button. No harm done really. You can always edit the Alternate Address if you have the proper Security.
2. You assigned the wrong Billing Contact ID and then invoiced some Sales Orders. So now they have the wrong Billing Contact. The good news?Again, if you have the proper Security you can right click on a Sales Order and re-assign the Billing Contact. The bad news? You have to do them one at a time.

The Dreaded Form Re-Design And Grandfathering...
Now the forms which shipped with SAFE until SAFE/8 always pull address information from the Customer Master. If you haven't had your invoices or packing slips updated recently, they will always print the address information stored in the current Customer Master. If you want them to print the address info as it stood at the TOI they will need to be re-drawn. As usual, we offer a 50% discount on forms design for adding this functionality to an existing custom form design.

A bit more challenging is the fact that, if you need this functionality, you probably have not been saving these addresses. So what to do about all those previous invoices? You have a couple of choices:

1. The sleeping dogs strategy. Only address problem (pun intended) as need be. If you need to re-print an invoice with the old address:
a. Create a new Contact with the old address and then,
b. Re-assign the individual invoice to that Billing Contact.
c. Re-print the invoice.

2. The comprehensive strategy:
a. Create a new Contact with the old address and then,
b. Contact us to re-assign the older invoices to that Billing Contact.
c. Repeat steps a. and b. for each necessary Customer.

In this article, we discussed how SAFE stores information about Customers for billing purposes and how you can manage changes to this data over time. We showed you your options for saving these changes and also your options for printing documents (invoices) which depend on this data. And also, we hope this review gives some comfort to those of you who occasionally struggle with 'changing customer addresses'.

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner Q/A: 'Web 2.0?'
Q: We were reading the latest PrintSolutions magazine on 'Web-to-Print 2.0'. I keep hearing about 'Web 2.0'. What is it, exactly?

A: Basically, 'Web 2.0' can mean whatever the writer wants it to mean. We believe that it began to be used when certain web site began to utilize a programming technique called AJAX--itself an extension of XML. And no you don't need to know the meaning of another acronym. Since then, Web 2.0 has been used to describe virtually any kind of new web site that works more like a desktop program---that is, in a highly interactive way. As you may know, traditional web pages are fairly static---you click somewhere and the entire page redraws. AJAX was the first big technology which provided for sections of a web page to update independently and from many different sources. Until then, if you wanted your web site to have more of an interactive look and feel, you needed to use Macromedia Flash but AJAX (and Web 2.0) is much, much more. It means that a single web page can consist of content from many sources all operating separately, but all on the same page. In effect, the web page becomes like your Windows Desktop where several programs may all be running at the same time. Want some examples? Google Maps and YouTube are prime examples: there are several processes going on at the same time when you're at these sites (in fact, there are several 'sites' at work when you visit.) Each process works separately, but they all communicate with one another to, for example, search for addresses and driving directions while at the same time updating a map of where you want to go.

As far as 'Web-to-Print 2.0'? I guess that it means the authors feel on-line order has reached another phase of maturity. The point of the issue was to encourage DMIA members to either get started or get more deeply involved with online technologies; both traditional online ordering and more advanced applications such as JDF.

Q: Right. What is JDF. I think I understand the basic concept, but is it of any application to a small company like ours which is just getting started with online ordering?

A: Job Definition Format is Adobe's attempt at creating a standard for electronically submitting not only the content of an order (the artwork) but also the order itself: how many to print, the medium (paper, plastic, etc.), what what machine to print them on (and specific instructions to that machine) and how to print them. In short? The complete purchase order. This has been a holy grail for many in the industry (including us) for many years.  Another great thing about a JDF document is that it's a standard XML document which means it's easy for programmers of all skill levels to work with.

Typically, vendors that now accepts electronic orders and every customer that wants to send electronic orders have developed their own methods. Some customers or vendors will use EDI, which is a standard for the accounting side, but offers nothing regarding the production details. JDF provides not only the accounting data, but also the job details down to the last detail. A JDF document can be sent to a vendor's computer system and directly into a JDF-enabled printer.

Some of you use third party online ordering services such as Four51 which, like EDI, provides connectivity and convenience, but also adds another layer of cost and complexity that separates you, your customer and your vendor. (Don't get me wrong--convenience is great! But you pay for that convenience and still have to eventually translate what they do into your accounting system.)

So there has been a very slow adoption rate for any of these cooperative technologies--for a variety of reasons. Vendors have been reluctant to adopt any standard that would further commoditize their work. And, despite several attempts, DMIA members haven't been able to muster the necessary unity to get vendors more motivated. But with Adobe behind JDF, it may well be that there is hope on the horizon. New presses are now being manufactured to accept JDFs and some vendors are finally taking the plunge.

We are fairly certain that, eventually, JDF will enable you to provide a completely direct ordering and fulfillment process. Ollie and SAFE have been able to generate XML documents for several years, so we're ready now. In other words, when a user clicks 'Submit' in Ollie, your vendor can receive a JDF document, including the PDF and all the information they need to run the job today. It's only a matter of time before your vendors will be able to receive that document.

We'll be talking more about how to incorporate more advanced web technologies into your Ollie and WebSAFE in a future issue. For now, you should probably be checking with your favourite vendors to see what type of JDF support they are now offering.

Til Next Time!

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
 

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume IX #7