Our Fax Number Is Changing!
Effective Immediately, you can now reach us by fax at (206)428-6035. You can continue to use the old fax number for another 60 days or so but by August 1, 2009, this will be our main fax contact point. Please update your records accordingly. We're doing this as part of our new support for the MyFax Internet Faxing Service which is included free, Free, FREE in SAFE XI.

SAFE XI Tip: PDF Folder Improvements!
Most of you use our PDFXtensions to save copies of your forms and reports or to e-mail documents to clients. A small but notable improvement to Simple Accounting for Forms Experts XI is the addition of personal and global folders for storing PDFs.

A Personal Folder is a place to store all documents for a particular Employee ID—usually but not always the currently logged in Employee ID (more on this in a minute.) A Global Folder is, as the name suggests a central storage place for documents to be shared by all Employees.

THE FORMULA
To manage this, we now have a very flexible file naming system for PDFs. Each form and report can be set to have an automatically generated file name. This is most useful in the Global Folder where you don't want Employees to be able to overwrite a pre-existing file.

A typical automatically generated file name formula might be something like:

RSOECC200906151315JOHND.PDF

Which means: Report Module Date Generated Time Generated Employee ID who generated the report.PDF

THE FORMULA
Now some reports also allow a redirection; essentially a cc. A redirection is simply a copy of the report which is sent to a folder other than the default Personal or Global Folder. For example, the above commission report may have been generated by JOHND, but the actual salesperson was MARYK. A rule can be inserted into the above report so that every time the report is generated a copy is inserted into MARYK's Personal PDF Folder--along with an e-mail telling her that it happened. Redirections allow you to automate the workflow of reports that should be seen by a group of users.

Another example? Every time you print an invoice for one of MaryK's customers, you could have a Redirection to auto-magically put a copy of the invoice in her folder. Or, when MaryK is on holiday, you could send a copy of each P.O. to her Personal Folder for her to review when she returns.

BACKUPS
The Personal Folders can (and probably should) be stored on your server, rather than on each user's workstation. In that way, you can make certain to have a proper backup of all documents. And with the new FileStream capabilities in SQL Server 2008, you can even backup all these documents inside the database on a daily basis automatically! (No external backup program required.)

CONCLUSION
The new PDF Folder system, coupled with individual formulas for each report and form and Redirections offers an almost complete document management system for all transactions in SAFE. It makes it possible to keep and distribute hard copy to all stake-holders on any SAFE task automatically which reduces errors, makes users feel connected and helps prevent action items from falling through the cracks. This new ability, coupled with the SQL Server 2008 FileStream improvements also makes having archived copies of this work completely fool-proof. That's quite a lot of bang for such a 'small' new feature!

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: Print Ads In A Business
First of all, regarding my rant on Health Care in our last issue ? I expected some upset and I got it. Most of these were along the lines  'Stick to software. Stay out of politics.' Fair enough. As I said, my goal was to engage people into doing something because it's damaging business. As that guy says in 'The Godfather', 'It's strictly business, Sonny. Strictly business.'

Moving on to another touchy subject. The Web. We've try like crazy to get users to

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume XI #14