Address Change!

Just a reminder. As we’ve been saying, effective December 1, 2009 please address all
mail to us at:

Suntower Systems

PO Box 1643 Mukilteo, WA 98275

Through the magic of VOIP, the phone and fax
numbers remain, respectively, (206)878-0578 and (206)428-6035.

Ollie Discussion: The Suntower Site Re-Design!

Until the end of the year we’re going to be Alpha Testing Ollie 10. And by ‘alpha’ we mean testing the internal workings. We have two mainl objectives of Ollie 10.

The first of these is to make Ollie/10 fully accessible (as we’ve been talking about these past few issues). We’re convinced that there is an untapped world of opportunity for e-commerce sites that properly cater to the disabled or visually impaired (By the way, there’s a good chance that you fall into this category if you’re using reading glasses to read this. A web site that’s can be made easier to read has a lot more appeal than you might’ve thought 30 seconds ago!)

The second goal is to become even more standards compliant. And by that we mean that it uses the styles and techniques that are now becoming standard practice for all good web developers. This in itself will have several advantages:

1. The pages will load much faster because they will be much ‘lighter’.
2. With almost all the ‘look’ of Ollie in style sheets you’ll be able to tweak the look and feel to match your brand.
3. This will make Ollie even safer. You can work with a designer as needed with almost no chance of doing harm to the inner workings.
4. Pages will ‘work’ far more consistently between different browsers and platforms. Most of the grief we get with Ollie has been ‘my user is running Apple Safari 9.6 and can’t…’ We think those days are over.
5. You and we will be able to enhance Ollie with many, many ‘plug-in’ features from third parties, such as Twitter, WordPress blogs, Facebook Pages and so on. And you’ll be able to do it yourself.

NEW SITE

At the same time, we’re also going to be re-designing the web site. We think you’ll agree it needs it bad. To that end, we’re going to be doing something a bit risky, letting you see under our skirts a bit, as it were. We’re going to be generating both the Suntower Systems web site and this newsletter from within Ollie/10 as it’s being tested(see Ciarán’s Corner for more details.)

That is to say, instead of having Maireád fire up a web design program as she has for years and then formatting our various articles into some sort of vaguely cohesive whole, we’re going to use the new mailing list and blogging features in Ollie/10 to do it for us. Everything, from assembling the content to managing the mailing list of recipients to actually pushing out the e-mails.

This newsletter is our first try. Over the next few months this newsletter and the Suntower Systems web site will morph into their final new designs as the capabilities of Ollie/10 are thoroughly proven.

At the end of the test process, anything you see in this newsletter or on our web site will be something you can do yourself with your Ollie. Can you tell we’re excited about this?

Most of our work over the past few years has been ‘under the hood’. Improvements to SAFE that aren’t noticeable at first glance. This is a chance to do something again with some pizazz; not just for you, but for your clients. And who can’t use a bit of that these days?

As we said, we plan on the site re-design and the newsletter testing process to be complete by year’s end.

Til Next Time!

Ciaran’s Corner: Eat That Dog Food, Boy!

There’s an old expression in the software world called ‘eat your own dog food’. I have no idea who started it, but we mention it from time to time as one of our core business practices. In short, it means that we use what we make. But we add that extra soupçon of excitement to the mix by using the beta and sometimes even the alpha versions of our code. It’s usually a bit frustrating, but since it’s usually only frustrating for the accounting people, who cares, right? (I’m being ironic, OK?) But this time, we’re spreading the pain with our site re-design. Everyone is involved in the web site and everyone helps with the newsletter. So this could be ugly.

For the past decade, whenever we wanted a change to the web site Maireád would open her web design program and start typing. Same thing with the E-News you’re now reading. We’d give her bits of text we’d generously call ‘articles’ and then she’d take the time to beat them into some sort of vaguely cohesive whole. It was great. She did all the work and I appear somewhat literate.

OLLIE/10: THE NEW MACHINE

Starting this week, however. we’re going to use the new blogging features in Ollie/10 to do it for us. Everything, from assembling the content to managing the mailing list of recipients to actually pushing out the e-mails. And since we’re making Ollie/10 a basic part of the web site, everything is going to affect everything else. Which means, to use an old saw, if Ollie sneezes, the whole web site might instantly catch swine flu.

We know it’s asking for trouble, but we can’t think of a better way to thoroughly exercise this thing and find out where all the usability issues are, can you? Since we send this list to zillions of people (OK, not zillions, but several thousand) anything that can go wrong with the system probably will go wrong.

But at the end of the day, when we do get this thing running like a top, you’ll have some pretty compelling proof that Ollie/10 is all that and a bag of chips. And that’s important to us. Frankly, we’ve been disappointed at the adoption rate of SAFE users to SQL Server 2008. Not enough of you have upgraded because you can’t see it’s wonderfulness. And with the crap economy, many of you need to see something that doesn’t just make things run faster, but actually has direct client benefits. You’ll see that with Ollie/10 starting (in a very modest way) with this very Newsletter.

HELP WANTED

The downside of course is that, until it is running like a top, it’s going to run like, well, not like a top. There will be problems, hiccoughs, bugs and probably the odd embarassment. But hopefully not too many. (My worst nightmare is that this first essay will go awry somehowand you won’t even know that this is the beginning of a test period–how embarassing would that be!) So we’re keeping the design changes small this time.

Anyhow, during this period we’ll be asking for your patience and more importantly, we’ll be asking for your reporting. Yes, whether you are an official tester or not, from this point on we hope to enlist you into the order of those who take the time to report anything that seems unattractive, wrong or just plain fishy as you read through each new issue.

Thanks In Advance. We think it will be worth any inconvenience as we build Ollie/10 into a real powerhouse e-commerce platform.

Cheers,

Ciaràn Marron

Technical Support Manager

cm@suntowersystems.com

THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Suntower Systems on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Suntower Systems must respond to change in market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Suntower Systems and Suntower Systems cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED 'AS IS' WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT. The user assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the use of this document. This document may be copied and distributed subject to the following conditions:
1. All text must be copied without modification and all pages must be included.
2. All copies must contain Suntower Systems' copyright notice and any other notices provided therein
3. This document may not be distributed for profit.

End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume 931