One of our customers is toying with a very interesting idea right now; since Customer2You has opened her business up to the entire internet, she's considering announcing a promotion on several out-of-state radio stations where people can order food online and it will be delivered to a local childrens' hospital! She gets sales, the kids get great food and kindness and joy are spread throughout the world. :) I hope she does it; in any case, it's a great way to use the global aspect of the Internet.
For that matter, my mom lives in Florida and I live in New Hampshire and I will occasionally call a pizza place local to her and order her a pie. :) It's a nice gesture, but it's left a little empty when she has to sign the slip and see how much I paid for it - and decide what "my" tip will be! If I could place the order online, I'd be much happier about it. Gonna have to send them a brochure. ;)
In other news, our technical team recently attended a seminar hosted by one of our distributors. At the seminar, we were exposed to a lot of emerging technologies in the field of IP-based surveillance, and given some technical training on how to install and support these very effective, efficient solutions for keeping an extra eye on a customer's business. Some of the higher end models could even remember by "smart" technology the size and shape of an object, and poll other cameras on the network for sightings of that object! Very VERY useful if anyone ever needed to investigate an incident.
Well, that's all the tech news that there is to print. Happy computing!
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Another Customer taking orders Online
So relations with our partner, Customer2You, are starting to work out very favorably for us and for our customers. We've now got a few clients up and running with the software, and able to take orders for their restaurants online. Wanna see what the end result looks like? Check it out at https://www.customer2you.com/divinos2.nsf - but please don't place an order unless you live in East Chicago and want to go pick it up. :) I've heard by reputation that his food is awesome, but sadly, living in New Hampshire, I've never had the personal experience. Maybe on my next vacation...
Customer2You works exclusively with our Aldelo for Restaurants sales package. There are other solutions out there for putting retail stores on the web, but this one addresses the unique needs of the food service industry. It's exciting to be working with it.
In other news, life in the lab is enjoyable as ever. We just put the finishing touches on our 2698th box since we started using our new serial number system, think we might hit 3000 by the end of the year? Hope so!
Customer2You works exclusively with our Aldelo for Restaurants sales package. There are other solutions out there for putting retail stores on the web, but this one addresses the unique needs of the food service industry. It's exciting to be working with it.
In other news, life in the lab is enjoyable as ever. We just put the finishing touches on our 2698th box since we started using our new serial number system, think we might hit 3000 by the end of the year? Hope so!
Friday, May 9, 2008
Our Fun in Learning
April Fools' Day is one of a technician's favorite holidays. In an old ISP I used to work at, we used to call it "Troubleshooting Day", because you were guaranteed to come into work and sit down at a brand new, innovative and very deliberate computer problem designed to make you pull your hair for your entire shift. Some of the newer techs found it to be very childish and aggrivating at first, but they didn't understand the reason for the season - dealing with these little pranks inevitably made them better techs by teaching them something new about the way their system worked.
One year, for example, the gang thought it would be fun to take a screenshot of my desktop, move all of my icons off the screen, and hide the taskbar with the start button from the bottom. The practical result of this prank was that every time I tried to click on a program on my desktop, nothing would happen, because I was really clicking on a /picture/ of the symbol that would normally open my program instead of clicking on the symbol itself. Embarrassingly, it took me almost an hour to realize their deception and bring things back to the way they should be, but along the way, I learned the keyboard shortcuts associated with using the desktop (for example, press your pretty-looking Windows key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, just to the right of your Ctrl button. You'll discover that your Start Menu pops up - whether you've hidden it from view or not), and I learned how to do a search for recently modified files to find my missing program links, and most importantly I learned the concept that sometimes things can seem to be malfunctioning but really be working perfectly.
Yesterday, that knowledge once again saved me a lot of time and energy, as I was called in to help a customer who believed that she had deleted all of her liquor from her Aldelo menus. I was prepared to spend a gruelling three hours ripping apart a backup of her database in order to recover it all without losing any of her sales information, but instead, thanks to that April Fools' Day so many years ago, I first checked to make sure that the database was actually a smaller size. When I discovered that it wasn't, I looked inside the Menu Groups and viola, there it all was, hidden from view because the manager's finger slipped and checked the box that told the program that those items were being discontinued. I reactivated them and twenty seconds later, everything was right as rain again.
Struggles always teach lessons, be they in life, or on the desktop.
One year, for example, the gang thought it would be fun to take a screenshot of my desktop, move all of my icons off the screen, and hide the taskbar with the start button from the bottom. The practical result of this prank was that every time I tried to click on a program on my desktop, nothing would happen, because I was really clicking on a /picture/ of the symbol that would normally open my program instead of clicking on the symbol itself. Embarrassingly, it took me almost an hour to realize their deception and bring things back to the way they should be, but along the way, I learned the keyboard shortcuts associated with using the desktop (for example, press your pretty-looking Windows key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, just to the right of your Ctrl button. You'll discover that your Start Menu pops up - whether you've hidden it from view or not), and I learned how to do a search for recently modified files to find my missing program links, and most importantly I learned the concept that sometimes things can seem to be malfunctioning but really be working perfectly.
Yesterday, that knowledge once again saved me a lot of time and energy, as I was called in to help a customer who believed that she had deleted all of her liquor from her Aldelo menus. I was prepared to spend a gruelling three hours ripping apart a backup of her database in order to recover it all without losing any of her sales information, but instead, thanks to that April Fools' Day so many years ago, I first checked to make sure that the database was actually a smaller size. When I discovered that it wasn't, I looked inside the Menu Groups and viola, there it all was, hidden from view because the manager's finger slipped and checked the box that told the program that those items were being discontinued. I reactivated them and twenty seconds later, everything was right as rain again.
Struggles always teach lessons, be they in life, or on the desktop.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Microsoft SP3
Goodness, it's been a long time since our last post! We've been exceptionally busy beavers over the last few months, and it's been hard to find a moment to sit down and really research what's been going on in the market today. Of course, like most companies with any kind of technical aspect, we're currently making a plan for how to handle Microsoft XP's imminent cutoff date of June 30th, 2008. For those of you who might not know, Microsoft had originally decided to stop selling XP on January 30th, but pressure from the community of programmers and developers who weren't ready to update their programs in order to make them compatible with Microsoft Vista caused Microsoft to extend the deadline to June 30th. Now the community is trying again to get Microsoft to give us a little more time, but this time Microsoft seems relentless in it's determination to close the books on XP for good. So what we've decided to do is set up two test machines here in our lab that are going to be exposed to every flavor of Windows Vista over the next two months, including both "home" and "business" levels of the operating system, in order to see which of our point of sale programs will function correctly on the new operating system and which will not. For those that work, no problem - we can simply start releasing those packages with Windows Vista for new sales starting in July, and ensure that our standard 30 days of free customer support includes answering any questions our customers might have about how to navigate through the Vista OS. For those that don't work, we're probably going to follow Dell's example and buy the version of Vista that comes with "downgrade rights" to Windows XP, which will allow us to continue providing excellent point of sale service in an XP environment. Then, as our developer partners make their programs Vista-compatible, we'll be able to offer our customers the ability to upgrade back to Vista if they so choose.
Overall, we're doing our best to make sure the transition is invisible to our customers. Both XP and Vista are superb operating systems, and the POS software experience shouldn't be significantly impacted either way.
Ironically, XP is getting the axe just as it's latest new bundle of patches and fixes, Service Pack 3 (or SP3 as we techies call it), hits download centers everywhere. If you've left automatic updates on your computer, then chances are that you have it already. However, if you are a customer using Microsoft Retail Management System, or RMS, you'll find that you did not receive this update from Microsoft. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS UPDATE ON YOUR OWN! Microsoft discovered in testing that part of the SP3 patch is incompatible with RMS, and causes it to cease functioning. The automatic downloader theoretically checks to see if you have RMS before downloading Service Pack 3, and if you do then it doesn't start the download. We haven't seen any widescale issues with Service Pack 3 on any other platform, so everyone else should be okay.
That's hardly all the news for the moment, but there's a new system being born with Aldelo for Restaurants that wants me to program it's menu, so I'll chat with you again soon. Take care!
Overall, we're doing our best to make sure the transition is invisible to our customers. Both XP and Vista are superb operating systems, and the POS software experience shouldn't be significantly impacted either way.
Ironically, XP is getting the axe just as it's latest new bundle of patches and fixes, Service Pack 3 (or SP3 as we techies call it), hits download centers everywhere. If you've left automatic updates on your computer, then chances are that you have it already. However, if you are a customer using Microsoft Retail Management System, or RMS, you'll find that you did not receive this update from Microsoft. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS UPDATE ON YOUR OWN! Microsoft discovered in testing that part of the SP3 patch is incompatible with RMS, and causes it to cease functioning. The automatic downloader theoretically checks to see if you have RMS before downloading Service Pack 3, and if you do then it doesn't start the download. We haven't seen any widescale issues with Service Pack 3 on any other platform, so everyone else should be okay.
That's hardly all the news for the moment, but there's a new system being born with Aldelo for Restaurants that wants me to program it's menu, so I'll chat with you again soon. Take care!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Blog for January 29th, 2008
Every now and then we're left in the precarious position of having to return a defective part to the manufacturer. Several months ago, we had two Linksys routers go bad and, of course, we had immediately replaced them for our customers, but when we got the broken ones back we left them on our shelf for awhile, and today seemed like a good day to call up Linksys and see if we could get warranty replacements for them. Gotta say, given how long we sat on them, the folks at Linksys were really good about it. We worked with their technicians to verify that they were, in fact, dead (most of their support steps were things we'd already tried when our customers were having problems with them, but they did have one neat trick we hadn't tried, apparently you can partially test a router's functionality by plugging one end of the cable into the router's uplink port and the other end into one of the router's other ports, a sort of literal feedback loop, if you will. Naturally in this case the router was really dead so that didn't do anything for it) and then they assigned a case number (almost like their version of a death certificate) to pass on to their RMA department in order to check on the warranty status.
Therein was the only negative part of the experience, really, because the hold time for the RMA department was rather extensive - good thing we can put their hold music on our speaker phone and attend to our other duties while we wait! - but once we got to a representative, it was a very painless process. He took my case number, read over the log of what the tech and I went over, and gave me a phone number to fax our receipts to. Once that was done, we just put 'em in a box and out they went.
Of course, our process with our customers is a little easier, we don't have to make them find receipts because we keep records of everything we sell and to whom, so once we verify that something's broken, we just replace it ASAP. Happily, our stuff tends to work great, so it doesn't happen all that often - if it did we'd probably have a pile of like 20 or 30 different parts rusting on our shelves waiting for us to get around to calling our manufacturers, because we'd rather focus on making our customers happy than on dealing with paperwork. :)
Had an interesting experience with Salon Iris today. At first it appeared as if the customer's program was freezing up after certain transactions, but inevitably, when we logged into her system, we'd discover that everything was fine and working. So we decided to "catch the problem in the act", so to speak - we left the connection to her computer open for hours, waiting patiently like duck hunters for the problem to rear it's ugly head again. Finally, after three hours, we got a glimpse of the issue, and spent a good half hour reviewing the video to see where it was going wrong. What we discovered was that nothing was "wrong", per se - Salon Iris was dutifully bringing up a window at the end of the transaction to show our customer that the transaction was complete and what to give back for change, but because she had another program running (Internet Explorer), Salon Iris was accidentally giving that program the center stage instead of it's change window. The customer was then going back to Salon Iris and discovering that she couldn't do anything - which was because Salon Iris was waiting for that change window to be closed first.
We explained to the customer what was going on, and many giggles were had all around, and we also reported the issue to Salon Iris, who said that their programmers would make sure that future releases wouldn't accidentally hide the change window like that. We've always been happy with the superb product they make, but their best asset as a company is their willingness to listen to us about how their program is performing in the field and work with us to make it better so that our customers always have the best experience possible. Thank you, Salon Iris!
Therein was the only negative part of the experience, really, because the hold time for the RMA department was rather extensive - good thing we can put their hold music on our speaker phone and attend to our other duties while we wait! - but once we got to a representative, it was a very painless process. He took my case number, read over the log of what the tech and I went over, and gave me a phone number to fax our receipts to. Once that was done, we just put 'em in a box and out they went.
Of course, our process with our customers is a little easier, we don't have to make them find receipts because we keep records of everything we sell and to whom, so once we verify that something's broken, we just replace it ASAP. Happily, our stuff tends to work great, so it doesn't happen all that often - if it did we'd probably have a pile of like 20 or 30 different parts rusting on our shelves waiting for us to get around to calling our manufacturers, because we'd rather focus on making our customers happy than on dealing with paperwork. :)
Had an interesting experience with Salon Iris today. At first it appeared as if the customer's program was freezing up after certain transactions, but inevitably, when we logged into her system, we'd discover that everything was fine and working. So we decided to "catch the problem in the act", so to speak - we left the connection to her computer open for hours, waiting patiently like duck hunters for the problem to rear it's ugly head again. Finally, after three hours, we got a glimpse of the issue, and spent a good half hour reviewing the video to see where it was going wrong. What we discovered was that nothing was "wrong", per se - Salon Iris was dutifully bringing up a window at the end of the transaction to show our customer that the transaction was complete and what to give back for change, but because she had another program running (Internet Explorer), Salon Iris was accidentally giving that program the center stage instead of it's change window. The customer was then going back to Salon Iris and discovering that she couldn't do anything - which was because Salon Iris was waiting for that change window to be closed first.
We explained to the customer what was going on, and many giggles were had all around, and we also reported the issue to Salon Iris, who said that their programmers would make sure that future releases wouldn't accidentally hide the change window like that. We've always been happy with the superb product they make, but their best asset as a company is their willingness to listen to us about how their program is performing in the field and work with us to make it better so that our customers always have the best experience possible. Thank you, Salon Iris!
Monday, January 28, 2008
Blog for January 28th, 2008
Hello everyone. :) In addition to our normal duties, the tech support team here at Assured Computing Technologies has started to make some training videos for the various Point of Sale solutions that we offer. Right now we're still in the rough draft stages, outlining what tasks each video will cover and where the line between the basics and the more "advanced" functions of our programs is; eventually, we want to make sure that there's a video for everything every piece of software is capable of.
We're starting with Aldelo, which is our most popular product for restaurants, pizza places and other food service establishments because it has the most features for customization of individual items. For example, it has built in functionality for ordering a hamburger with "extra cheese, no onions, light mustard and bacon with onion rings instead of fries for the side", as opposed to our other software solutions, which focus more on a static database. After we've gone through at least the basics of setting up Aldelo, we'll probably move on to Cash Register Express and work our way through the basics of all our packages before moving on to the advanced features each program has to offer.
You can get a look at our efforts on our YouTube page.
As for our regular duties, today we unloaded and configured a new IBM SurePOS 300 for a customer in California. This is his second system with us, so we loaded the point of sale solution unconfigured because once it gets into the field, we'll call the customer and log in remotely in order to make sure it syncs up with the database on his existing system. The system is currently going through it's 24 hour burn-in test and, assuming everything checks out, we'll probably be able to ship it out tomorrow.
We're starting with Aldelo, which is our most popular product for restaurants, pizza places and other food service establishments because it has the most features for customization of individual items. For example, it has built in functionality for ordering a hamburger with "extra cheese, no onions, light mustard and bacon with onion rings instead of fries for the side", as opposed to our other software solutions, which focus more on a static database. After we've gone through at least the basics of setting up Aldelo, we'll probably move on to Cash Register Express and work our way through the basics of all our packages before moving on to the advanced features each program has to offer.
You can get a look at our efforts on our YouTube page.
As for our regular duties, today we unloaded and configured a new IBM SurePOS 300 for a customer in California. This is his second system with us, so we loaded the point of sale solution unconfigured because once it gets into the field, we'll call the customer and log in remotely in order to make sure it syncs up with the database on his existing system. The system is currently going through it's 24 hour burn-in test and, assuming everything checks out, we'll probably be able to ship it out tomorrow.
Opening Entry
10 Print"Hello, world!"
20 Goto 10
An eternally basic hello for you. :) My name's Jerry, I'm a technician at Assured Computing Technologies, and I'm starting this blog to let anyone who's interested know what our Tech department's up to these days. So stay tuned!
20 Goto 10
An eternally basic hello for you. :) My name's Jerry, I'm a technician at Assured Computing Technologies, and I'm starting this blog to let anyone who's interested know what our Tech department's up to these days. So stay tuned!
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