Software Development Director

Report Engine 2.0

2009-08-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

New Report Engine 2.0

During the current quarter there is a new enhancement for our software. This is actually a set of features that will apply to a set of reports within different modules on our system.

Those enhancement wont be on all the reports, however if you feel that there is a missing one that will impact most of our customer, feel free to request it free of cost.

Enhancements:

Remove “Modal” screens – This mean that the report will not force u to close it in order to access other part of our software. In essence the report became just another screen within our software, rather than a popup that prohibit the user to access other part of the software.
Capability to run the report multiple times – Because of the non-modal modification that means that the user can call the report again and run it with different parameters, and even have them side-by-side for comparison purpose.
Data view (with export capability) – Because of certain query restrictions this won’t be on all the report, but basically allow the user to see the raw-unformatted data in a grid view. Also will allow the user to export to either cvs, excel, and html format.
Direct access to subscriber (and some other records) information. – by clicking inside the report (over subscriber id) the software automatically open a subscriber and lookup that subscriber!

Some of the reports on the list are (and subject to change)

Alarm Activity report
Accounts Receivable
Non Restored Alarms
Excessive Signals
Failed To Test
Invalid Phone Numbers
Panel with no signals since

Soon we are going to review the Receivables and Service module reports that will be affected with those enhancements… stay tune!

Dealer Billing from our Central Station

2009-07-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

Within the many uses and configuration supported by our software, one that has recently gained some recognition lately is the capability to manage the receivables of your dealer within the same software (primarily bill and receipts).

Millennium is capable to define dealers as ‘Divisions’ and therefore every invoice printed to that customer will contain the dealer “division” information. Some of the reports has the options to print by divisions (Accounts Receivable, Cash Receipts, Recurring Revenue Preview, Sales Taxes Collected/Invoiced, others) so that you can provide the dealer with reporting information about their account.

Also recently we added a set of new fields in order for the central station to define how much does the central station keeps from a recurring revenue record called Wholesale Rate. With this field the central station can define that (for example) 5 dollars our of the 20 dollars charge on a monthly based are for the central station, and the rest for the dealer.

In addition to Wholesale Rate we added a new report ‘Wholesale Billing Report’ This report will list (by division) all of the account billed for defined month/year/cycle. This will list the invoice (by line item) with the amount billed, and how much the central station will keep, and therefore how much will pay to the dealer. This report plus the Cash Receipt will help central station to provide just one more service to their dealers, giving them more advantage over their competitors.

Hidden treasures in our central station software…

2009-07-06T09:14:00.001-07:00

Recently one customer complain about how to go thru all his saleitem list to pickup one at the end of the list… knowing that we order by id, and that you can start typing and the software will assist u searching for that item I was not worried about it… that until came to common knowledge that this customer have hundreds of items, and that many of them use similar start character.

Solution: Advance Sale Item Lookup… This form is currently accessible from Invoice/Proposal/Job Cost (inventory section) and can be accessed by pressing ALT + F2 when cursor is in the saleitem field.

With this form the user can refine a filter for group, vendor, item type (inactive, inventory, kids, recurring) and type the sale item ID, allowing the user to filter down to whatever the user feels like…

Custom Dropdown Search - Initial Implementation

2009-07-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

As many customers crave for more ways to select information during the data entry process, many of them had express to lookup information by code, other by description (or other available fields). There has always been a struggle to find the perfect lookup field… Well, I think we found it… you select what field you want to lookup by… simply right click the dropdown, select ‘Search by’, and select the field that you want to use.

Whathever u select, this setting is stored per user; therefore every millennium user will select different fields to lookup by within ur system.

Important to mention that not all drop down use this engine, only selected multi-column one will do it for now, however any request is welcome!

Sample code

Original ‘Code’ selection…

Right click and select ‘Description’

Search by description!!!! :@)

Roadmap update (end of 2nd quarter)

2009-06-30T10:21:00.001-07:00

As we are in the last day of the second quarter, here is a list of the status of our primary target plus some last minute added items.

Done items...

Statements Exports

Support 64bit systems (x64)

Virtual Printer (Transaction Screen)

MKS DBISQL

Custom Reports

Wholesale Rate (Dealer Billing)

In the process

Arabic language support (expected to be done today)

SureView Integration - in the process (but paused)

Tech Module 2 (On Test, History view, Receipts) - waiting for protocol implementation.

New Items

Custom Dropdown Search - initial Implementation

New MultiCompany Setup

DealerView

WebTech (Going to beta soon)

Custom Reports…

2009-06-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Out of the last blog entry (Roadmap update) I mention about custom reports, yet is seems not to be clear what is involve on it. Here is a summary…

What reports are “customizable”?

Service Request form (all 3 types), Proposal (legacy and default format), Invoices (Full and summary).

Is there any pre-setup requirements?

There will be a new form called Custom Report that u need to give rights to users that will be updating those custom reports, everyone else will only run the reports (if they have rights to the respective form (invoice print, proposal, service request form). Also this modification will be available on Release 31 (minor version number has not been assigned since it depends on QA)

Where would those reports be accessible?

On it’s respective form (invoice, proposal, service request), you will see an arrow on the right side of the Print button, once the user click that arrow it will drop down with a list of custom reports (for that type) (see figure 1)

What can I customize?

Layout (move labels and data around, colors, fonts, remove fields out of the reports, add new labels, shape, lines, some other objects.

How many custom reports can I add?

About 2 millions… enough?

Can I email those reports?

Not in an automated way (yet), however u can save it to a pdf, and attach it to an email.

Figure 1

Roadmap update (2nd quarter)

2009-06-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

As we are near the end of this quarter, I'm doing some review for this quarter roadmap and the status of some of our projects.

Statements exports - Done, now users can export their statements to be printed by a 3rd party company.
Support 64bit systems (x64) - Keep in mind that is not intended to rebuild our software in 64 bit format, but to be able to run our software in Windows 64 bit systems.
Virtual Printer (Transaction Screen) - This has been implemented, plus the avility to run this program as a windows service and to see transaction on a secondary computer.
MKS DBISQL - a more streamline version of dbisqlc.
Custom Reports - Service Reques is done and tested, Proposal is done and currently on QA, Invoice should be done by next Wednesday.
Arabic language support (MKMSC toolbar) - not done yet
SureView Integration - in the process (but paused)
Tech Module 2 (On Test, History view, Receipts) - waiting for protocol implementation.
Wholesale Rate (Dealer Billing) - done

note: some other development has move to a higher priority, DealerView, WebTech, MultiCompany setup, Winpack Interface, as many issues has been fixed during this quarter.

"Hello world"

2009-05-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, now it's my time to start a new blog (yup, another one). This one with a more business oriented point of view (sorry for those Orlando Magic’s fan).

Within this blog I’ll try to keep you updated with the latest on research and development. That should be the primary goal, however I might add a bit of politics, sports, social life, food, gossip, and whatever jumps on my head while I’m typing… be prepare, you’ve been warned.

Note: “Hello world” is normally the first application coming out of most of software development books… that’s why the title is… “Hello world”