Holiday Schedule Alert!
This is to remind everyone that we will be closed from Saturday December 25 through January 1st, 2004, reopening January 3rd 2005. As always, if you have an emergency we will have technicians available, but we ask that general sales, service and support wait until we return.
 

SAFE 7/Preview: What Counts In Reports!
Advanced SAFE/SQL users know that there are a lot of very cool things one can do with Queries in reports. This time we want to discuss something advanced, but extremely useful that you may make even report-phobic users want to start delving more deeply into SAFE reports.

First you can use SAFE/7 to actually custom total and count things in reports. In other words, you can create columns in your reports such as:

Total_Number_Of_Orders_Placed_By_This_Customer This Month

Second you can base Queries on these counts and totals.

Now, once you know that you can do this and you know how to do it, you can use these techniques to obtain some very powerful management insights which are not obvious--especially if you are used to seeing typical 'white bread' sales and accounting reports.

Here are some examples that could be applied to just one SAFE/7 report: a Customer Master List

• A column showing the number of orders each customer placed in a month
• A column showing the Number of Orders In A Month Above $100
• A Filter to show only customers with more than 2 orders in a month
• A Filter showing only customers in Top 10% of sales for the month

To say it another way, there are two important new features here in SAFE/7:
1. You can control the content of certain columns in the report! And you can do this without using ReportWriter. In fact, the column can be (as you see above) a formula (number_of_orders_in_current_month).

2. A Filter Option can be a formula! And in fact, that can be pretty sophisticated, drawing data from other tables. To clarify that, look at the last example: we're only going to display customers who were 'in the top ten percent', so the filter will have to calculate whether or not each customer is in the top ten percent as the report prints.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Today we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg. We'll go into the mechanics in a future column. Until then, here are some other possibilities you'll want to try with SAFE/7 on another typical report, the Product Master List

• A column showing the number of production orders placed for this product in the past year
• A column showing the number of releases for this product in the past year
• A column showing the total_profitability of production orders placed for this product in the past year
• A column showing the total freight billings of releases for this product in the past month
• A Filter showing only Products in the top 10% of sales for the month
• A Filter showing all Products which are member of a Category which was in the top 10% of sales for the year

SUMMARY
These techniques are designed to further the number of 'you can't get there from here' problems with reporting; you know, where there is a report that has almost everything you need...but not quite. They also will allow you to learn things about your business that were just not possible with any conventional reporting (even ReportWriter). With a little effort to master their use, and a little more creativity, we think you'll find them indispensable in managing your business.
 

Internet Telephony!
A few months ago we touted the fact that we had switched to VOIP (Voice Over IP) for all our phone/fax needs. This has turned out very well for us. Now at the time we admitted that it was probably not ready for non-geeks to implement, but since then the market has really taken off and we are now seeing local carriers falling all over themselves to get in on this before the gravy train leaves the station.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the traditional hard-wire connections that we've known and loved since Theodore Vail developed the modern phone system (Oh, and you thought it was A.G. Bell? Pshaww...) will be going away in the next five years or so. Best to be prepared. After all, a single physical connection (forget phone numbers!) can handle dozens of phone calls as well as your fax and data services.

Think about what that means: You'll never pay for a 'truck roll' to add a new line or get more bandwidth. You want more services? You'll do what you do when you want that new Premium Channel from your cable provider: just fill out a request and presto-change-o, in a couple of days? You're watching The ReRun Channel!

Another benefit: There is no such thing as 'long distance'. We pay zero for talking to our other offices; even Ireland. Come to think of it, we pay about $100 a month for all our long distance now. And we talk on the phone a lot. All over the world. And the only reason we pay that is because VOIP hasn't spread to every corner of the globe yet; we still have to pay a 'real' phone company at the other end of a call, say to Germany, to translate our bits and bytes into a Deutsche Telekom signal.

Need more? When we grab a cell phone, we're still on our phone system (so long as we're in a Cingular area of coverage) because their network is already IP enabled. So if we're in Seattle and want to talk to Ireland on our cell phones, we don't pay $2.00 a minute, we pay zip, zero, nada; just regular usage. Why? Because as far as our cell-phone is concerned, we are local; the call is converted into VOIP in Seattle so any call we make on a mobile phone costs us only what a 'local' call would.

And of course, since it's all digital, we've integrated it with our Caller ID and Contact Management so your calls are automatically logged into our Contact Management Activities along with e-mails. (Ed. Note: which you can do as well in SAFE of course!)

STABILITY IS THE KEY
Now the one possible weakness of  VOIP is that it demands a steady and strong IP connection. So your ISP has to be reliable. Recognizing that they have a reputation for reliability, probably what will happen is that the current phone companies will morph into 'Super-ISPs'. They won't be so much connecting copper and fiber as managing IP addresses. They'll get less for that single 'connection' but make up for it by providing you with all the IP addresses you'll need to satiate your hunger for more 'lines'. At least, that's the theory. Quite a number of other players are hoping to get in on the action (read on). It's not quite 'the wild west' but it is certain that reliability will only improve because this is the future and, as they say, the future is now.

SO HOW TO GET STARTED?
Well, we started by saying that your local carriers are all getting in on the action so they should be one call you make. But they are not the only one! Notice the clever cable-tv metaphor we just used? Well, companies like Comcast are drooling to get your phone business. In many areas of the country they offer a business cable service which looks suspiciously like a phone system---because it is. And of course, there are about a gillion telephone resellers who now offer turnkey solutions. But here's the thing: all these systems work pretty much the same way. Handsets work the same and in fact, when we set up our system we demanded to keep our existing handsets---after all, it's all analog until it's digitized before leaving the building. Of course, getting new handsets gives you more options. The key thing to ask about is quality of service (QOS). Do they have a guarantee? Do they have stats on past performance to back it up?

WANT A FREE TASTE?
A handy little subset of internet telephony can be sampled by you, right now, by going to www.skype.com. Skype is an application that lets two or more computers tele-conference. No it isn't 'telephony' per se, but it should prove to you that VOIP is ready for prime time. All you need is two (or more) computers running Skype, each with a headset. You won't believe the sound quality. Plus you can do neat things while connected, like screen captures, file transfers and the ability to record the conversation for posterity. And it's all free In fact most of the things you can do with WebEx you can do with Skype so long as you're OK with wearing a headset (hey some people freak out if they can't have a 'real' handset).

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: Dump Internet Explorer Now!
If you've read any computer magazine or listened to any article about computer security in the past two years, you'll no doubt have heard about the constant security problems with Internet Explorer. To my reckoning, there have been over 200 patches to IE since IE6 was released. And still it goes on with new threats and vulnerabilities discovered every day. It has become clear to us that IE was structurally designed in an insecure way and can never be made safe regardless of patching. And Microsoft has recently announced that it will ship no further fixes to any version of IE outside of XP2. So, enough is enough.

It is time to dump Internet Explorer. We are now recommending that users immediately switch to FireFox available from www.mozilla.org. Firefox is now shipping the 1.0 release and according to several outside groups that have been auditing it's development, they have been extremely responsive in correcting all known security flaws. Installing Firefox alone will make your PC far more secure. We recommend that this be done on all your company's PCs as one PC (with access to various servers) running IE is enough to render your entire network vulnerable.

And when I say vulnerable I mean that, despite Microsoft's almost non-stop update process, it appears that it is, today, just as possible for hackers to gain control of your entire network as ever using only Internet Explorer.

WHY FIREFOX?
Firefox is better in several ways. First by not being intimately linked with the operating system, there are no 'back doors' into various file system functions as there are in IE (remember that Justice Department suit? MS was not kidding---they couldn't remove IE from Windows without ripping out all that nasty stuff.) Unfortunately it is that nasty stuff which makes a number of web sites run. For example there is 'ActiveX', a technology unique to Windows/Internet Exploirer that let's a web server run tasks on the client PC. Works great for various on-line services. Works great for hackers too! Secondly, Firefox isn't the popular target IE is. So far the market share just isn't there. This may change, but one thing Firefox has going for it in this regard is that the Open Source movement is constantly reporting (and fixing) bugs. They have no interest in hiding flaws because they have no commercial stake in it. That is why the initial release was so bug free---it had already been tested and tweaked by literally thousands of developers.

GET BRIAN'S BUZZ
I also strongly encourage you to read the following article from Brian's Buzz: http://windowssecrets.com/041118/. Outside of the newsletter you are currently viewing, this is probably the most important reading you can do for your company's computing needs. The linked article details other specific steps you need to take in order to make web browsing in your company safe.  Read this article. Follow it's recommendations. Subscribe to Brian's Buzz. Do it today.

Til Next Time,

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com