Begosh And Begorrah: Yet Another St. Pat's Thank You!
Toorah Loorah and so forth and so on... Our twentieth year in existence and it's good to know that some traditions nivvver die; namely a raft of goofy (and always green) presents to celebrate La Feile a Phadraigh (St. Pat's Day to you 'mericuns). Among the list this year of items that made us say, Oh you really shouldn't have...

• A box of green golf balls (practical)

• A special dye for -safely- colouring beer green (thoughtful)

• A t-shirt reading 'Sorry Ossifer. We drive on the other side of the road in Ireland...' (cheap insurance)

• A set of pens which play Danny Boy (clever)

And though we may from time to time question the tastefulness of these gifts, we never doubt the sincerity. Thank you so much. It's taken some years, but we have learned to appreciate these almost as much as you seem to enjoy sending them.

Now before we resume our boring chatter about SAFE, here's a link to some information on the real Patrick. In Ireland, St. Pat's is more a religious day than a party. In all seriousness, Patrick was known for tolerance. Patrick outlawed slavery in Ireland a thousand years before anywhere else in Europe. He also demanded equal rights for women---many women were leaders of the Church in Ireland until the 10th century.

Til Next Time!

Imceda LiteSpeed 2005: The Best Backup Software For SQL Server
Congratulations! A significant number of you are reaching a point where your business is generating a volume of orders that requires fairly large databases. Progress! Success! Bigger is better, right?

Well, not always. In the case of backing up SAFE, the larger your database, the more of a pain become backups. For most smaller customers, we have traditionally recommended a single backup program for your server such as ArcServe or BackupExec. These are fine, especially with the LiveData and SQL Server options. Simple, right? One backup program for everything.

But at a certain point, these programs are not that efficient. For one thing, they are not optimized for SQL Server data, so they are neither all that fast in doing a backup nor are they that great at squeezing as much data as possible onto your tapes/DVDs.

To address this, In recent years, several vendors have debuted backup programs which are designed only for SQL Server. They do not replace your traditional backup software; they are used in addition. Now why would one want to do that? Three words: Speed, Compression and Safety.

• All these programs backup SQL Server data many times faster than traditional backup software.
   

• All automatically backup SQL Server data while SQL Server is running
   

• All compress their data onto your backup media many times more efficiently than the backup program you're now using.
   

• All have the ability to intelligently analyze your data during backups and restores to make sure it was properly backed up or restored. In other words, they can see the data, not just the bits and bytes so they can tell you about data problems (and perhaps even fix it) that regular backup programs happily pass by.

Because of these advantages, it

So When To Switch?
So how do you know if it's time to consider one of these programs? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I need a real-time backup solution?

• How long are backups taking?

• Do I need to back up SQL Server data at several offices?

• How much data do I have to backup and how much of it is SQL Server database?

And The Answer Is...

• If you have decided that losing even half of a days' activity would be unacceptable

• If your backups are taking more than a couple of hours

• If your SQL Server data represents over half of your data to backup or your databases are greater than 10gb?

A yes to any of these means you should strongly consider a SQL Server based backup program.

But Which To Choose
There are several companies doing this now including St. Bernard Software and Illumigent. But we're cutting to the chase and recommending Imceda LiteSpeed. In recent showdown tests in several trade magazines, Imceda LiteSpeed was shown to have an excellent ease of use, plus it one every speed test hands down. Our own internal tests bear this out and it has become our standard backup solution for SQL Server data at all four of our offices. Every night, LiteSpeed automatically backups over 300gb of our customer data, over the internet onto only five DVDs!

If this sounds like something you need (and if you took the quiz above it should), call us today to order. Sooner or later, you'll be glad you did!

 Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: Q & A
This is the 3rd or 4th Q/A column this year and we're not even into April! Could this be the start of a kinder/gentler Ciarān? Fewer rants and more helpfulness! Probably not. But here are a couple of questions that have come up many times in the past month so they're worth a bit of review. I should be back with more fire and brimstone next time.

Q: How Can I Prevent Users From Changing Order Quantities After A PO is Printed?
A: An oldie but a goodie. (And by that I usually mean the dreaded 'backward compatibility issue once again rears it's ugly head.)

Background: Remember that SAFE is form driven for inventory updates; you print something and the inventory is updated. You print a Release Notice, inventory is relieved. You print a P.O. and the on order quantity is increased. Also remember that a P.O. is in many cases a contract. SAFE really shouldn't allow one to change the Order Quantity after a P.O. is generated, in the same way that one is not allowed to change a Shipped Quantity on a Sales Invoice; in both cases, a piece of paper has been generated which can be considered a binding contract. We can't allow users to print one thing and then fiddle numbers in the machine, right? Back here on planet earth, we know that many CSRs find this silly, irritating and so on. Having to void/generate a new P.O. every time an Order Quantity changes is ridiculous--they know when they need to re-print! So by default, SAFE allows users to do something we know is not really correct.

So, to prevent users from changing an Order Quantity after a P.O. is printed:

1. Open Security

2. Select the User Template to be affected (all the users you want to prevent from changing Order Quantities)

3. Add the following Security ID with Deny Access:

DisableOrderQuantityAfterPO

More To Consider: Now, if it's so simple, why all the 'background' stuff above? Because there is a nasty, nasty little side-effect of allowing users to change On Order Quantities after a P.O. is printed and I gave you a gigantic hint above! Namely, SAFE updates inventory when a form is generated. So what updates the inventory to correct the On Order Quantity if you change it after printing the P.O.? The correct answer is: nothing. That's right, if you manually change the On Order Quantity of a Line Item after printing a P.O. your Product Master's On Order Quantity is now wrong, wrong, wrong! In that case, you need to run Calc Usage on that particular Product to put things back to rights.

So what have we learned?

1. You should strongly consider adding the above Security ID in order to prevent this from happening
    

2. If you don't want to do this, you must remember to run Calc Usage on any Product which you affect by manually changing the Order Quantity after a P.O. is printed.

Q: The Spin Boxes for dates are nice, but they can be irritating. If I select one which has no date, it changes to a strange ##/##/## symbol. And a lot of times I can't see the full date!

A: SAFE formats dates according to the setting that you choose in Windows Control Panel. This allows users in other countries (there are other countries?) to be able to enter dates in a familiar way. On many systems, the default Windows date format is DD/MM/YYYY and that accounts for the 'squished' look. To correct this
1. Go to Settings|Control Panel
2. Select Regional Settings|Date
3. Change the Windows Short field to mm/dd/yy.

Bonus tip: If you click on either the up or down arrow of an empty date field, the current date is automatically entered for you.

Til Next Time!

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume VII #6