SAFE/X: Memo Line Items!
A lot of people have asked about another 'small' addition to SAFE/X: Memo Line Items on Sales Orders. Memo Lines are just as they sound: simply a place for notes. They allow for nothing like a 'product', 'quantity', 'price', 'cost' or 'tax'. Just notes. Actually two notes: one for your customer and one for your vendor.

A Note Of Digression
There is a plethora of 'notes' on any sales order. So with this new member to the family, it's probably a good idea to review:

There are two kinds of Sales Order Notes; notes which are attached to the entire transaction, but not to any particular line item:

• Customer: Notes which are meant for the customer to see. These may (or may not) print on various forms (packing slip, invoice). Frankly, because we've offered these notes since day one, we never felt a great 'urge' to develop Line Item Notes. And in fact, some of you may not have used them simply because you can't see them on your custom designed forms. If you haven't used these much, you may want to consider having your custom forms re-designed to include them. Alternatively, you could switch back to our standard forms which do utilize them.
• Internal: These are, as the name implies, notes which are meant for your eyes only... not for the customer.

There are also three kinds of Line Item Notes; notes which are attached to each Line Item (duh!):

• Customer Notes: Again, notes which are meant for the customer to see, for example on packing slips and invoices.
• Internal: And again, notes which are meant for your eyes only... not for the customer, but this time, attached to the Line Item.
• Vendor Notes: Notes which are meant for the Vendor. The most practical application of these is that they print on Vendor Purchase Orders.

So What Are The Advantages?
Good question! Which is why we never added them until now. But over time, as transactions have become more complex, a comment we get is that invoices can become more difficult for your client to interpret. So it can be useful to place notes randomly within an order, ie. between line items to add clarity.

So What Are They Not?
A memo line item is not about money! It is not for buying or selling anything. If you were thinking this was a down and dirty way to bill for 'services', think again. A memo line item is strictly for notes. End of story!

Some Rules
You can have a Sales Order with only Memo Line(s). This could be useful to transmit some piece of information to the customer.

You may not add Memo Lines after invoicing, however you may be able to modify their contents after invoicing with the proper Security Template. As we've discussed before, that last bit is controversial from a GAAP standpoint.

You may disable the ability to add Memo Line Items for all users or for a range of users using a Security Template. Some companies may wish to limit who can enter Memo Line Items; the bookkeeper or sales manager for example.

Form Re-Design
Yes, you need to have your forms updated with our forms design service to use this feature. If you don't, you will get a very ugly result on your invoices; the memo line item will appear as a 'product' with 0 order and 0 ship qty. Your customers will be confused. If you don't wish to have your forms re-done, it is best to Memo Line Items in the Global Options Browse.

But when you do choose to have your forms updated, you can have memo lines print different from other elements of the page. You may want to use a different font or size to make it clear to your customer the purpose of these notes.

Til Next Time!
 

CARP (3) In Full Swing
Remember: Ciarān's Annual Bug Reporting Incentive Program is in full swing now until our Anniversary Issue at the end of May. This is our 3rd year paying you to catch bugs in SAFE.

CARP pays you, the individual, not your company, but you, dear reader  to report site specific bugs---something that isn't working properly at your site that should at least be caught by SAFE (no error message, for example). During this period we double that and pay $10 to anyone who reports a verifiable program bug (something that would affect all SAFE users everywhere.) And for those? I don't even care if you're the first or the fiftieth person to report the same damned bug; if it's verifiable---you get paid, until we issue an update or patch. (If you report the bug after we issue a fix, you get bupkus--your company probably isn't set up for automatic updates and needs to get on the stick.)

Procedure?
Just do what you've been doing (OK, should be doing); report anything untoward in excruciating detail! The whole point is to encourage those of you who are aware of annoying little nigglies but never take the time to report them. Don't let anything annoying slip by. But even more than that, tell us who you are so you can get the dough and not Francine over in Accounts Payable or Ed the Owner/Sales Manager who already has enough money to go to Barbados every year. Forget Ed! Think of yourself!

When we announce our Annual Discount for our Twenty Third Anniversary (next month), we'll send everyone who contributed a list of their reported bugs and, more importantly, a check.

To give you an idea of what is at stake: Last year's winner got a check for $200. Three other users got over $100.

Fine Print
1. You must claim your prize! When you are notified of your point total, you must request the money! If you send us a note like, 'Just make the check payable to my employer' you get nothing. Seriously. This is for you, to 'incentivize' you to help us make SAFE a cleaner system. Selfless acts of employee loyalty are no fun at all!

2. You must claim your prize! You will have 30 days after the Anniversary Issue to request your check(s). They will be mailed, in your name, to your company.

But Wait There's More!
The person with the highest overall score will receive a fabulous Grand Prize: A matching gift certificate from our pals at Amazon.com. In other words, if you're the winner, and report $200 worth of nasty, filthy bugs, you get an additional $200.00 gift certificate.

The person with the second highest score, gets a set of steak knives (sorry, if you haven't seen the movie 'Glengarry Glen Ross' you have no idea why that's so funny.)

Til Next Time!
 

Ollie Tip: Time Out!
Ed. Note: Last time we promised to begin a multi-part discussion of interfaces with the outside world. We've received some interesting updates from our vendors which may change some of the material, so we're postponing the series for a couple of weeks to incorporate the newer standards.

One thing that often doesn't get discussed until after the install is how to handle users who leave their Ollie sessions. Remember that when a user has any web application running, this is taking up resources on your server... even if the user is away from their desk for lunch (or gone for the day!) Since there is no way to force users to 'exit' a web application, all web servers have systems in place to automatically shut down a user's session after a period of inactivity. This length of time is referred to as a timeout. Without this timeout, sessions would soon build up until the server crashed.

The flip side of a time out is a session memory. When a user logs back in and after being out, what is retained from the prior session?

These are important considerations and there may not be a one size fits all. So Ollie has several ways to manage timeouts and session memory either at the global level or by customer.

Session Inactivity Timeout (Customer Specific) This sets the amount of time before the session times out due to inactivity. The default is ten minutes. There is a tendency for new Ollie customers to want to jack this up to a very high number so that your customer can leave their sessions on their screens, go to lunch and come back with everything where they left it. Don't do it! Learn from eBay, Amazon and other major e-commerce companies; it's a sure way to overload your server in short order. You need an inactivity timeout.

Total Session Timeout (Customer Specific) This sets the maximum amount of time for a session, regardless of what the person is doing. The default is one hour. In other words, the user has one hour to get their business accomplished. Active or inactive. This is important because, there are certain types of robot attacks on the internet which create a connection and then stick around like vampires sucking up resources. By limiting a session regardless of activity or inactivity, you can prevent these types of intruders from hanging out indefinitely.

Session Memory Timeout (Customer Specific) This determines what happens to unsubmitted transactions in case of a timeout, or in case they exist without submitting their items. In other words, if the user's session ends with items left in the shopping cart, what should be done? Again there is a timeout value, but this one's range is in hours and the default is 24. So the user has 24 hours to return to their previous session with all items intact. After 24 hours, the transaction is dumped. The maximum is 99 hours, the minimum is zero. If you set this value to zero, unsubmitted orders are never saved between sessions.

There are other kinds of timeouts which are part of your web server's operating system and are beyond the scope of this article. But one of these is important: The Microsoft IIS server timeout. This controls an inactivity timeout for the entire web server. The default for Microsoft IIS is 15 minutes. Nothing gets past this timeout, so if you accidentally set this to a low number, no changes to the Ollie will make any difference. As a general rule, have your network admin check this first if you find that users are being unceremoniously booted off Ollie!

Summary
There are several types of timeout controls in Ollie. The main ones we discussed here are customer specific which gives you the ability to tweak your server to balance between responsiveness for all and convenience for individual users. There is also a global timeout set by your web server (Microsoft IIS) which needs to be taken into account. Taking the time (sorry) to adjust these will help ensure that your web server runs smoothly under a wide range of loads (number of users) and reduces the chances of problems due to overload or outside attack.

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: On-line Dating And Other Support Issues
One of my co-worker's (who shall henceforth be referred to as 'Dater X') has recently become somewhat obsessed with on-line dating. Our tech support has a lot in common with on-line dating. Both are kind of 'two-dimensional'. In many ways, they are 'easier', but in some ways they are much, much harder.

First off, I have nothing but sympathy for all 'daters'. If I had to go through that crap again, I'd rather join a monastery. And I'd likely do not too well either. You might think that because I live and die via e-mail, I'd feel otherwise, but no one is more aware of the difficulty in creating the right 'impression' in an e-world.

I've often talked about communication as being a message in a bottle. When Dater X sends a message, she waits. There's no immediate feedback. That right there is maddening for her! We are e-mailing fools. We check our e-mail more often than most people look out the window. Her time line for expecting a reply is about 1 hr. A lot of people only check their e-mail once a week! She shared one exchange with me where she politely tried to explain to one guy how on-line dating only works if people check their e-mail! Of course, it also doesn't occur to her that these people have work to do!

Then there are the times when she'll write long e-mails because she's using the service as it was intended: to really get to know people before going out on a real date. Evidently, a lot (maybe most) people do not use the service that way. We (the office is highly invested in this process now) are beginning to conclude that what most people do is simply use the service as a 'net' to catch people, get their phone number and then get away from e-life as quickly as humanly possible! Which doesn't make sense to geeks like us. To her it seems as though a lot of guys are shallow (outrageous!). But what she forgets, of course, is that most people don't type 100wpm. She types with total fluidity. IOW: she types like a tobacco auctioneer talks. So she can't understand why any intelligent person who paid to join an e-mail based service types like this...

I     l i k e   t o    g o    c a m p i   n g to o.   S o m  e t  i m   e   s  I    g o    t   o   t h   e  O l y m p i   c   M  o u n  t a I n s.     Ho   w   a b o u t yo u?

...or maybe they can type, but just aren't particularly articulate in print. Or maybe they type all day and by the time they get home, they are sick of it. (I've often said that when I get out of here, I steer clear of any contraption more complicated than a can opener.)

One never knows. And that's the point: she has no way of knowing where her correspondents are coming from. Statistically, she may have already met Mr. Wonderful a dozen times--someone she'd get on with famously. But maybe she approached that guy on the one day when his computer crashed ten times, or maybe he's perfect except that he hates 'e-mail' and she sends him this overwhelming first note which creates the wrong 'first impression' so they're screwed right there.

What is really find curious in looking at her efforts is how small is the window of opportunity. If you meet someone the 'normal' way (you know, in a bar ;) , you've got one shot. That is how it's been since time immemorial. Everyone hates the shallowness and awkwardness. On-line dating, has the opportunity to change that. To not judge based on first impressions. To do things differently. The curious thing is that, for most people, apparently, the on-line dating is not about that at all. It's just as first-impression based as the 'bar' scene. All it does, is change the criteria for creating that first impression. In other words, instead of judging people by their appearance or initial 'Hi, what's your sign' approach, you're judging people by their picture and their... OK. Maybe it's exactly the same!

What Exactly Is Your Point?
Only this: It gives me a much stronger appreciation for your point of view. And how many assumptions go into any support transactions. We try very hard to give you what you need to get your questions answered and your problems solved. But there is always a gap between what we intend and what you perceive. We may assume that because we don't hear back that we've done our job. We may assume that your short response means one thing because we type like fiends, whereas all it may mean is that you have all the typing skills of Dater X's boyfriend.

What we can do, which Dater X cannot (well, not without being arrested for 'e-stalking') is try to be more proactive: follow up more, 'check in' on the general state of things, ask more often for feedback.

Frankly, one reason we slacked off on that stuff in the past couple of years is because (like Dater X) the response rate was not that great. A lot of customers would not reply to organised surveys or e-mails out of the blue asking for suggestions or simply, 'How are things going?'.

We're going to start doing more of that again. Mainly because it's a good thing to do, but also because now we're even more sensitive to why you may appreciate it even if you don't take the time to reply. You may have been busy the week we sent you that survey. Or maybe you didn't get the survey because your brother-in-law was dinking with the firewall that day. Or whatever.

But of course, we hope you do reply. As always, we live for your suggestions on how we can make SAFE, WebSAFE and Ollie better products. We always assume you know that. ;)

Til Next Time!

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume X #8