To Pre-Build or Not Pre-Build that is the Question

[David Head]

Ross
Hard Laugh! You have way too much time on your hands! Mooning

[Ross MacLane]

Never moon me or I'll get you back... I'll drink a Foster's, that's Australian for beer. Trying to lighten things up around here, do want to be a bunch of stiffies like some other place! Besides that I put the wrong one up there, changed it now. Hope the old guy doesn't take it the wrong way.Happy Dancin! BTW: You may be in for a little surprise yourself Shortly! Do you have Skype International?

Ross
Hard Laugh! You have way too much time on your hands! Mooning

[David Head]

Hard Laugh! Funny thing is I don't know one person who would touch a Fosters with a barge pole let alone drink it! I think it might be one of those cruel exports where we ship out stuff we don't like and tell everyone it is popular back home.

Yes I have Skype and I can make International calls. Is that what you meant?

And BTW, this is a much nicer place than certain other forums (or is that fora?)

[HarryGlos]

Hey Ross,

What can I say after such cinematic excellence? A perfect balance of funny, interesting and disturbing…smiley-wink

Funny: from the jocular, devil-may-care and simple flights of whimsy.

Interesting: from the who-done-it, product review and user functionality.

Disturbing: from the who is Harry Rooney, Why does he talk that way and where did he come from?smiley-surprised

Some would say Harry Rooney is my alter ego.
Others would say Harry Rooney is my long lost identical twin brother.
Still others would say Harry Rooney is my genetic clone.
While still others would say “who is that masked man�?

All I can say is I enjoyed it emensley and hope we hear from him again… And David I’d say the boy had just the right amount of time on his hands…smiley-laughing

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry

[HarryGlos]

Hey Sports Fans,

Excelisys just posted a new open file and white paper on our "Articles- Tips, Tricks & Techniques" area of the forum that I don't want you to miss. It's called Drag and Drop-Dead Elegant Interfaces - TipsnTricks just click on the link below.

http://www.filemakertoday.com/com/sh...ad.php?t=20941

I am delighted to see Excelisys and Richard Carlton participating here on the Cafe. They bring a lot to the table so sit down, eat, drink and enjoy!smiley-laughing

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry

[HarryGlos]

Hey there fellow FileMaker-Ins,

I’d like to talk a bit more about the calendar/scheduler side of a good business solution. We’ve all seen different MONTH views on Calendar/Schedule solutions and they mostly fall into one category. “A block for each day with lines of text and/or numbers”. Generally something like;

10:00 am Meeting with Harry or
Packaging mtg take mockup.

Some allow only one line per event, some allow a line and a half followed by something like “…” at the end of the last letter allowed and still others allow as much text as you want to type per event.

• Some do a good job of showing the separation between each item while others don’t.

• Some do a good job of showing when there are more events than you can seen in the date block while others don’t.

I’ve not rechecked all of the calendars of the solutions reviewed here but there is something I noted with FM Business Tracker from Richard Carlton Consulting, that I like but needs a change in my opinion. I like that you can type directly into a day block and type in an event, kind of a “add on the fly” kind of thing. What I don’t like are two things.

1. You can type 500 words if you want to and take up the entire day block and...

2. When you directly type into a day block it does not mark it as a new item.

If you go though the To Do layout to enter an event it puts a "." in front of the entry so you know one entry from the next. I think if you can type directly into a date block it needs to be marked that way as well. You need to know when one event starts and the other stops.

For those who think I’m being picky, look I know that many of us use a calendar in different ways for different things. All I know is when I go to my calendar, I need quick information and I need it well organized because I have a lot of information there! This is important and I’ll not apologize to Richard, because it’s his fault not mine… If he and his group hadn’t built such an excellent product I’d care less about it and wouldn’t waste my time or yours talking about it. smiley-smile

When you build something this good you can’t help but want to make it great! Are all of my ideas the defacto-standard to build a solution by? Maybe not, but there is nothing I say that you can’t see for yourself and decide for yourself as we review things? If you want to hurt Richard Carlton and his company, then tell him nothing, that’s what hurts! Richard I love a Man…smiley-laughing

Although the “date block with text” may well be the prevailing method for the Month view, is it the best method? More time than not I start with the month view because I’m looking at my schedule more than a week out. So I'm looking at a bunch of date blocks with line after line of events and much of it is of little use to me because I cant see enough to know what I have. We spend too much of our time trying to find unique ways of phrasing an event to fit in the block. Then we go to read it 5 days later and have no idea what it means and have to go to the day or week view to get the full event information anyway.

Oh and while we’re on the subject “PLEASE STOP EMAILING ME”! Put your comments here on the Café and the World as the good Lord intended! If you have a question like “my wife reads your stuff and wants to have your baby”smiley-surprised and I get that allot,smiley-wink send me an email along with a picture of your wife…smiley-laughing But if it’s a question about the forum please put it here on the forum. Sheesh!smiley-frown

So Ok Harry, do you have another way to set up a Monthly view for a calendar or are you just talking trash? Good question there Crab-Cakes and here’s two ways I really like.

• Right smack dab in the middle of the date block put the number of events you have that day like “8 Events”, nothing else just that. Clicking on the “8 Events” takes you to that day’s or that weeks events where you can easily see the 8 events.
• Matt Petrowsky of ISO productions added to this theme that I’ve adopted into my own solutions which is, when you click on the “8 Events” it brings up a dialog box showing all of the events and the time of each event if it’s an appointment. Then if you need to you can click on the event to read any note etc. Very cool and works like a charm.

I added a wrinkle to Matt’s idea where I can click and go to a layout showing all 12 months. Each day where I have an event the day shows in Red. From there I have three options. I can;

1. Click on a day and go to that day view.
   
2. Click the top of a week and go to that weeks view.
   
3. Click on the name of the month and go the full view of that month.

All very easy, very fast and gives you what you need when you need it.

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry

[HarryGlos]

Hildy Ho Good FileMaker'Ins,

Just a quick note to let you know that Richard Carlton Consulting recently released a new version of FM Starting Point... They have made a number of changes to make their solution better and a functional change as shown here.

FM Starting Point 1.0v6 - Thanks to a sharp user, we repaired a relationship between contacts and accounts. Now when a valid relationship exists between a contact record and account record, the company label on the Contact Data Entry screen will turn blue with an underline, to denote a relational and clickable link.

You can download the new version here: http://www.fmstartingpoint.com/

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry

[HarryGlos]

Hey guys there is a new Job pro on the market so let's take a look at it and see what we think...


Job Pro Central v6.01 “Price for a single user $1,200.00�

When I first reviewed Job Pro v.5 (this thread, post #5) I commented about the interface and said “It all seems kind of 60’s to me, like it was built in FileMaker 4, converted relationally in FileMaker 5.�

Now I must hand it to Job Pro because in version 6 they really did it right… Their new interface is clean, sharp, with excellent flow, with a clear business look and feel. I’m not wild about it taking up the entire screen on my laptop but hey you can’t have everything.

A criticism from before was the time it took to open and close version 5. This is not nearly as bad in v.6 and I solute the boys for making necessary changes. One thing very annoying however is when you open Job Pro 6 you get the FMP dialog saying “FileMaker cannot share files because another user is already sharing files using FileMaker Pro on this computer.� Now that would be fine if you got it once, but it isn’t, you get it 6 times. What’s that about?

I know my next statement will make some of you pink panty wearing, tree hugging, save the vultures (that’s for my good friend Kjoe) and 4D rights advocates that “I’m being far too critical�, but here’s the thing. This solution has been out long enough that something like this should have been corrected and not doing so is bush league! Look I don’t expect to develop a new solution and have it 100% right out of the box. We’re going to have some things that need to be tweaked and changed, that’s a normal part of the process. But this is a demo file to help you decide if you will purchase the product and this is an unnecessary annoyance that should have been corrected by now!

When you’re at the home page there are 13 Navigation buttons on the left that read “Calendar, Enquiries/Leads, Contacts, Mail & Fax, Jobs/Projects, Tasks, TimeLog, Stock/Services, Quotations, Sales Orders, Purchases, Shipping and Sales Invoices�. Once you click on one of them you move to that layout and these buttons move from the left of the layout to the top. Hmmm!

I’ll say again what I said in my first review and that is I find the solution confusing! I’ve built a few solutions through the years and generally have an idea of the type of business a given solution is targeted. This should especially be easy for an off the shelf pre built business solution right? Sure, because you want to conform to as many businesses as possible to maximize your audience. With Job Pro I’m at a Loss. A quick example is Products… If you reread the 13 navigation buttons there is nothing that even comes close to a Product button. The closest I can figure out is “Stock/Services�. How many business do not have products? Not many, so where are products? Come on this is nuts that I’ve spent over 15 minutes just trying to find products and am still not sure where it is. I know I’ve not read the poop sheet but some things should be very obvious and Products is one of them.

Warning: I will tell you right now if you do not want to read about “anger, frustration and gnashing of teeth�, then please do yourself a favor and move on to the next paragraph where I’ll try to be a warmer and gentler reviewer. If you were to open the solution and click on “Sales Invoices� and once there, go up to the top right and click on List you’ll see a “Ref no� 3040. First of all it ain’t a Ref number it’s and invoice number. If you click to print the order it says Invoice so what’s this Ref number business? So OK, if you look over to the right of the list view you will see that #3040 is a “PAID� invoice. Great it’s paid so click on 3040 and go to the “Sales Invoice�. Now go down to the line items and click the + button and guess what happens? You got it, you can add a line item, making a change to an invoice that’s already been “PAID�. That's like shooting a pig that's already dead! This is a solution you are paying for and part of the reasonablility of the developer is not only to help protect you from your bad self, but also to provide data discipline. Being able to make changes to “PAID� invoices is outrageous as it is irresponsible. Too strong you say, well maybe so, but talk to the business owner who turns his data over to his accountant who wants to know what the deal is on some PAID invoices that show a balance? Then try to go bak 6 months and try to figure it out...

You guys take a trip over to our friends at Excelisys http://www.excelisys.com/ and download eX–BizTracker 2.0 and see how they lock a paid invoice on a FREE solution. I can’t help but feel where Job Pro is trying so hard to be something for everyone they have negotiated themselves into a monster.

Another good solution is FM Starting Point http://www.fmstartingpoint.com/ that does a bunch of things very well but does not, at the moment, lock the paid invoice. But two things here, it’s a free solution and its open architecture so you can go in and either add it or have it added.

Another thing I don’t understand are the 16 separate files, 3 of which are identified as data files. It’s not an open file so I can’t take a look inside but I don’t get it. Are we to understand it’s built on a separation model? I don’t understand that anymore than I understand the 16 files. We stopped that many versions ago so I sit here scratching my head. And how do you back it up, export data, establish an audit procedure and transfer data from one version to another? You better find out before you buy it that is for sure.

Job Pro has some good things, like the dashboard and a much cleaner interface. It weighs in at 41.6 MB with next to no data, whoa! I’d love to know what it does over a network with a load? I could be wrong but I’d bet it wouldn’t be pretty. If any of you good folks are using Job Pro and would let us know about this or any other comments I’d appreciate it.

For $1,200.00 buck-a-roos it needs some questions answered. Maybe we’ll get some... God only knows I don’t have em!

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry

Hey Ross, the look and feel of the forum is looking better and better. Or as a Florida cracker said after winning the Florida $15 million dollar lottery "gooder and gooder"!smiley-laughing

[Richard Carlton]

Hi guys.

So the issue of record locking is very specific to each companies' internal business processes... as to how, when, and why an invoice (or other record) gets locked. Also...there are all sorts of rules of who and when ... can unlock an invoice. Typically, an employee could lock an invoice, but only a manager could unlock it.

I'm not sure if it wouldn't be more of a confusion...for people who open FM Starting Point ...to figure out how "the lock" works...etc.

Anyway...just a thought for you . . .

- Richard Carlton

[HarryGlos]

Hey Richard and fellow FileMaker-Ins,


Like you said, every company has a process they follow from initial order through payment of invoice. From pending orders and inventory to fulfillment and payment of invoice and points in between.

I have clients and you do as well who have never even given the subject of invoice locking a thought. Once I discuss the pros and cons however I don’t remember ever having a client not say “yah lock the invoice after payment�. Including even a one man shop! Why because they recognize what we all know, “none of us are exempt from mistakes�!

Errors come not only from changes to line items. They include an inadvertent change of customer, ship to address, billing address and Purchase order numbers. We have to also take into account the accidental deletion of an invoice or a found set of invoices as well. That’s another subject for another time, but I think at very least we should have an alert system built into our solution where if a users tries to make a change to a Paid invoice. A dialog box comes forward saying something like; “This is a “PAID� invoice. Are you sure you want to change the Customer�?

Solutions I build are automatic… Once the invoice is paid the invoice is marked as such and is locked. The ability to unlock the invoice can take on many different directions depending on the company. Some will make you jump through hoops by design while others, depending on your access level, will have a button that will appear on the invoice (made easy now with script triggers) saying something cute like “Unlock�! In short I've found more reasons to lock an invoice than not too!

Like you Richard, data security is something we deal with almost on a daily basis and for many reasons. Not the least of which is employee error and/or theft. We don’t talk about this aspect of design very often, but as developers we have to know things and include things in our design that a customer would not think of. Things we tend to include in everything we do from a client standpoint, because we know from experience it’s necessary. From simple things like export and backup routines to more elaborate issues like security and data integration.

I’ve done some incredibly bone headed things with data myself and seem to always maintain the ability to continue them. So maybe I’m really simply saving my clients from me!smiley-wink

I fully recognize there are things you include in a “paid for by client solution� that you would not necessarily include in a “free pre-built solution� and that is a given! However... No company and I repeat “No Company� has offered a free business solution with the length and breath of solution excellence like you and Exelisys have. I look at what you guys have done for free and shutter at what some companies have payed and what they got for it…

Always good to hear from you Richard,

Live Long & Prosper and Remember Who Loves Ya,

Harry