Cogitate Inc Newsletters Here you can find archives of our newsletters and other important information. 8 August August 2016 Newsletter By SuperUser Account newsletter 0 Comment Major Call Log Maintenance Feature Added! We have added a major feature to the Call Log Maintenance portion of Pro Fund Accounting. Call Log Maintenance now gives you the ability to email call log item alerts to employees. You will be able to email a notification of each call log that you create to the employee that is setup as the call log resolver. These email alerts will be sent automatically to the call log resolver for all call logs that are marked as Urgent or Extremely Urgent. Otherwise there is an email button that will send out a call log alert email to the call log resolver for the currently selected call log. Under Preferences, there is an option where you can disable the call log item alerts from being automatically sent for the Urgent or Extremely Urgent call logs. We hope you enjoy the ability to email call log item alerts from Call Log Maintenance. If you need any help with setting up the Call Log Maintenance program to email call log item alerts, please feel free to give our support staff a call at 866-634-9991 x2. Read Full August 2016 Newsletter Major Call Log Maintenance Feature Added! We have added a major feature to the Call Log Maintenance portion of Pro Fund Accounting. Call Log Maintenance now gives you the ability to email call log item alerts to employees. You will be able to email a notification of each call log that you create to the employee that is setup as the call log resolver. These email alerts will be sent automatically to the call log resolver for all call logs that are marked as Urgent or Extremely Urgent. Otherwise there is an email button that will send out a call log alert email to the call log resolver for the currently selected call log. Under Preferences, there is an option where you can disable the call log item alerts from being automatically sent for the Urgent or Extremely Urgent call logs. We hope you enjoy the ability to email call log item alerts from Call Log Maintenance. If you need any help with setting up the Call Log Maintenance program to email call log item alerts, please feel free to give our support staff a call at 866-634-9991 x2. Read Full August 2016 Newsletter Attached Files August 2016 Newsletter 899.19 KB Related Articles March 2016 Newsletter The Windows 10 Free Upgrade Is Nearing Its End! Windows 10 was released on July 29, 2015 and is a highly recommended operating system upgrade. Microsoft is currently helping out by giving Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 users the chance to upgrade to Windows 10 for FREE until July 2016. With that being said, there is a limitation to this upgrade offer: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows RT, and all Enterprise versions of Windows are not included in this upgrade offer. Where does Cogitate stand on this? We recommend that if you are looking for new hardware in the near future to purchase new PCs with Windows 10 already installed. For those of us who are not looking for new hardware, if you are running Windows 7 then we recommend performing the Windows 10 upgrade as soon as possible so that you can take advantage of Microsoft’s great offer if you qualify. All of our current software including the PFA Works Timecard application is supported on Windows 10. If you would like to learn more about Windows 10 and the FREE upgrade offer, please take a look at the following link: https:// www.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-10-faq Read Full March 2016 Newsletter August 2014 Newsletter Disaster Recovery 101—Have a Plan! Whether it’s a storm knocking out your power lines, a computer virus disabling your software, or a fire, your operation can be disrupted by any number of threats. When that happens, a strong disaster recovery plan can make the difference between a brief hiccup in your operations and a costly blow to your organization. Because your operation involves several connected parts, a number of elements will go into a good disaster recovery strategy. How do you define a “disaster”? If you hear the word and immediately imagine an 8.5 magnitude earthquake or a category 5 hurricane, you’re correct – natural disasters are probably the most threatening types of disasters in terms of damage, potential loss of human life and disruption to operation operations. But the reality is that there are many other types of disasters that can cause significant operation disruptions. Savvy operation directors and managers should be prepared for disasters or disruptions, which come in many forms. Some disasters are man-made, such as industrial accidents, nuclear accidents or terrorist attacks. Natural disasters range vastly from blizzards and hurricanes to lightening, fire, or flooding. Even technical failures like a malicious computer virus should be considered disasters because of how detrimental the downtime can be to your operation. All of these scenarios, and many others, could create an immediate need for decision makers within your organization to flip the switch into recovery mode. Your disaster recovery plan should answer the questions “What do we do now?” and “What is the chain of command?” The process of creating a disaster recovery plan should involve operation management who are fully committed in investing the necessary time and resources. A plan can be relatively simple, or you might hire an external consultant to guide the process. Regardless of its complexity, here are a few key components of the disaster recovery planning process: Prioritizing internal functions – In the event of a disaster or operation disruption, which operation functions will need to be up and running first? For example, depending upon your industry or size, you may need to develop a plan for getting your accounting department’s technology up and running first, followed by other departments. Your plan should outline the IT resources that will be required to address the most time- sensitive operation functions. Restoring data – Is your data stored at an alternate site? Are you backing up to a cloud or web-based backup system regularly? Your disaster recovery plan should clearly spell out how your data will be retrieved. Minimizing downtime – What is your strategy for minimizing the amount of time your IT systems may be down? How long can you afford to be down? For some operations, the answer is “zero downtime.” If this is the case for your operation, your disaster recovery plan must include a strategy for backing up and restoring your IT systems, or running two synchronized systems, which is costly but sometimes necessary. Now go and develop a plan that is right for your organization. The internet has many free tools that will help you along the way. Search for Disaster Recovery Plan and you should find lots of information to help you. Read Full August 2014 Newsletter August 2015 Newsletter Reboot I remember the bad old days when I had to reboot my computer several times a day. The reasons were the usual suspects: the computer hung up in some unresponsive state; operations had slowed down so much that a clean reboot would make it go faster and I would gain back the time lost rebooting; going out to lunch and not wanting to keep the computer running and disk drive spinning; having a hard time debugging some code and wanting to just start with a clean slate; wanting to save power and lessen the air conditioning load, etc. etc. etc. Of course the most famous reason was the BSOD. That’s the Blue Screen of Death introduced by Microsoft sometime in the 90’s to let one know that the operating system was so fouled up that it couldn’t unscramble itself and wanted to be put out of its misery by a nice clean reboot. Of course, ‘they’ blamed it on faulty hardware so it was really, really not their fault. Over time the need to reboot got less and less as the operating systems got more reliable and robust, and hardware, such as memory, got even better, and disk drives and the computer would put themselves to sleep to keep wear and tear to a minimum. Over even more time, the need to reboot got even more infrequent and I found myself letting my computer run for days, weeks and months at a time without a reason for a reboot. Until, recently I was working away at my system when suddenly it locked up as we used to say. I figured it was just some update getting in the way and gave it a couple minutes to clear things up. That didn’t work so I decided I would have to reboot my computer for the first time since I got this new one in over a year ago. Then I had the awful realization that I didn’t know how to reboot my computer! I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know. I’ve booted computers thousands of times in my career and I was looking at the computer trying to find the button and I had to get down to floor level to look around the sleek and stylish cabinet to find the button. I found two but couldn’t read any label so I poked one and then the other with no response. There used to be reset buttons that would immediately reboot a computer and I guess that wasn’t the case here. So I did the press and hold for 6 seconds trick and that did it. If that didn’t work I would have gone to the wall plug, but the computer was alive enough to know I wanted a ‘hard’ reboot. But not knowing how to reboot my computer really struck me as a watershed moment in my history of using computers. The hardware and software have become so good, so long lasting, so reliable that there’s probably people who have never had to reboot their computer. Well, there’s probably not that many but I’m sure they’re around and their numbers must be growing. I also realized that I’ve got to bring my programming skills up to new levels so that my programs are up to the reliability of the computers they’re running on. I think I need to reboot myself but I’m not sure if I’ve got a power button I can hold for 6 seconds! And I’m not sure I would want to! Read Full August 2015 Newsletter January 2016 Newsletter Changing Service Codes UtilAbility provides several utilities for various tasks that aren’t necessarily part of your typical day to day operations. We have talked about some of these utilities before. Many of them were designed to allow you to make changes to several records at once, where it would otherwise be difficult or time consuming to perform these changes manually. Today we are going to discuss the Change Service Code utility. This utility does exactly what its title says. However, this isn’t necessarily as simple as it sounds… Have you ever thought about changing the code you use for a particular service? Maybe the code isn’t working very well for some reason or you were never happy with the one that was setup in the first place and you simply want to use another one. You may have thought about changing such a code, and then decided that it’s not worth the trouble. To make a change like this you would have to change a lot of records from many different tables. In fact, changing a service code currently affects as many as nine different tables within the UtilAbility database and some of these may include thousands of records that would be affected by your change. Fortunately, UtilAbility does all this for you. You don’t have to think about tables and records let alone make any manual changes. You simply supply the old service code and the new one. UtilAbility will change all references from the old code to the new one in every table and every record as necessary. You can find the Change Service Code utility and other helpful utilities under Tools|Utilities from the menu on the main screen in UtilAbility. Please take a look at these as they may save you a lot of time and effort. If you have any questions about Changing Service Codes or any of the other utilities, please see the UtilAbility help documentation or contact our support staff for more information. Read Full January 2016 Newsletter April 2016 Newsletter Pro Fund Accounting Evolution I was at the coffee shop and was surprised to see how young many of the patrons were. Looking around the place and observing the next generation interacting with their devices, I wondered about the lack of person to person contact that is missing. As I was finishing my large overpriced coffee and remarking to myself ‘I just don’t get it’, I remembered when my father would say that about me when I would play the Atari videogames on the TV for hours. Since the generations have evolved, we are beginning the evolution of the entire Pro Fund Accounting software. The last few months many of the changes we made have been related to the ‘insides’ to enable the software to gradually evolve. A key component of the changes will be the input we get from our customers. I know you are all very busy and do not want a lot of change in your life. With this in mind, we will be evolving small pieces of Pro Fund Accounting. Communication with you will be through email, webinars, real phone calls and yes, even text messages, about each piece that will be changed. We want to allow you time to share your thoughts so we can factor those into the software before we change it. This brings me to the first part we will evolve and that is security. We will be sending out more information soon, so be ready. Read Full April 2016 Newsletter July 2016 Newsletter Pursuit Of Maintenance A little bit ago we were working on the development of the new inventory and work order/preventative maintenance program. One of the road commissions supervisors asked us to look at the VMRS. VMRS? What is that you may ask like we did. It is an industry standard used for vehicle maintenance developed and maintained by the ATA (American Trucking Association), but let them describe the system better. Developed by the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC), the leading voice on industry best practices, VMRS™ is the universal language of maintenance reporting—the vital link between the shop floor and management. ATA’s VMRS helps you create a single process to: Simplify, Clarify and Unify with ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards Create a Single Concise Method to Manage Fleet Assets and Analyze Maintenance Operations and Costs Document when, why, and how maintenance is performed on equipment. Improve equipment and parts inventory control. Identify where money is spent. Help control costs and create greater efficiency. Manage a wide variety of equipment, including trucks of all types cars, buses, vans, construction equipment, and more. We would like to fully embrace the methods and codes that this system entails. But before we spend any more time, is this what the maintenance and inventory people want? So please check out the VMRS system and let us know, via email to president@cogitateinc.com, what you think. George Loescher, President Read Full July 2016 Newsletter Comments are closed.