NEWS LETTER
August 06

First let me apologise to all customers and readers for the lax attitude of me and my fellow directors as it has been some considerable time since our last news, February actually.
Since February we have been involved in the production of several new products and this associated with upgrading of current customer servers and software has kept all very busy indeed. In fact Charlie Grant seems to spend most of his time between Scotland and Ireland and Matt Manning 90% of his time over in the West Midlands.
Arthur Field is attempting to write what appears to be a rewrite of War & Peace, that’s what he tells us, but we think it could be a specification for one of our customers, I hope so as Caroline Shaw has been very diligent in reading it and tells me that her team have nearly finished the project. I shall reserve judgement until I see the finished product and sincerely hope that it is not an animated version of War & Peace and is some form of bespoke wizardry for one of our customers which will hopefully make life easy for them.

In addition to the above Tim Spate has finished a Web Stock module for one of our Civil Engineering sites. This module allows site managers to request items over the Web for delivery to site. The Web application accesses the Unix server to obtain stock items in real time and it is looking as if it will be a huge benefit when it goes live on the 1st October.

It is also looking increasingly likely that his next tasks with also be associated with the Construction/Civil Engineering industries.

  • First we have been tasked with writing a Plant Register. We looked at this and decided that the best way to complete this task was to take the Asset Register & Fleet Maintenance Systems and combine the three into one Asset Manager. By doing this it reduces the necessity of entering a piece of plant three times.
  • Second, CIS (Contractors Information System). HMRC have decreed the way sub-contractors are reported on has to be made easier for them. This of course means that it will be more difficult for Contractors and Civil Engineers, will cost users and providers of the software, but HMRC nothing. This has to come into effect by start of the 2007 tax year.
  • Third, negotiations are taking place with a firm of Civil Engineers to write a new piece of software which will simplify the Estimating process.

These three modules will greatly enhance the Contractors/Civil Engineering Suite of software.

In addition Carolines’ team are making good headway in the rewrite of Release 6 Nominal Ledger.
Technical Support is also at full stretch with upgrading sites to the current versions of the A4 Printing, emailing from Prodigy and Training for customers requiring the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). This function allows the downloading of Prodigy data into excel for additional reporting purposes.
Sales & Marketing has been on the slow side since mid May, but Phil tells me that Prospects are now turning into more that just prospects and completion on some are expected in the next few weeks.
Move of Support Functions.
For those who are not aware, a Board decision was take in June to move all Support Functions to Juno IT Services Ltd, part of the Optimise Group from July. All correspondence for support services, hardware & software will now originate from this company. The reason behind the decision was purely to separate the support function from software. This change does not affect you in any way and all calls for support services should be channelled through the same numbers.