It’s been nearly a year since I last put a post on this blog. How sad, well really you’re probably not missing much. I do have some ideas for topics though, so I’ll probably write a bunch and then not return for another year! ha

A little about what has happened in the last year. We’ve been with SedonaOffice at work for almost a year now. It’s hard to believe; it’s gone very fast. Overall, it has gone very smoothly. We’ve run into a glitch every now and then, but mostly we’ve just needed to change our processes to match. The biggest was something we didn’t realize until a few months ago. I’ll probably make this a topic on it’s own: What we’ve learned about SedonaOffice!

It’s about time to return to Florida again for the conference, so I look forward to returning Joey’s Pizza and Pasta House. This year Robert is going with me, so he can enjoy it, too! I hope they are still in business. I know it’s been a tough year for many.

I’m about to imbark on a couple challenging new projects at work. One is updating the scheduler I wrote and adding some features to it to tie it in directly to the SedonaOffice database. This should be fun and make scheduling with it a lot faster/simpler. It’s a breath of fresh air to be working with a software database that’s written well and I can communicate with easier.

I’ve found a site with some great training videos for a very good price. I’ve watched one video so far about programmer productivity and I think I’ll log my scheduler upgrade project on the blog. I want to use some of the things he mentioned.

An a personal note, we’re still working on the financial stuff. No debt other than the mortgage, but it sure is harder to save money than it was to pay off debt. I wish we could get back the same intensity we had when we were getting out of debt. I’d really like to lead another Financial Peace University Course… I’m working on getting it approved to do it. I’m not sure what the hesitation is about in the church leadership. It’s a little frustrating.

Well, it appears that it is time for bed. It’s cold here in South Texas tonight; I hope I can stay warm!

…by me. We went live on Monday. I spent all day looking through the data. Found a few things that didn’t get imported, a few things that didn’t come in right, etc. I’d email our rep (Laurie Goodrich) and our person who did the data conversion (Rob) and the problem would be fixed within less than 30 minutes. I THOUGHT the billing addresses for our customers that have multiple sites should have been imported, but thankfully, Rob knew better. If he had done what I *thought* we needed we’d have a lot of duplicated records in our new, nice software. That would have been a travesty!

I thought there were a lot of extra clicks just to get to the system password so I emailed support asking that it be easier to get to. Within 10 minutes or so, I had an email telling me how to get to it faster than I was doing it. Screen shots and all. Then a minute or so after that, I got an email from a developer with a screen shot showing how it will be easier to get to on the next update. Can’t ask for faster service than that!

One of my favorite things is that there are so many ways to do one thing. At first, it seems to complicate things. But in the long run, it’s really nice because you can use the software in a way that works best for you.

Automatic credit card processing is going to take a lot of work over the weekend. Alarms for windows didn’t delete the information when you took someone off of auto, so we had a lot of bad ones imported. As far as I can tell, there was no way around that. It seems that it was still better to bring it all in so I didn’t have add all the credit card numbers manually. I just have to delete the entries that I don’t need. Can you believe that Alarms for Windows stored all that bank and credit card data raw in the database? Sure glad we’re getting away from that software.

I just really can’t think of any complaints about the software or the transition. I’ve been worried about it for months, just not knowing how well the data could come in. There was so much trash data in the old Top Speed database. Alarms for windows would widow records all over the place.

I don’t think I could have asked for a better conversion experience!! Thanks Laurie and Rob!

This is something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I won’t get it all out of my head tonight, but thought I should start.
We’ve been using Alarms for Windows for billing for almost 10 years now. It has some great ideas, but sadly not much of it is planned out very well (don’t even get me started on the database design!). After going to the user conference for SedonaOffice, I know where this product (Alarms for Windows) struggles and that’s with it’s developer. It’s a one man show and he does NOT like to hear that something doesn’t work or that it wasn’t executed very well. Anytime you mention something doesn’t work, it’s always your fault for using the program incorrectly. And, you’re told it doesn’t happen to anyone else, everyone else uses the program with no problems. Yeah, right.
I went to the SedonaOffice user conference and it was a completely different world. The co-founders were there and very much cared about the product and where it could go. Imagine this…they WANTED our feedback on how to make it better. They didn’t take it as personal criticism. The SedonaOffice community is very open in sharing ideas. I don’t know how many times the co-founders (Michael Marks & Don Faybrick) said, “Hey, that’s a good idea. Let me write it down and talk to the developers”. Such a nice change.
I learned something else, too! I met a President/CEO from an alarm company in Maryland that just switched to SedonaOffice last September. Guess what software they migrated from? Alarms for Windows! They used the software for 12 years and had MANY similar stories that we did. Turns out we were not the only ones that had a miserable failing migration to the Alarms for Windows SQL (we were told we were). We also didn’t have the largest set of data, they were told they did as well. I’m also not the only person who has recieved nasty, rude emails from the developer of Alarms for Windows. I feel better now knowing I wasn’t the only one treated that way.