Bill Thoms from Trails Regional Library in MO recently emailed us to ask about the Simple Inventory Management System. "...from the Simple Inventory menu, there seems to be a duplication of terminology.  If you look under Groups you will find options ADD INVENTORY GROUPS & EDIT INVENTORY GROUPS.  If you look under Items you will find options ADD INVENTORY ITEM TYPES & again EDIT INVENTORY GROUPS.  EDIT INVENTORY GROUPS is listed twice but the results when one clicks on it are totally different," he said. 

We looked into it and found that when we removed the java applets in favor of new toolbars, we had simply mislabeled a link.  Now under Groups, there are links to Add Inventory Groups and Edit Inventory Groups.  Under Items, there are links to Add Inventory Item Types and Edit Inventory Item Types.

Also, we noticed that there was also an Administrator heading that had all four of these links under it.  We deleted that header which made the toolbar a little easier to understand.

That being said, for those not yet using the Simple Inventory Management system (it comes free with the Building or Technology Work Order System), what are inventory groups and inventory items?  Groups are made of of items and your actual inventory is made up of objects of different item types.  For example, if you were managing your technology inventory you could set up a Group called Computers.  Under that group you could set up the Item Types PCs, Laptops, Macs, and Servers.  When you were ready to add your workstation to inventory, you would click on Add Inventory and select the Item Type PC.  Then enter all your info for that PC.  You must select an item type for each object you want to enter into your inventory.  In the animal world (if you were making an animal inventory) mammals would be a group, dogs would be an item type, and Spoede (our family's dog, pronounced Spodie*) would be an object in the animal inventory.

Another feature of the Simple Inventory System is Preventative Maintenance.  You can also set up Preventative Maintenance Work Orders for each individual object stored in inventory.  When you post recurring/PM work orders, the technology work order system creates a work order for that item (in this example a PC) to defrag or any other preventative maintenance job you have set up.  You can also bind any work order, old or new, to an object in inventory in order to track the labor time and costs you have invested in that object.

Its a handy tool that many of our organizations aren't yet using.  And its FREE!  If you have any questions or would like a walk-through, please call us at 1-866-722-3902. 

* For our customers in the St. Louis area, I know it is pronounced Spadie.  When I lived in St. Louis, I always mispronounced Spoede Road as Spodie, and thats how the family dog got her name.

The new school year is upon us and most of our schools and libraries are installing new pcs.  Every year when this happens, especially with Vista, our java applets start acting up.  At this point, we've had two schools and one library system contact us to let us know that their new pcs won't run our software properly.  Microsoft and Sun (producers of Java) have fought for years and years and with each new PC and service pack, Microsoft seems to move farther away from Java.  Previously we were able to update or install java on new machines and the applets would work, but this year our schools and our programmers were having a harder time finding a work around or fix.  Therefore, we removed all the java applets from bluechalkapps.com and replaced them with a new toolbar.  The few places we had tab menus that used java applets were replaced with text links (for now). 

We also upgraded the site to use ASP.Net 2.0 which should speed up the system.  One odd quirk of this update is that Microsoft Internet Explorer users will have the borders of their datagrids go from black to white (which look like no borders at all).  We hard-coded black borders on the main pages of each component but the datagrids on other pages may have white borders for IE users.  FireFox users seem to have no border issues.  We'll be changing the many of these datagrids with the next upgrade.

As with any updates like these, there is always the chance that we missed something or that a feature will behave differently than before.  If you have any problems, please email us at info@bluechalksoftware.com or call us at 1-866-722-3902.

Thanks again for your business.

Security issues on the new server caused down time over the weekend.  Data was corrupted and we worked to repair it, but in the end it was better to restore the data from an earlier backup.  The repairs were working but we couldn’t guarantee that they weren’t truncating data as they removed errant strings.

The corruption of data occurred before our midnight backup up on August 1, so data was used from our backup on midnight July 31^st.  This is where it can get confusing midnight is the start of the day, not the middle, so any data entered on July 31^st was lost.  As soon as one of our customers alerted us of odd strings in their data on the morning of August 1^st, we shut down all web traffic to find the problem.  It has now been patched.  Any work orders or labor items entered on July 31 and the morning of August 1^st need to be re-entered.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience on this and we take it very seriously.  As a result of this, we are making changes. For instance, we are now backing up data hourly rather than daily.  Our network center says this is crazy, but we don’t like losing data.  For the record, this is the second time this has ever happened.  In 2003, we were co-locating our server in North Carolina and there was a crash.  While we waited for the server to be shipped, we used older data on a spare server and lost about a days worth of data.  Twice in 5 years isn’t bad, but we’re going to try to do even better.

Thanks again for your patience over the weekend.  Some of the websites we host (other than our applications) will remain down for a few days while we make sure that all security problems are patched.  If you have any questions, call me, Todd Mayberry, at 1-866-722-3902.  Thanks to Shawn Asmus of TAN and Scott Slinkard of ShowCase Technologies for helping us out.  Oddly enough, I was in a band with them in the Nineties, 2 of us (Scott and I) became programmers and Shawn became a network security expert (it was a really nerdy band).  Again, we're sorry.