Mona Hidayet and Dan Heffernan represented ACS at the United Kingdom Serials Group exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland in April.  Here is Mona in the Advantage booth.

May is another month jam-packed with webinars offering a wide variety of topics and presenters. Don't miss out, as space is limited!

May 19^th - Advantage Security Groups

This webinar, presented by Daryl Vautour, will cover the basics of defining a user group, adjusting security levels, and working with the Component and Action Permissions view.

May 20^th - Duplicate Consolidation

The goal of this webinar is to provide you with a solid understanding of Advantage duplicate consolidation processing, the accompanying reports, and some best practices for getting started.  This webinar will be presented by Eric Burbeck.

  

May 26^th - Promotion Item and Sub Choice

In this webinar, Mike Miklosovic will discuss how to define item and subscription choices in order to vary promotional settings for a given item.  He will also demonstrate using promotion choices during order entry.

Also coming up this summer, we have GL Mapping Setup presented by Bill Pinard and a free webinar of 2010R2 New Features Highlights that will be presented by Mona Hidayet.  Date will be announced in the next newsletter.

You can sign up for any of the above webinars at the webinar registration page. Please contact Angie Markel if you have any questions, need help registering, or have suggestions for future webinars.

Death, taxes and change.  The human certainties.  Change is constant.  Who could possibly argue with this, especially now?  So much is changing:  technology, business models, advertising, communication, housing prices, dietary restrictions, airline fees, the accelerator in my Toyota…I'll stop here.  It is indisputable that change in our industry is occurring.  But where the change will take us is probably at the forefront of every CEO's mind. 

Is it just me, or is there a new buzzword out just about every week now?  It wasn't that long ago that I hadn't heard of "monetizing" or "cloud computing" or "chatter."  I find myself using Wikipedia more than ever before as our engineers casually mention a new acronym each time we meet.  More and more information is being thrown at us every day.  If you're like me, you have electronic newsletters that show up in your inbox faster than you can read them.  I find myself skimming more and reading less.  Then there is the sheer quantity of emails that we receive, especially from all those marvelous memberships that we get to Best Buy, Borders and other retailers. 

I am deeply appreciative to the writers of spam filtering software.  Without it, we'd accomplish very little as we'd be fishing through hundreds or thousands of emails trying to find the relevant ones.

Where am I going with all this?  To this:  we are experiencing more and more information overload.  As more information is available and easily searchable, we need to be able to sift through it more and more effectively.  As consumers of information will want to purchase smaller and more targeted "chunks" of information to suit their very specific needs, the amount of stuff available to be purchased will skyrocket.  Why do I say this?  Because for some years now, many clients of ours have talked of wanting to be able to sell their customers a chapter of a book, or a chart on the 3^rd page of an article, or a table of contents, or an abstract.  When this happens, a publisher's "inventory" of products grows exponentially. 

Combine this with the ability to package such granular products together with other things like conference attendance, membership dues, and subscriptions, and it starts to get very interesting for the consumer yet very complex for the publisher.  You'll have to be able to handle micro payments.  You'll have to be able to deliver the electronic content as the reader wants it – on their PC, their iPad or in a print-on-demand book. 

ACS is ready, willing and able to partner with you to do all of this.  We can help you transform your business.  We have the tools developed to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.  I would love to hear from you regarding what changes you have in store—or just in mind-- so we can enable that transformation.  Call or contact me and we'll talk about it.

Dan Heffernan

dheff@advantagecs.com

(734)327-3600 ext. 441

Upgrade activity was busy in recent months as a number of clients moved to new releases of Advantage. 

MOTOR went live on Advantage 10 R1 in early April and, due to their thorough testing procedures, the go live was nearly flawless. 

Todd Ladson, Motor's Director of Financial Services, had this to say to ACS:  "I just wanted to drop a note to let you know how smoothly MOTOR's upgrade to 2010R1 went.  With Paul DesRosiers' leadership throughout the process and the support of your employees such as PhilippeRowland, Larry Kleber, Martha Krieg and of course, my favorite, Ken Darnell, the upgrade went extremely smooth.  We have been live for the last 2 ½ weeks with no problems at all (and I mean no problems)."

National Auto Research (Black Book) upgraded from 2005R2 to 2009R2.  They have 2 production areas - Black Book and Veretech Holdings, Inc., a company acquired in March, 2007.  Veretech is a much simpler configuration (PRO Only) and they went live February 1, 2010.  Black Book went live the weekend of April 3^rd, 2010.  Both go-lives were relatively uneventful thanks to Paul DesRosiers and his team.  

"The time Paul spent with us onsite going over the Upgrade Audit results and Schema changes proved to be invaluable," says Ricky Land of NAR.  "We were able to get both upgrade areas configured properly and moved into setup and testing much sooner than scheduled.  Most importantly, our upgrade was completed on time and under budget, which is going to allow us to pursue some much needed custom mods!"

American Psychiatric Association also went live on 9r2 in March.

Congratulations to these clients on successful upgrades!

It's all too common for Michiganders to decide to desert their home state once they have had a taste of sunnier climes.  But not Stan Bisgaier.  No, he is one of a select few that chose to come back from sunny Florida– Gainesville, to be exact–to live and work in Michigan.  And we are very glad he did!

Although born in New Jersey, Stan moved to Ann Arbor with his family when he was a kid.  He didn't stray far from home when he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned his undergraduate degree in computer engineering.  Stan worked at several programming internships and, after graduation, he took a job with a game development company, where he worked for about a year.  Stan then decided to go to graduate school and headed down south to Gainesville.  Stan earned his Master's degree in computer engineering from the University of Florida, but decided that he wanted to return to Michigan.  He did, and joined ACS in 2005. 

In his five years here, Stan has worked with Matt Varblow on various web development, ecommerce, capsule and client website projects, but most of his time has been spent as a developer in the Product Development group led by Howie Brooks.  He has done work for several clients including Bayard, CDS Global and Agora, in such Advantage areas as customer service, direct debit, conference and event, and reprints. Some of his assignments have involved collaborative projects with the QA and Documentation teams. Through it all, Stan displays a calm and capable demeanor.

Ev Acton, manager of the ACS Support Center, comments:  "I REALLY like working with Stan.  He's so good with the clients, and is very thorough."

Although he is interested in the systems area, Stan enjoys development the most.  "Howie is a great boss," says Stan.  "He does a good job of balancing assignments so that no one gets too overwhelmed.  And I'm continually impressed with how smart he is."

Stan likes to approach a new feature looking for how he can incorporate creativity into his design.  He enjoys having an influence on the evolution of Advantage. 

 "Stan is very thorough and good at identifying potential problems with a design.  He works well on his own but never hesitates to involve others when a consensus is needed," says Howie.  "He is always quick to respond to questions that arise during client testing and QA."

Stan's colleague Alan Cherney has this to say about him:  "I really appreciate Stan.  Having him just over the wall (we're cubicle neighbors) is extremely convenient when I need to take advantage of his technically sound opinion or advice.  Additionally, he's just a friendly guy who likes good coffee, plays a solid game of wallyball, and laughs at good jokes.  Who doesn't enjoy a coworker like that?"

Stan currently lives in Ann Arbor and, in his leisure time, enjoys snow skiing—preferably out West or in Canada—and baseball, and likes to keep up on the latest technical and science journals.  He also likes to play video games, watch movies and listen to music. 

John Hughes has joined ACS as an analyst in the Client Services Division.  He is currently working in the Support Center, led by Ev Acton, although he is expected to join the implementation services team later this year.

While John was born and raised for the most part in the Ann Arbor area, he had the opportunity to experience life in another country when his GM executive father took a 2 ½ year assignment in France when John was eight.  John and his four siblings were forced to learn French as quickly as possible when they were placed in French schools.  Fortunately, kids find it easy to pick up new languages and they all did just fine.  John admits that although his French accent is excellent, since he learned it as a child, his vocabulary does tend to be rather elementary as well.  He is working now to learn the more technical terms that he will need to know to communicate with French clients of Advantage.

A graduate of Dexter High School, near Ann Arbor, John completed two years of general studies at a mid-Michigan community college and then took a year off from his studies to do service work in England and Germany through a local Christian group.  Upon his return, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a BA degree in economics and German in 2007.  John worked at a couple of different jobs before joining ACS in April.

He is engaged to be married, with a June wedding in the works, and the newlyweds will live in the house he recently purchased in Ypsilanti.  In his leisure time, John enjoys working on the house, and his hobbies include playing soccer, and making and recording music (he plays guitar and piano).

We welcome John to the Advantage family!

Have you been keeping up with Advantage Alerts? Here is a recent critical alert that you may have missed relating to nightly processing.

Remember that only critical alerts are emailed directly to your inbox. Other alerts are stored in an online knowledge base for your review. You can find alerts that affect your Advantage revision by logging in to the ACS support website and using the Knowledge Base links at the left.

If you are not currently receiving email alerts, but would like to, simply send a request to support@advantagecs.com asking to be added as a system administrator for your company. For more information about alerts, please contact Angie Markel.

Historically, online help in Advantage has been presented in compiled help (.chm) format.  However, over time, Microsoft has introduced security controls that prevent users, in certain intranet scenarios, from accessing help files that use this format.  To work within the MS Windows framework, the help files beginning with the 10R2 release will use HTML help (.htm) format.

 

The differences between .chm help and .htm help are as follows:  1) a slightly different user "look and feel"; and 2) whereas .chm help opens directly within the application, .htm help will launch a browser session for presentation of the content.  When you open the online help from the Menu option in your Advantage session, Advantage will open the browser session automatically, and route to the website where the help resides.   When you are finished consulting the help, you close your browser session.  Everything is handled automatically by the application.

 

The standard table of contents, search, and favorites features will continue to be available in .htm help.  Custom help will be available as well, but will work slightly differently than before.  The delivered help files at 2010R2 will contain instructions on building and using custom help.  As part of the migration to .htm help, the System Administrator manual, which was formerly kept as a separate Help menu choice, will now be offered as part of the merged online help with the other user manuals.  (Please contact ACS if you have any security concerns with this approach.)

Milan is a large publisher of regional and youth magazines based in Toulouse, France. It was purchased by Bayard in 2004.  The year-long Bayard Milan in-conversion project went live on Advantage in early May.   Data entry began on the 4^th, and the combined processing with both Bayard and Milan orders ran successfully. The Milan websites were also integrated with Advantage during the project and have seen increased traffic compared to their previous sites.  With Milan activity now on Advantage, Bayard is planning to implement a strategy of marketing and organizational optimization.

Benoit Marchal, Anne-Marie Massiot and Corinne Cabirol teamed up on the project on the Milan side. They have been strongly supported by Bayard team, managed by Emmanuel Chevalier.

On the ACS side, Project Manager Levi Hyssong was largely responsible for the project being accomplished on time.  Philippe van Mastrigt assisted Bayard on site in Paris. Others at ACS who worked on the project were Angie Markel, Kathie Porter, Karl Davis, Bryan Varblow and Dave Rees.

Congratulations to Bayard Milan and the project teams!

 

 

 

The second release of 2010 will be available early in June.  Here are just a few of the new features you will receive.

 

·         Credit card responses from the vendor are now processed via a flexible, select-driven response code table (similar to direct debit responses).  Besides providing greater standardization for handling vendor responses, the number of possible automated actions you can take based on a particular response has been increased.  For example, you can cancel or bill-suspend the subscription, cancel or bill-suspend the BCL participation, add the customer to a Telesales list, etc.

·         With this release, you can set a discount at the promotion header level, to apply to (or bypass applying to) any CIR, PRO, or AMB item on the order.  The promotion-level discount is overridden by any specific discount set up at the item level.  This feature provides a shortcut method of setting a general discount for the promotion, without needing to set it up for each item.  The promotion discount is expressed as a percent (not an amount).

·         A CDSDWS warehouse extract type has been added for AMB transactions.  The table is populated by AMB210 posting, and provides information on new adds and renewals of agreements, adjustments (including adjustments to access points), cancels, and reversals.

·         ARP310 can now automatically bill-suspend or nonpay-cancel an AMB agreement.  This feature uses the same lowest-level select controls that are used for CIR and CEM suspends and cancels.  AMB suspend/cancels are supported for all billing processes, including "regular" billing and installment billing.

·         At MSTDAT, you can now move an order from one of your control groups to another, or from one closed control group to another, as long as you have security to do so.  This allows much more flexibility in management of control groups; for example, you can move one "problem" order so that the rest of the control group can release.