françaisMay - June 2010
Bayard Milan Goes Live on Advantage
Milan is a large publisher of regional and youth magazines based in Toulouse, France. It has been 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 4th, 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 being on Advantage, Bayard has now planned a large strategy of marketing and organizational optimization.
ACS Welcomes New Employee
ACS is pleased to welcome John Hughes to the Advantage family.
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.
Congratulations to Motor, NAR and APA on Recent Upgrades
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 Philippe Rowland, 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 two 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 on the first of February, 2010. Black Book went live the weekend of April 3rd, 2010. Both go-lives were relatively uneventful thanks to Paul DesRosiers and his team.
ACS Is Your Partner in Change
by Dan Heffernan
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.
May Webinars
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 19th - 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 20th - 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 26th - 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.
Stan Bisgaier: Dynamic Developer
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.
Highlights of Advantage 2010R2
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.
Advantage Online Help Gets a Facelift with 2010r2
By Matt Varblow
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.
Advantage Alerts
By Angie Markel
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 theACS support website and using the Knowledge Base links at the left.
Advantage at UKSG in Edinburgh
ACS attended and exhibited the United Kingdom Serials Group conference in Scotland.
Mona Hidayet at UKSG in April 2010.