ACS is pleased to welcome Newsmax Media as a new Advantage client.  The 12 year old company is an American political news media organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. It operates the news web site Newsmax.com, and publishes Newsmax Magazine, as well as a host of health and financial newsletters. 

ACS is pleased to announce that Ouest France is the latest publisher to choose Advantage.  Ouest France is a large regional newspaper company based in Rennes in Brittany.  They publish 4 daily papers and their flagship--called Ouest France--is the largest daily newspaper in France, with 800,000 copies and 44 editions a day.    Implementation has already begun and the ACS project team includes Levi Hyssong (project manager), Philippe van Mastrigt (project director), and Karl Davis (lead engineer). For Ouest France, the team includes Antoine Péculier (project manager), Jean-Dominique Hardy (project director), Anne-Yvonne Surel, IT project manager) and Laurence Cuchard (system administrator.)  We welcome Ouest France to  the Advantage community.

http://www.ouest-france.fr/

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) website store launched successfully on Advantage in mid-April.  GASB establishes standards of financial accounting and reporting for state and local governmental entities.  The project lasted a little over a month and a half.

On FAF's side, the team included Jim Lapinski and FAF website consultants.  Work on the ACS side was done by Molly Mathe and Greg Sharp.  Congratulations on a successful go-live!

We are very happy to welcome Laurin Publishing to the family of Advantage publishers.

Laurin Publishing specializes in the photonics industry.  Photonics is a term encompassing the fields of optics, lasers, imaging, fiber optics, electro-optics and photonics component manufacturing.  Founded in 1954 by a retired Eastman Kodak physicist, the company was purchased by current president Tom Laurin’s parents in 1967 and became Laurin Publishing. 

Laurin Publishing has 80 employees and is headquartered in Pittsfield, Mass., with several editorial and sales branch offices. They publish 3 magazines (Photonics Spectra, BioPhotonics and EuroPhotonics), an annual directory (the Photonics Directory) and several e-newsletters.

We welcome Laurin Publishing as an Advantage client.

We are extremely pleased to welcome Value Line as a new Advantage client.  Value Line is a New York corporation founded in 1931 by Arnold Bernhard.  The company serves both individual and professional investors with investment research and data, and it is best known for publishing The Value Line Investment Survey, one of the most highly regarded and widely used independent investment newsletters.  Its well-known Timeliness Ranking System ranks stocks on a scale of 1 to 5 for probable market performance over the next 6 to 12 months. The company also produces numerous specialized print and online investment publications and information services covering mutual funds, convertible securities, options, special situations and more.

We welcome Value Line to the family of Advantage publishers!

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 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!

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!

Congratulations to Weekly Reader on the success of their recent upgrade.  It was a big project, as they were migrating four versions ahead in Advantage and also moving several ancillary systems to new servers, all of which had to be coordinated and synchronized.

Marcia Smith, Vice President of IT and Fulfillment at WRC, was delighted with the success of their upgrade.  On Monday, after going live over the weekend, she sent an email to everyone involved saying:

“Thank you all for working together to get us where we are this morning – a truly great job!!  A special call out to Susanne Goebel and Steve Petersen for their great leadership and perseverance throughout this project.  And it was all done smoothly and with great communication and handoffs between the teams during the past few months, but particularly this past weekend. “

She also applauded “The ‘never say done’ devotion of the ACS Advantage team to get the upgrade area ready and then enhance the scripts to run within a 48-hour window.”

On the ACS side, Project Manager Doug Moore had nothing but praise for the team’s work.  Martha Krieg did an excellent job as the application engineer, while Larry Kleber was tireless in running scripts.  Ray Zick, Howie Brooks and Toby Hartman stepped in to assist at crucial moments in order to make the target go-live dates.  Project Director Paul DesRosiers and Senior Account Manager Ken Darnell were also involved along the way in the seven-month project, which came in on time and within budget.

Kudos to everyone involved!

Liturgy Training Publications (LTP), a not-for-profit agency of the Archdiocese of Chicago, recently went live on Advantage.  Chuck Lorenz served as the LTP project manager, aided by Deanna Keefe, and John Thomas provided executive sponsorship.  The go-live date was set for early January to avoid LTP’s busy season at yearend.

Eric Burbeck acted as the ACS project manager, directed by Mike Miklosovic.  Barbara Smith served as lead engineer and several others, including Angie Markel, Bill Pinard and Levi Hyssong provided assistance.

LTP publishes materials for use in Catholic churches, schools, and by Catholic individuals and families.  In addition to several magazines and journals LTP primarily publishes and distributes books. They market via direct mail, their website, Catholic bookstores, and leading e-commerce book websites.  LTP is the largest U.S. distributor of Spanish language titles in their niche.

Based in Chicago, LTP has an historic location in the Windy City.  Their office is in the old stockyards area, in a converted warehouse building, and they are both entertained and annoyed by the dozens of loud trains that pass close by all day long.