Solutions by Softech
Sixth Edition – January 2000

Softech Solutions, Inc. 300 North C.R. 427 Suite 100 Longwood, FL 32750
1-407-331-TECH (8324)   1-407-331-5570(Fax)
SSI@SoftechSolutions.com

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Here we are, - January 2000, and all is well. We hate to say we told you so, but in the Third Edition of Solutions by Softech (December 1996) we said, and we quote, "While we are sure that some problems will occur, and that nobody in the industry will be at any New Year's parties that night, we are also sure that it is not as big a problem as we are being led to believe." All right, so some of us did get to party, but we still think we were pretty close to hitting the nail on the head! Bill will be the first to admit that he thought there would be more problems with small businesses, but it appears that even they made it through relatively unscathed. At last count we have yet to identify any serious Y2K problems, albeit quite a few annoyances - 1900 on statements, an error in a backdate calculation, import errors into Access databases. But all in all, a relatively boring non-event. We still have a few hurdles to overcome - plenty more statements to be produced and verified this month, leap year, 2001 rollover, etc., so stay tuned . . .

Now that we have the Y2K stuff out of the way, we can officially welcome you to the Sixth Edition of Solutions by Softech. Fitting as it may be that we are also starting our sixth year in business, we are still not giving up on the possibility of producing this newsletter on a more frequent basis than annually! Regardless of the frequency, we hope you enjoy this issue. We are also in the process of cleaning up our contacts list so let us know if your name and address are correct and send us your e-mail address if we don't already have it.

Why don't that make airplanes out of the same stuff as that indestructible "black box"

We guess we really stumped all of you with our last puzzler. Not even a single guess! Well the shirts we are giving away are really nice, so we'll try to make this one a little easier. The last puzzler was: "A father and his son had the following conversation: Son: "Well dad, 60 wasn't enough last time, do you think I should try 125 this time?" The father replied "no, 125 probably won't be enough either, you had better make it 90". What were they talking about?" We struggled for awhile about giving a little bit more of a hint and perhaps we should have - using mother and daughter might have been a little clue - saying common household appliance surely would have given it away - yep, you got it - microwave oven! 125 entered on a microwave is 1 minute and 25 seconds which is 85 seconds, while entering 90 will get you 90 seconds. You all knew that, didn't you? Now for this edition's puzzler: What part of a car is inter-changeable with virtually any other car, foreign or domestic within the last 30 or so years. It's not liquid or air - it's an actual piece that you can take from any car, no matter where in the world it was made, and it would fit on any other car. No, it's not the cigarette lighter either, but it is something that you would likely come in contact with doing normal maintenance.

Solutions Offered: We have been involved with a lot of interesting and unique projects recently. Here are just a few: MQ Series startup applications. Seems like everybody is getting on the MQ Series bandwagon where any communication device can talk to any other communication device on multiple types of platforms. We have recently implemented this new communication protocol with both FAS and CDM. See Doug Lester's write-up on the Web by going to "Products and Services" from our home page.

POS Interfaces. Although we've recently completed a couple of custom POS interfaces to Vision Plus, we've been implementing these types of interfaces for several years. If you have some unique POS device you would like to have us interface with your retail or banking application, we have developed quite a large number of model interfaces that will help reduce the coding and testing time substantially.

Migrations from Vision 21 to Vision Plus. We have three of these under out belts, plus quite a library of "cleanup" programs to make the migration smoother and more efficient. Obviously the amount of customized code that must be brought forward impacts the total time, but the migrations we have performed have taken roughly nine months with two Softech experienced resources. Although not nearly the impact of a migration, we've also helped several retailers with Vision Plus Upgrades to the most current release.

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.

Email hoaxes, untruths, and urban legends. Have you b een bombarded recently with all kinds of email stating such things as "Free Stock", "Free Computers From IBM", plus all sorts of warnings and to be sure and "pass this email on to everybody you know"? We have discovered that most of these are absolutely f a lse. In order to keep from propagating such hoaxes, we recommend you always investigate any suspicious email by going to a site on the Web that specializes in investigating the claims of such email. Although there are several sites dedicated to such resea r ch, one of our favorites is "Urban Legends and Folklore". You can get to it by going to our Web site and selecting "Our WWW Favorites", then selecting the obvious link. Save this site as one of your "favorites" or "hot keys" so you can get to it easy. With just a little effort you can help prevent some of the fraudulent proliferation.

Travel-R-Us . . .
Since our last newsletter, we have been to Slovenia, South Africa, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Oregon, and California, Unfortunately, we have temporarily had to turn down a few additional trips for various reasons including internal strife and earthquakes. Although, like most people, we don't like to be away from home for extended periods of time, we also never forget what a tremendous opportunity it is to see the world and meet new and interesting people and experience their cultures.

Ron spent some time in Sao Paulo, Brazil, leading a technical Q&A session on VisionPlus on-line and batch processing. He is currently enjoying spending time in North Carolina on a project that involves a de-conversion of banking applications from one major banking application software company to several processor's. This project is also allowing him to ski on the weekends, which we all know is Ron's definition of a great project.

Ed has had an interesting time. He has had numerous trips, including 'local' trips to Tampa and Miami, and some 'not so local' trips to Oregon and South Africa.

Bill worked on a CardPac Y2K project in Slovenia - that's right "Slovenia". While all of us admit to having to look it up on the map when we got the contract, Bill said that it is a fabulous country. He spent over 8 weeks there in the fall and is looking forward to going there on vacation this summer. Bill's son, Bill Jr., will be stationed in Germany for the next three years so Bill & Kathy are already planning their European vacations! Also, on the home front, Bill's wife Kathy not only received her National Certification from the National Board of Professional Teacher's, she also received the Teacher of the Year award at her school, and is vying for the county award. Congrats, and good luck Kathy!

Doug was primarily "stationed" with our good friends at the Bear Creek Corporation in southern Oregon for most of the '99 thru the early fall. He not only assisted BCO in going "live" on 2.59 VPlus but also managed to attend kayaking classes, do major wilderness hiking/camping, scuba diving, hang gliding, cooking school, and yoga classes. If anyone can figure out how the last two events fit in this picture, please call one of the partners and let us know.

Aaron has made it through his first year as a newly wed and has taken on the next extreme pleasure that most of us have experienced - home ownership! Ah, the joys of doing your own plumbing, gardening, painting, . . . welcome Aaron - misery loves company! Aaron has also just returned from his first road trip - welcome to the Road Warrior club Aaron.

Joy is bringing new meaning to the term Road Warrior. She was on the road for almost three quarters of 1999 and is beginning the New Year with trips to Puerto Rico, Leeds, England, LasVegas and possibly Australia.

Leanne has returned to Australia after using her time at Softech to see the USA. She saw the Florida Keys twice, New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Monterey, LA, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, San Juan, Puerto Rico and New Orleans. That's more than most of us native "yanks" get to do in a lifetime!

Karen Phelps who, even though she is a sub-contractor, has been working for us full time since November 1998. She spent most of the first half of the year in Tampa and then spent nine weeks in Slovenia including a 3 weeks stint over the New Year. We are happy to report that the New Year was uneventful, at least from a Y2K perspective.

If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up somewhere else! - Yogi Berra

Where are we going? We asked ourselves this question (actually "where should we be going?") recently and the resounding answer was - E-Commerce. We have prospered for the past five years believing that Mainframe, Credit Card applications would get us all to retirement (15 more years!), but we "have seen the light". The proliferation of e-commerce in our industry is almost of the same magnitude that Y2K was in the last quarter of 1999. To this end we have begun the certification process to become a Microsoft Business Partner. Since we at Softech have plenty of application development experience, we just need to learn the new technologies. We are hoping to partner up with another company that has that expertise and hope to be cranking out e-apps by the beginning of the second quarter. Naturally our desire is to integrate these apps to credit related applications, but we are not limiting ourselves to them. With the wealth of banking, manufacturing and distribution knowledge we have at Softech, we know we are capable of addressing a multitude of business applications. By the way, we still intend to continue doing what we've been doing for the last five years.

Some mindless minutia
November 19th, 1999 (11/19/1999) was the last day composed of all odd digits until January 1st, 3111 (1/1/3111). Of course we can't forget the even numbers - February 2nd, 2000 (2/2/2000) will be the first 'all even' day since August 28th, 888 (8/28/888). Aren't you glad you get this newsletter!

Wacky Headlines:

As part of our day to day jobs we run across numerous software applications, web sites, technologies, etc - some good, some not so good. When we find one that is particularly deserving of praise (or scorn) we will pass it along. On the home technology front, we want to sing some praise for cable modems. A new service in the Central Florida area, Roadrunner by Time Warner Cable, offers 50-100 times the speed of modem access, and if you displace your current ISP and second phone line, it is just about a break even as far as cost. Has anyone tried DSL yet? Although we hate to make Bill Gates any richer we have to put Windows NT on our "good" list as well. Since installing Windows NT as our server in June of 1999 we have never had to reboot due to any system problems. The few times we have rebooted were due to prolonged power outages and hardware or software installation. That's why we call it "the Unstoppable Windows NT"! And last, but not least, and although we absolutely love QuickBook's Pro as our total accounting software solution, we do have to report that their service has gotten so bad that we no longer use their Payroll features.

Copyright © 2000 [Softech Solutions, Inc]. All rights reserved.