Advantage Computing Systems : eVantage

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July - August 2010

ACS Welcomes New Client Laurin Publishing

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.

ACS Welcomes New Client Value Line

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.

Financial Accounting Foundation GASB Website Launched on Advantage

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

ACS Welcomes New Employee

ACS is pleased to welcome Virginie Motte to the Advantage family.

Virginie Mott

Virginie Motte

ACS is pleased to welcome Virginie Motte as a new employee. She is working with Philippe van Mastrigt, Director of European Operations, and is based in Paris. Currently, Virginie is providing operational support to Bayard Presse, assisting them with campaign and renewal set-up. In addition, she is in charge of setting up and maintaining the French Translation of Advantage User Manuals.
Virginie has worked at Bayard for the past two years, and handled fulfillment. She also worked on the VPC project, converting to Advantage. Prior to that, she worked in the supply chain, helping to implement sales forecast software, and also worked as a customer service manager for a subsidiary of company TOTAL, French main oil company.
In joining ACS, Virginie says she is renewing the international link she had in her youth. As a child, she lived in several countries (Denmark & Morocco) and as a young adult, studied abroad including some time in the United States. She has a degree in business, and speaks English, Spanish and Danish, plus a little Portuguese and Japanese.

FREE Webinars in July and August

Don’t miss these FREE webinar presentations being put on by the Advantage Sales Team in July and August.

Corey Mantel will be doing a demo of recent updates to the Business Intelligence Module on July 29th. Then on August 4th, Mona Hidayet will be showing 2010R2 New Feature Highlights.

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.

Scott Ghormley: Seasoned Multi-Tasker

Scott Ghormley’s history with Advantage starts before there even was an Advantage Computing Systems. In 1978, when he was 15 years old, he was hired by Infomatics--one of the precursor companies to ACS--to work in their computer room “flopping tapes and delivering output.” He has come a long way since then. Scott returned to the company as an intern twice between his first stint and 1986 when he was hired as a full-time employee. That lasted until 1988. During his time away, Scott spent four years in the IT department at Domino’s Pizza, and also worked as a consultant and network engineer at a variety of Detroit-area based companies (including Lotus Notes Development).

Scott returned to ACS in 1997, this time as a lead engineer in the group led by Karl Davis. He worked on a number of implementation projects for clients including Boy Scouts, SRDS, Farm Progress, Horizon Publishing, Ogden, Oakstone, Penton, American Medical Association, Bayard Presse, and ACP.

Peter Loftus of SRDS has this to say about working with Scott: “Although I have not had the pleasure of working with Scott for several years, he has always been there for SRDS in the past. His knowledge, patience, good humor, and excellent problem-solving skills have gotten us through quite a few situations. His attention to detail and keen understanding was a great assistance to me and ultimately benefitted our SRDS clients.”

How the Advantage Launch Pad Benefits You

by Paul DesRosiers

With the 2010r1 release of Advantage, it is now easier to manage multiple Advantage configurations from a single location, including a new mechanism for users to launch the Advantage application. This enhancement follows an industry-standard approach, and is called the Advantage Launch Pad.

In prior releases, the configuration settings for individual areas were located in client and server-side configuration text files (Advantag.ini). These plain-text files, located on each and every workstation as well as the application server, were prone to users or processes inadvertently deleting or compromising them. These configuration files could also have problems if they become out of synch with global INI file or other application settings.

Second European Client Meeting Held

By Dan Heffernan

On May 18, ACS hosted a meeting of the Advantage clients in the European region in London. The purpose of the meeting was to update the EU-region clients on ACS activities and strategy, future software direction, new features in our latest release of the software, and to provide an opportunity for networking with other ACS clients. 18 attendees representing 10 clients were present.

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Advantage Alerts

By Angie Markel

Advantage gives you the ability to create "jobstreams" -- sequences of processes or reports that you run on a regular basis and in a specific order. To simplify scheduling of jobstreams, you can enter reschedule information when requesting your jobstream.

If the processes within your rescheduled jobstream use an accounting period set by environment variables, then you may run into issues with subsequent runs using an incorrect accounting period. You can find more information about this issue by reading Alert 261305 relating to rescheduled jobstreams.

You can review other alerts that affect your Advantage revision by logging into the ACS support website and using the Knowledge Base links at the left. Note that critical alerts are emailed directly to your inbox.

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.