New Training Videos Showcase Upgrade

In the last few days we have posted six new training videos to our web site. These videos cover all of new features that were added to ZonePro in the recent upgrade. After you read about the new features in the latest newsletter, you can see them in action in the training videos! This one-two punch should make it much easier for customers to adopt new features in ZonePro and start getting benefits from them right away.

Newsletter Correction

In the newsletter that was mailed yesterday there is an article on the Daily Inspection Schedule now supporting negative numbers in the Day Range field. The result of that action, however, is the opposite of what the newsletter says. The newsletter says that using a negative numbers means that you will only see future inspections. The truth is that using a negative number means you only see the past inspections that are either overdue or due today. If you are still confused look at the training video on the new feature to see it in action.

Multiple Web Links at Once

I installed a new customer earlier this week and showed him how to use the Internet Link button on the Property Screen to link to his county auditor's site. He then asked if there was any way to link to more than one web site. He wanted to link to a deed site and a GIS site too. My first instinct was to use the new User Script button on the Property Screen. You can easily attach a web link to the left, right, and middle mouse click buttons to launch additional sites. But he wanted all three sites every time so we tried something new. We added two more "GoUrl" statements to the original Internet Link script and it worked! When he right-clicked on the Internet Link button his internet browser came up with three tabs, one for each site. In his case he had FireFox designated as his default browser. Back in the office I tried this same technique using Windows Internet Explorer and only the last site I requested appeared. The trick, I discovered, is to add a pause between the GoUrl statements. When I did that each requested web page appeared in its own tab. I added the pause by inserting the code 'WAIT "Loading..." TIMEOUT 1' between the GoUrl statements. Give it a try.

New Release Two for 2008

A new release is available for ZonePro. The newsletters are going out today. New features include an expansion of the scripting options available from the User Script Screen. This upgrade add eight more places where you can add scripts to ZonePro screens including a new User Script button that you will see on most scripts. These new script options mean that there are many more opportunities for customizing the way ZonePro works. Another upgraded area is the Zoning District Screen in Maintenance. Several new fields have been added to this screen including a web link option for linking to customer's online ordinance pages. The Compare Module gained a long needed feature in that it now has a way to maintain a list of owner names that should be ignored when comparing your input data with your property data. This option to ignore names that don't require any action should make future searches for owner name discrepancies much more efficient. Some of the other changes have already been written about in these pages. As always this upgrade is available free of charge to all ZonePro customers currently under a maintenance agreement with us. Just call or write to request the new files.

Billing Module Goes Custom

In the next release of ZonePro the Billing Module will be converted to a custom module. The Billing Module was written specifically for a small group of customers to track trash service billings. Basically it should have always been a custom module, but I didn't have that option at the time I first wrote it. The change means that the Billing Module will no longer appear in our brochures, help files, or other sales material. It will no longer have any specific references in other ZonePro screens, such as the Finalize Deletions Screen, etc. Users of the new custom module that handles trash billing will have all the same screens and features they had before.