News From the Kore

Summer 2004 Issue

Summer is Going, Going, Gone... 

Welcome to the Summer 2004 Edition of News From the Kore.

It was a nice summer here in beautiful San Diego, CA, but it's almost over. It was hot, but not too hot. And although the Summer has been mild, things have been heating up here at Kore. We have been very busy the past few months and there's still a lot to do as we race towards the finish line for this year. Speaking of races...

Kore Team News

 Kore Goes to the Races! 

In honor of Ken's 40th birthday, we decided to take him to go watch the ponies run at Del Mar, our local and very popular race track. Michelle Durbin, our new office manager and leader of the Bad Kitty Crew, organized the event. Michelle had the most consistency selecting horses, unfortunately she was consistently picking the losers. You know it's going to be a tough day when the horse you select for the first race gets scratched and in the second race your horse finishes dead last without it's jockey. Towards the end of race day, everyone was asking Michelle what horse she selected--just so they would not choose the same horse! Even though none of Michelle's horses crossed the finish line in the money, she and the rest us had plenty of fun cheering for our favorites. Everyone had a good time, and some of us did pick a few winners--but no one was so lucky that they had to report their winnings to the IRS!

Members of the Bad Kitty Crew above are from left to right Front Row: Michelle Durbin, Rob Morrison. Second Row: Ken Dickinson, Rishi Persad, Andy Blanchard, and John Bosley. Back row: Jeremy Segal, Mark Dobransky, Keith Lambert, Paul Bressler, and Bob Bottomley. Kore team members not pictured are Frank Busalacchi, Frank Kertai, Paul Trebbien, Chuck Verran, and Eric Yarborough. These guys are officially banned from the Bad Kitty Crew.

IBM and Kore Partner

You may have already heard that Kore is now an IBM Business Partner, enabling Kore to deliver our enterprise integration, business automation, and custom solutions bundled with IBM U2 products. For more information, please read the announcement. Kore is already hard at work developing new integration solutions that leverage IBM's WebSphere MQ software. These new products will be more robust and provide more power and flexibility for exchanging information across different platforms while allowing us to integrate new and existing business applications faster and easier.

If you have integration challenges and need a better solution, please contact us to discuss new options that are available to you from Kore.

Kore at APICS 2004

The APICS conference will be here in San Diego this year at the Convention Center from October 10 - 13. This is a very popular conference and looks to be better than ever this year. It will be chock full of educational sessions, speakers, events, and a showcase of leading suppliers and technologies. And the good news is that Kore Technologies will be there! While there will not be any dancing girls at our booth, don't let that stop you from coming by. We will have more exciting (and more relevant) products for you to see, such as our Web solutions and enterprise integration technologies. 

If you plan to be at the event or happen to be in San Diego during this time, please stop by and visit Kore in booth 418, right near the bookstore and Internet Cafe. We will have a daily drawing for a nice give away and free gifts for everyone. If you are interested in attending and would like a complementary pass to the exposition and general sessions, please contact us. We hope to see you there!

See You in Vegas for Perspectives 2004

Kore has been invited again to attend this year's Epicor Perspectives. It will be held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 24-27, 2004. 

Stop by our booth in the Partner Pavilion and you can meet some members of the Kore Team and see a demonstration of our latest webTeam products. There will be some nice freebies and a daily give away you are sure to like. We will also have a break-out session where we will be discussing tools and techniques to empower your teams to collaborate more effectively. This will include a more in-depth product demonstration of our webTeam products. 

This is expected to be an excellent event and an opportunity to review third-party software solutions and get an update on Epicor's products and strategies. For more information on Perspectives, click here. We hope to see you in Vegas!

Product and Service News

Kourier Integrator

• Now supports BY-EXP selections in Kourier exports. Now you can qualify the data for export using the "BY-EXP" keyword. This is great for exporting data that contains parallel multi-values. 

• Improved service configuration messages.  Users are warned when a service appears to be configured with invalid Data Source name settings.

• Expanded Purge Utility. Now includes ability to purge transactions and messages.

KommerceServer Framework News

The big news is that KommerceServer has now been migrated to and certified for Microsoft .NET. All KommerceServer products are now available as a .NET application. As mentioned last issue this improves the performance of our solutions, and it allows us to easily leverage new Microsoft capabilities such as comprehensive search indexing, MS Outlook integration, and MS Report Server 2000. 

Existing KommerceServer products that use the previous ASP framework will continue to be supported, however new features and product development will be on the .NET platform. If you would like to benefit from the .NET capabilities of Kommerceserver, please call us to schedule an upgrade.

With the .NET project complete, we have now begun taking advantage of the user interface control available in .NET platform to improve usability of the applications. Examples include:

•  New Calendar date control:

• New menu control:    

• An expanded page template design that provides for easier content management and tailoring to match the look and feel of your Web site.

Other Product News 

Here are some updates to our tools and some other interesting projects we have recently completed. Please call us if you are interested.

• Our very popular File Resize Utility has been ported to UniData. This utility provides a quick and easy way to optimize the performance of your UniData database, using either TCL commands or simple input screens.

• We have created a Credit Card Payment Interface for DataFlo. You can now accept credit card orders directly from your DataFlo sales order entry process and perform real-time credit authorization, credit payment, and settlement transactions using CyberSource. 

• New Label Printing module. We have created an interface to Seagull Scientific's BarTender product making it very easy to design and print almost any type of label from within DataFlo. Examples Include: bar code labels, generic labels, shipping labels, and customer-specific labels.

For more information on any of the above products or our services, call us at 866-700-KORE (5673) or contact us at sales@koretech.com and we will be happy to talk with you!

Tech Tip: Setting the wIntegrate Title Bar to Display Account Name

By Jeremy Segal

If you use the Classic DataFlo menus and you or your users log into multiple DataFlo accounts (DEV-DATAFLO, PILOT, etc.), or if you are running in a Multi-Plant environment, then you may have run into the problem of entering data into the wrong account. While the default Menu setup shows the Account Name, you have no indication of which account you are in while you are using a data entry screen. To help minimize this problem, here's a little tip that explains how to change the wIntegrate Title Bar to display the Account Name, and the Plant ID (if you are running in a Multi-Plant environment).  Read the Tech Tip.

If you would like to know more about the other functionality available at user login time, please give us a call at 866-700-KORE(5673) or email us at info@koretech.com and we will be happy to assist.

Paul's Corner

Well, I’ve finished the ‘Monster Truck’ for my grandson; it turned out to be about 7 inches long and 6 inches tall with 3-inch wheels (see picture). This truck could possibly be called the “$2,000 Monster Truck”. It all started when my wife and I went to the woodworking store where I wanted to pick up some supplies for a box I was building. She found a book on making wood trucks for kids. I examined it and found I really should have a Band Saw in order to accurately cut wood that thick. I researched and found the Band Saw I wanted - what do you know, the manufacturer had a rebate going and will send you $100 if you buy another machine within a couple of months. So I researched and found a Table Saw I really wanted. And with these great tools I needed some great saw blades…  As with all projects around the home, I found other things I needed while building the truck, like the Circle Jig I made to cut out the wheels on my band saw, the jig for my router to make those wheels perfectly round, and then the jig to help me cut the tread in the wheels at 15 degrees. Then there’s the extra wheels I created in case of mishaps and the new wheels I had to make when I discovered the tread is different depending on which side of the car you are on… Note, those are purple fenders and running boards – I found a type of wood called Purpleheart and it’s really purple. What a project, very fun, I made every part of the car on my band saw, what a tool… Anyway, now I’ve got some great tools and, of course, am in need of other tools as I’ve found some furniture I want to build and will need those other tools to make really great furniture. If you want to see a picture of my workshop, click here.

Programmers, I wanted to mention, again, how accounting feels about reports they can output to an Excel spreadsheet – They ‘love’ it! With wIntegrate and the Preview Report Manager, this generally is a piece of cake for the Info/Access reports. As I’ve mentioned in previous Newsletters, reports with output generated by a BASIC program will need to be modified to send the output to a file (Preview work file?) and then that file can be output using info/access which is the vehicle used for Exporting the data. If you’re up for the challenge, check with accounting to see if they have any reports that they would like the ability to export. A couple of the reports I’ve done lately are the Inventory Cost Version Comparison report (we also decided to display the labor fixed and variable overhead) and the Indented Bill of Material – this one presented a big challenge. Note there is a limit to how much data can be passed to a cell (about 200 characters). I’d be happy to lend a hand if need be – these are very fun projects for me. 

I’m looking forward to the upcoming APICS conference as it gives me a chance to get out of the house, see my friends, and meet new people. Hopefully, I’ll see you there. Please stop by our booth and say hi, we’ll have gifts for all.

Please remember, “Great Service to your Customer is always rewarded”.

Paul’s Questions and Answers

I always enjoy answering your questions!  So everyone, if there’s a question you have on how something works, email it to me – pault@koretech.com.  I hope you find these useful:

Question:  We have a screen that is supposed to display the Part Descriptions but, because of quote marks used in the description they are being truncated.  How can I fix this?

Answer: We resolved this with a little clean-up loop to change those quotes ( " ) to Inches before allowing the Part Description to print:

0004 * Remove Quotes from descriptions
0005: LOOP UNTIL INDEX(ITEM<2>,'"',1)=0 DO
0006:   XX=INDEX(ITEM<2>,'"',1)
0007:   IF XX>0 THEN CITEM<2>=CITEM<2>[1,XX-1]:"in.":CITEM<2>[XX+1,99]
0008: REPEAT
0009: *

Question:  I'm going to Resize the files tomorrow and I want to know how I can lock all users out of DataFlo except for me during the resize.  Got any ideas??

Answer:   You’re running Unix, so how about making sure all users are logged off and shut the system down setting it to run in “Single User Mode”.  If you’re running DataFlo you can simply set the Group Code on the Account Security screen to a code that is not being used, possibly “#1MONSTERTRUCK”.

Question:   How often should I resize the files on my system?

Answer:  I usually recommend monthly – After your Month end processing is completed. Archive old data to the Historical files, and then resize. These days, with data being copied (monthly) to historical files be sure to not resize those high volume files downward as that just slows things way down after a week or two when they fill up with data again.  Note, Kore has a File Resize Utility that does not downsize files. 

If you have any questions or comments about our newsletter, please send an email to kore_newsletter@koretech.com. We want your feedback.

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