News and Blog
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The other week, I wrote about popup calendars, but there is more to this simple feature than I thought. I was watching Kathy Carlson, our remarkable Project Manager, use Escape Online the other day and she did something that I had never seen before. (She said that a customer showed it to her.) While creating a pay schedule, Kathy used the calendar to go to next year. That doesn’t sound surprising, I know, but let me step you through it. | Here is what the calendar popup looks like at first glance. |
It is this next part that is so amazing: Kathy clicked on the Month (January, 2009) at the top of the calendar to change the presentation to monthly. |
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Then she clicked on the year to change the presentation to annual. (If you want to go back to the original/daily view, just go backwards, clicking the year and then the month.) |
We all oohed and ahhhed, because the rest of us had all just kept clicking the arrows to move from month to month. This is such a quick method for moving forward and backward in time, I just had to do a follow up and share it with all of you.
I also want you to take note that it was a customer that showed this to us. If you have a great idea that you want to share, please feel free to contact me or your Customer Care representative.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
With Sonoma County’s rollout of Escape Online 5 version 3 this month, we now have 100 organizations, with over 1,700 users, now using v3. Many of our remaining v1 customers are planning on upgrading their systems over the next two months. Several others are awaiting the delivery of hardware, while a few are still developing an upgrade plan.
In an effort to assist customers with planning and execution of the upgrade, we have developed a Q&A document on this topic, v3 Upgrade Q&A. This document includes information on equipment and operating system requirements, upgrade tasks, and benefits of the v3 software. You can find the v3 Upgrade Q&A in the Customer Care section of our web site.
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I have just updated our 2010 Product Roadmap page. Besides the 100’s of features and fixes we do in each release, there are numerous “big picture enhancements” we are actively working on or will begin this year. The Roadmap discusses these items and their status. You’ll want to read about Data Grids, the Detail Window, Finance/HR Workflows, and more. Please take a moment to review!
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I have a tendency to run very large reports and then “drill-down” to the information that I want. I do this using the Group Tree in the Report Viewer. It is very handy. For example, if you run a 500 page Receivables/Liabilities Activity (Ledger02) report, you may want all of that information, but you may not want to weed through all those pages to find a particular requisition. Voilà! You can use the Group Tree feature in the report viewer. The Group Tree is like a table of contents. Every report in Escape Online has this feature, showing the major groups that you specified in the report in the Group Tree. |
So if you run an HR/Payroll report and select a group/sort option that groups by bargaining unit, the Group Tree will display bargaining units. If you rerun that report and select a different option—one that groups by job category—the Group Tree will display job categories. In other words, the table of contents is defined by your report parameter and sort/group selections.
The Group Tree is really easy to use. Once the report runs and is displayed in the Report tab (or Report Viewer), click on the Group Tree icon and you will see a “table of contents” for the report. As you can see below, the tree shows the organization, the object and then the requisition or journal entry number.
If you click on an item in the Group Tree, the report “jumps” to that page. This is a really handy feature for long reports, especially if there are a lot of requisitions, journal entries, or employees!!
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As our Escape Online 5 districts and COEs prepare for W2 production, we did a few SQL queries to analyze transaction volumes for calendar 2009 payrolls. Here are a few interesting numbers:
$1,554,480,193.60 |
Dollar total of employee ACHs, pay checks, and vendor checks processed |
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407,617 |
Total count of ACHs, pay checks, and vendor checks |
Several of our customers didn't have a full year on Escape payroll in 2009, and the Sonoma county districts had none — they are just going live now.
So for calendar 2010, even this impressive volume will be doubled or more!
When W2s are completed, I'll update you with some other figures such as employee counts, as well as how many distinct organizations processed payroll with Escape Online 5. Our customers also process an incredble volume of retirement earnings, and I'll be sharing that with you as well.
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We are in the process of moving our XCOE customers to version 3 of Online 5. XCOE is our name for those Escape Online 5 systems that we host and support for small County customers. We have five XCOE counties, with 53 total districts and approximately 500 users. So far we have converted three of the five to v3: Sierra, Tehama, and Trinity Counties. Since Escape manages the application servers for these customers, we performed all upgrade tasks for the servers. The remaining XCOEs (Lake and Modoc Counties) will soon perform acceptance testing in the v3 software. We are ready to perform the upgrade for them as soon as testing is complete. |
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I am one of those people that have to wake up every morning and look at my cell phone to know what day it is. Unless it is a special day that I have been waiting for (like my birthday!), I generally don’t know the date either. So, you can imagine that I really, really like the interactive calendars in Escape Online. The calendars work just like lookups, and they are ubiquitous, appearing on every search and form that has a date. Even though you cannot use the calendar lookup to specify a date range (like entering 01/10, 01/15..01/25 to get info for just those dates in January 2010), you can still use the lookup to determine dates, accessing it with the F4 key. |
Other, more date sensitive people, like them too. For example, when scheduling future vendor payments, it is nice to have the calendar so you can see what days are business days.
The same is true for pay dates. If you want to know when the pay date was in March of last year, no problem! You can scroll through the months, future and past.
And, look at the bottom of the screen. It tells you what today’s date is. Nice!
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Shannon Hagerty of Hawthorne SD reports that over the Christmas holiday she began an upgrade to v3, starting first with district office staff. Last week she began distributing the v3 client to her school site users.
Hawthorne is a mid-size district in Southern California, with approximately 100 users. They are a departmental customer, using purchasing, requisitioning, and work order functionality in Escape Online 5. Shannon reports:
"So far the feedback is good. Everyone says it is running faster (I agree). We especially like the new Activity Quick Starts. I have been showing it to each person individually as I install the new client. There have been no major issues yet, just a couple of small ones."
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The upgrade rate for customers moving to version 3 of Escape Online 5 has been quite good. In December alone, three customers representing sixteen organizations rolled out the new software. The statistics for customers now using version 3:
The software continues to work well, with no significant problems specific to v3 having been reported. In January, two large customers with 56 total organizations are scheduled to upgrade. A customer with 26 organizations is scheduled for February.
It seems reasonable that by July all customers will have been upgraded. In addition we have 12 new customer projects scheduled for rollout by July, all on version 3.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Every new year, we make resolutions to improve our lives. Well, I have a suggestion for a new exercise: the Webinar Work Out. This work out is easy on the body and good for the mind. You don't have to pay tolls, get running shoes, or learn a new diet, and your stomach muscles will receive a nice workout with the always funny, always educational, Terri Hammond, System Trainer. Terri’s webinars are streamed over the Internet to your desk or conference room. You can listen quietly with a headset or play it to a large group, whichever suits your style. You will be able to see all of the keystrokes and mouse movements, just as if Terri was standing right in front of you! |
This year, Terri has set an ambitious agenda with webinars scheduled for almost every month, ranging from Creating User Records to Budget Development to Purchasing to you-name-it. So, if you are getting ready for creating your budget, you will want to register for the Budget Development webinar on February 11th.
These reasonably priced webinars ($250 per customer, unlimited users) can make a difference and are a resolution that is easy to keep. Happy New Year!
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I’m happy to announce we’ve added another new team member to the Finance Customer Care Team. Arin Simonyan joined Escape in early December 2009 and was referred to us by Elen Meltonyan, one of our HR/Payroll Customer Care team members. Arin comes to us with extensive experience in teaching Finance and Economics at the community college level and since our client base includes more community colleges than ever, her experience working in that environment helps round out our skill set. She is being mentored by our other Finance team members and is assigned one subject every week to learn, then is required to ‘teach’ key team members through that subject area. Since early childhood Arin has had special love for “working with numbers on a computer,” so she’ll definitely put that to work here. Arin enjoys baking and cooking Mediterranean food. One of her dreams is to have a road trip from the West to the East on Highway 80. |
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As part of the reorganization of software that took place with v3, software updates to the client have changed. Although we still release software in “version sets,” downloading of software to client computers is now more transparent to the user. The client automatically updates when you start the software, without prompting you.
Client updates are normally due to the release of a new version of Escape Online 5 into your production environment. However, there are other possible reasons for updates, such as an update to your user permissions. In version 3, Escape Online 5 doesn't download activities that you don’t use, based on your activity permissions. If your permissions change, you may receive new components at startup. Another reason for an update is that in rare instances an individual software component is released between version releases; if appropriate it will be downloaded.
The good news is that as a result of our new dynamic updating, updates complete very quickly. You may see some update messages appear very briefly, but in most cases the user will not even be aware that an update has occurred. This new update method insures that users are kept current with the least amount of inconvenience.
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If you took time off during the holidays, you may have missed some of our December blog posts. I posted several articles on version 3 of Escape Online 5 that may be of interest. We have quite a few customers in the process of moving to v3, so I will continue to post articles on this subject.
We also posted a couple of articles reporting that a customer and a local non-profit organization took advantage of our “inherited” office furniture surplus. These articles include photos of their great new office setup. The only cost to them was for moving and setup of the cubicles!
We still have a few cubicles and desks available, and will gladly coordinate moving. If you have an interest, contact me, barry@escapetech.com.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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One of the joys of the giving season is receiving cards from the kids we support through Children, Incorporated, a child sponsorship program which is affiliated with schools, orphanages, and welfare centers around the world and in the United States. Currently, Escape Technology (in the name of our customers) is sponsoring four children: Antonella, Marino, David and Luis. Last year, Antonella graduated from high school! We are so glad to be able to help her realize her dreams. Now that Antonella is an adult, we will be assigned to a new child to help. Marino has been sponsored since 2003. David and Luis have both been sponsored for the last few years. |
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