Email Options From Staff Web Site

I have just added several Email options to the Staff web site. You can launch an email screen from the Building Inspection page, the Contractor page, and the Contact File page. These screens are all designed so that you can copy in various chunks of field data easily and also add your own text. Before you use this feature you should probably go to the Email Setup page under the new Maintenance section to at least save your preferred return email address. You can send Emails without having to add your own SMTP server by using our built in default. If this doesn't work for you, the Setup page lets you enter your own SMTP server information. Try this feature out and give me your feedback!

Staff Site Adds Maintenance Section

A recent major addition to the Staff web site is a series of pages that are the equivalent of the Maintenance Options section in the Windows version of ZonePro. This is the first time I have added any of the Maintenance screens to a web site.Not all of the Maintenance options are available from the web yet (notably most of the screens dealing with fees are still absent) but a great deal of functionality is present. Please try this section out and give me your feedback as again fleshing out the web side of ZonePro is a major emphasis this year. Thanks!

Staff Sites Deployed

Every ZP SQL customer now has the new version of the Staff site available for them from their web root page. Please try this new site out and let me hear your suggestions. In almost every case, the new Staff site is accessed from the same link used to get to the old Staff site. If you wish to have access to your older Staff site for some reason, it is still there and I can easily add a link. If you have your old Staff site linked from another page (such as your main community web site) you may want to consider switching to the newer version. I'd be happy to advise based on how you currently make use of the system.

New Staff Web Page

I've posted the demo site version of the new Staff web page (www.zpdemo.zpuser.com/staff/). This is a complete rewrite of the previous Staff page. My goal this year is to continue to develop this web page until it can rival the Windows interface in functionality. The idea being that eventually users will be able to do everything they need to do from a web page. The new site differs from the old Staff site in that it requires a user log in. It has a fancier floating sidebar and some other changes that are designed to make it work for mobile devices as well as larger screens. The next step is to roll out this version of the site for existing ZP SQL customers and then return to enhancing. I am very interested in getting customer feedback on this new site. I need to know what features I should work on adding first and where the current weaknesses are. Any suggestions you have to share would be appreciated!

New Local Copy Setting in Global Options

Recently I have a rash of support calls where the culprit of problems turned out to be the "Create Local Copy" button. The "Create Local Copy" option was designed to give users a way to save various Maintenance databases locally so that ZP would not need to make an Internet call to get that data. In theory this would be a time saver but in reality the feature causes more trouble than it is worth. Now there is a new Global Personalization Options on the Two Tab of that screen that says "Allow Local Copy Option in Maintenance Screens." Keeping that option checked means the button will work as it always has. Unchecking that option means the buttons will be disabled for all users. For most customers I would recommend going ahead and turning this feature off. If you have a Maintenance Screen where the "Local Copy" button reads "Delete" instead of "Create", I would go ahead and delete the local copy before disabling the feature system wide.

New Max Rows Setting In Personalization Options

Every report screen in ZP SQL has a Max Rows option that is set at 100 records by default. This means that no matter what report criteria you use, ZP will return no more than 100 records for that query. This is basically a safety feature to prevent users from accidentally requesting a huge data set over the Internet and bogging down their connection. You can manually change this value any time you run a report but some users wanted a way to avoid this limitation all together. So now there is a new setting in the SQL Tab of the Local Personalization Options screen that lets you keep the default setting at 100 or change it to 0 which effectively turns the limitation off. The new option "Set Max Rows to 100 in Report Screens" will be turned on unless you go into the Personalization screen and uncheck it. This new feature affects just about every module in ZP SQL so you will have to download a full complement of upgrades to implement it.

Printer Summary Option Improved

The "To Printer Summary" output option available in most report screens is really useful. It allows you to condense multi-page reports to just the relevant subtotals and totals. It eliminates all the detail lines and just shows the meat of a report. But in prior versions there was no way to preview a report in summary mode and no way to direct such a report to anything but the default printer. The most recent updates fix these shortcomings. Now when you select "To Printer Summary" and right-click on the Printer button you will see a preview of the summary version of the report instead of the full report. I have also changed the code so that when you left click on the Printer button with "To Printer Summary" chosen, you always get the printer prompt dialog so that you can direct the report to any printer. These two changes should make this option a lot more user friendly.