The Clip

 As banks make it more difficult for small and medium sized businesses to take out loans, expenditures for improving internal business processes can rapidly shrink or disappear altogether in an economic slowdown. Customers reign in spending, businesses suffer and look for ways to streamline their business with cost-effective solutions, only to find that the bank will no longer give them the loan to make it happen…and so the cycle continues…. The New York Times notes that the witholding of credit comes as the economy tightens and joblessness grows, making it difficult for companies who would be able to grow to secure the funds to do so. By mid-June 2008, the credit that banks were giving was decreasing at the rapid rate of more than 6 percent. In dollar terms, that’s about $150 billion dollars that companies at present (and very likely for awhile into the future) cannot get for their business needs. Imagine wanting to do internal restructuring to be more cost effective and needing to make a large expenditure for the softwares, etc. to accomplish it….and then not being able to get the money for the investment.

Technorati Tags: Contact Manager, Document sharing, Economy, Hosted Web Software, Loans, Online Calendar, Pay-as you-go, The New York Times, Timesheet

We’ve been able to add some functionality to the Timesheet Rules feature. This enables you to automate certain communication (or actions) based on the values of a submitted timesheet. For example, if your company’s policy states that certain departments/employees must submit a minimum of hours worked, then this feature will automate the notification of when/if a particular user fails to meet the requirements. Therefore, both employee and manager can be a little more efficient in the submit and approve pieces of the time tracking workflow.

Here’s a quick guide to setting up rules through the Timesheet Admin console:

1. Add a condition to the rule (also, you can set the order of the conditions to set the appropriate precedence)

2. Select the action which you would like to occur, once a submitted timesheet has met the condition(s) of the rule.

3. Name the Rule, so that you will be able to easily identify it from the Rule List view.

Technorati Tags: officeclip, rules, rules-based Timesheet, workflow

Many of our customers (with installed version of OfficeClip Suite) were asking us how to take backup of the database and how to avoid data loss if the server died. Most of our users run OfficeClip on Sql Express database and Microsoft does not provide Log Shipping for the Sql Server Express Edition.

So we decided to write a command line interface which would manage incremental backup and restore for our customer. Anticipating that this would be a useful solution for many other sql express users, we decided to make the source available free. Here are some of the features:

1. Full backup is taken every day (regardless of how often the program is run)
2. Incremental backup is taken periodically (say 10 minutes) when the program is run
3. It can keep the past backup history for a certain number of days
4. Log file is created in HTML format so it is easy to read
5. Backup can be restored using a single command that first restores the most recent full backup and then restores all the incremental backups in the correct order
6. It is possible to use the Windows Scheduler and run the program periodically and save the files to a destination machine and restore periodically thereby simulating log shipping
7. It can be run from a command prompt

Notes:

1. Before running this program on a database, you must change the database to “Full Recovery Mode” from the Sql Server Express Management Studio.
2. For restoring the backups make sure that the sql server user name and permission should match in both database.
3. The program is released under BSD License, so that you can also use it commercially without paying any royalities whatsoever.
4. It is written in C# using .net framework 2.0 in visual studio 2005 but should run on any vs.net 2008 editions.
5. If you are an OfficeClip customer, the same program is available in the distribution and it is called ocbackup.exe.

Download: Source Code | Executables Only

Usage:

To see all the options, run the program: OfficeClip.OpenSource.LogShipping.exe (from the LogShipping\bin\debug folder)

Examples:

The following command takes transactional backup every time it is run, takes full backup every day, keeps old backup for 7 days for the database called officeclip. The backup files are stored in the folder E:SqlBackups. It can be run every 10 minutes using the windows scheduler.

 OfficeClip.OpenSource.LogShipping -bd 7 -c backup -d officeclip -f “E:\SqlBackups” -s “Server=(local);Database=Master;Trusted_Connection=True”

The following command restores the backup to the database called officeclipR. The files are read from the folder E:SqlBackups.

 OfficeClip.OpenSource.LogShipping -bd 7 -c backup -d officeclipR -f “E:\SqlBackups” -s “Server=(local);Database=Master;Trusted_Connection=True”

License: BSD License

If you download and end up using this code, please leave a note. We would like to know who is using this code.

Technorati Tags: free source, log shipping, sql backup

Issues are often entered in the system and forgotten. OfficeClip Web Issue Tracker Escalation Rules allows administrators to decide what to do when a critical issue is not attended for a predetermined amount of time.

These rules are defined in Condition – Action format. For example, a rule can be set such that if an issue is open and critical and not worked on for a period of two days then an action is triggered. Actions can be set for sending email, changing the value of a field or even sending SMS messages.

This feature can be accessed from the Rules Menu of the Issue Tracker Admin screen.

Technorati Tags: Issue Tracker Tips, Web Issue Tracker

Based on our users feedback we have implemented a field-based access permission for our Web Contact Manager. This allows administrators to provide read, write, delete or append access to a role based on the value of a contact field. For example, if you want to restrict members of Georgia Team only to see the contacts who are in the State of Georgia, you can program this rule in the contact manager at organization level.

OfficeClip Contact Manager has many levels of security; the list below provides a recap of all security levels that can be set for contacts:

1. Organization Level Permission: Allows administrator to set default permission for all contacts in the organization. For example, an administrator can set the system such that only administrators can see all contacts and the contact creator can see only his/her contact.
2. Role Level Privileges: Administrators can create roles and provide privilege for the role users.
3. Role Level Object Permission: Allows creator or administrators to restrict a group of contacts accessible to only a particular role.
4. User Level Object Permission: Allows creator or administrators to restrict a group of contacts accessible to only a particular user.
5. Field-based Object Permission: Rules can be defined in the system so that when a contact is added or edited, permission is controlled based on the value of a field.

Technorati Tags: Contact Manager Tips, rules