Darryl Booth

An Ounce of Prevention...

I twisted my ankle good last weekend playing tennis with my five-year-old son. We were just hitting balls against the wall at the local high school, Andrew learning how to use his new Spongebob racket, and me showing him a proper forehand.

During one of those, "See how I swing level and always watch the ba.....OUCH!" I stepped on a loose ball and fell to the ground.

OK, bad form on my part allowing loose balls on the court. I know better.

A Systems Perspective?

Later in the day with ice, swelling, and elevation, I started thinking about the pain I was enduring and how it could have been prevented. The answer is obvious... I should have not proceeded with the lesson while the court was littered with loose tennis balls. I should have checked then stopped to clean up the balls before proceeding. User error.... and I had all the tools to prevent it.

EnvisionConnect Financial Wizards?

EnvisionConnect's billing and aging wizards has a check-before-you-proceed page for just this reason.

The system shows you the anticipated outcome of the wizard before the wizard posts the results. For example, when billing for annual permits or hourly services, the system displays each of all the charges it thinks should be posted to the financial system based on your configuration and how you used the wizard.

This wizard page is designed to encourage the user to stop, print reports, and validate the anticip0ated outcome before proceeding with the "Post and Continue" button.

Taking these few extra moments certainly will prevent the pain of an incorrect billing run.

A Little Boast, A Little Brag

Meghan, Donald, and I were invited to speak to the Northern Cal Users Group yesterday. I got home last night and couldn't sleep.

I tried to find the words to convey the excitement that was buzzing around my head. Below is the company e-mail message that I sent the following morning.

Yesterday Meghan, Donald, and I attended the Northern California Envision User Group meeting in Sacramento. The topic was EnvisionConnect migration.

Guys, there is so much enthusiasm about EnvisionConnect. Meghan did a presentation (using Verizon’s wireless service) that blew everybody away and left them wanting more. Performance was very good.

The latest release on Rackspace (delivered last Friday) was solid.

A new client (in the final contract stage), Tuolumne County, kept audibly gasping and going on about the features that they see in EnvisionConnect but have been missing in SWEEPS. They have high a enthusiasm factor.

Nobody blinked an eye at our plans for migration and were hungry to hear every detail about the SBCEH migration. We covered what went right and what challenged us.

Thanks for making this meeting an easy one… we all drove home on a bit of a high (which might explain why Meghan missed the Shaw Ave off-ramp, but that’s another story).

Next month, public water!

Online Meetings Reduce Donut Consumption 80%

Decade renewed its technical partnership with WebEx this week. Under the updated agreement:

• Decade licensed WebEx's teleconference services, the "telephone part" of multi-party meetings 
• Decade licensed larger "meeting rooms," allowing many more attendees in each meeting 
• Decade licensed Support Center, a new kind of meeting optimized for technical support 

Decade Software Company has used WebEx since 2000. My appreciation for WebEx was sealed when I spent time trying to find a less expensive alternative.

While WebEx is not cheap, its value proposition is justified when you accumulate the hours saved by avoiding travel (for both our customers and Decade staff), seeing product demonstrations (instead of describing features), and by reaching out to solve technical problems with just a moment's notice.