MainBoss Newswire

April 2004

 

Topics:

  1. Preventing a requestor from receiving e-mail notifications on a specific request
  2. Viewing MainBoss work orders on your Palm Pilot
  3. Upcoming Tradeshows

 

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1. Preventing a requestor from receiving e-mail notifications on a specific request

MainBoss @Requests is a great tool for allowing requestors from throughout your company – whether they work on-site or from a remote location—to submit work requests. As you deal with the request, the requestors receive automatic e-mail notifications which update them on the status of their request.

However, sometimes it is better to not send out these automatic notifications. Here is an example: A MainBoss customer manages the maintenance activities at a college and receives requests from students and faculty. The maintenance department is very busy and the automatic replies sent out by @Requests free up a lot of their time that would otherwise be spent on the phone with the requestors. Some requests though are not really valid and the maintenance department would prefer to just ignore them and for the requestors to just forget about them. But if they void the request, the requestor will receive notification of this and call up the maintenance department demanding why their request was voided. So, the question is: how can the maintenance personnel void the request without the requestor receiving a notification about this?

1.      Once the request is received in MainBoss CMMS, decide whether the request should be voided and whether you would like to notify the requestor.

2.      If you don’t wish to notify the requestor that you will be voiding the request, leave MainBoss CMMS and open MainBoss @Requests.

3.      Find the request in the Waiting bin on the left hand side of the screen.

4.      Move the request to the Deleted bin by right-clicking on it and choosing Delete.

5.      Now exit MainBoss @Requests and go back into your MainBoss CMMS. Go to Work Requests->Browse Work Requests and void the request as normal.

6.      Since you have deleted the request out of MainBoss @Request first, any changes you make to the request in MainBoss CMMS will now not be noted by MainBoss @Requests and therefore no acknowledgements will be sent.

 

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2. Viewing MainBoss work orders on your Palm Pilot

MainBoss customers occasionally ask us whether MainBoss has a module for viewing work orders on their hand held devices, such as Palm Pilots or Blackberries. Ideally they would like to receive a work order on the Palm, view it, do the work, edit the work order to note what repairs were made and what labor and material resources were used, and then somehow sync the information on the Palm with their actual MainBoss database. While such a module is not available at this time, there is still an easy way to receive and view a MainBoss work order on your Palm (or other hand held device that has e-mail functionality). Using a free program called PDFMAILER, you can convert a MainBoss work order into a PDF file and email it to your Palm…all in one easy step!

PDFMAILER can either be purchased for a nominal fee or a free promotional version is available, which just prints an advertising sentence along the top of your document. To download and install PDFMAILER, click on the following link:

http://www.gotomaxx.com/cgi-bin/gm/site.cgi?file=mp_uebersicht

The PDFMAILER install program will walk you through setting up a virtual printer port on your computer and configuring PDFMAILER to your needs.

Once PDFMAILER is installed, documents can be sent as an attachment to your email message. Here is how you would email a work order:

  1. Open MainBoss and bring up the work order you wish to email. This can be done by clicking on MainBoss ->Browse Work Orders, then editing the desired work order and clicking on Save & Print.
  2. Once you are in the Print Work Orders screen, from the pull-down menu beside ‘Name:’ choose ‘maxx PDFMAILER Standard’ rather than your actual printer and simply click on OK.
  3. A PDFMAILER window will pop up. Make sure that the E-mail checkbox is marked and enter an appropriate file name (for example the WO number) and click OK.
  4. Your default e-mail program will open and you can send the email containing the work order attachment to the appropriate person who will then receive it on their Palm Pilot and be able to view it as a .PDF file.

 

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3. Upcoming Tradeshows

Thinkage will be attending the following tradeshows to demonstrate MainBoss:

·        BOMA International: North American Commercial Real Estate Congress and Office Building Show in Toronto, ON from June 27th to 29th, 2004. Visit us at booth 1730!

 

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