We have two exciting items for this newsletter! The first is registration for our Annual User Meeting and second is we are ready for you all to start testing our transaction section of the program. There is a lot of information in this newsletter about the latest version of the AgWare MGR program, please take some time to read over all of it. We appreciate all your support and insight!
MGR Annual Meeting:
Our Annual Users Meeting will be on Friday, September 18th in Des Moines Iowa. We will be having an appreciation dinner on Thursday, September 17th at 6:00PM and then the meeting will run from 9AM to 5PM on the 18th.
Where: Renaissance Hotel (401 Locust Street, Des Moines)
- Please call 515.244.2151 for hotel reservations. Please tell them you are with the AgWare block and the room rate is $139.00 per night. The block with remain open until August 15th.
- The hotel has a free airport shuttle
Please email Lisa Evans at lisa.evans@uaar.net with all attendee names and if you will be attending the appreciation dinner on Thursday as soon as possible so we can make reservations and confirm meeting space needs. We look forward to seeing you all there.
AgWare MGR Version 1.2.8:
We are excited to have a new AgWare MGR version to share with you. Please fully read the below information on the new version before installing it. The install link will be at the bottom of the update information. You will notice a small change to the icon for the program, it is now green! 
To avoid confusion with our other products we have changed the color. We like the new look and hope you do also!
Over the past few version we have been focused on two areas.
1) Cleaning up issues that were sent in on the reports area
2) Transaction Entry
Reports
More report sections are finished and have had their criteria screens enhanced to work with each other by preserving your last entered criteria.
We have attempted to make our system reports consistent with each other as a group. In some cases that means that items like page numbers and headers may be slightly different from the original AccuFarm reports. However, all the reported numbers should match the old reports. Please let us know if you see any variations.
One of the biggest items we missed on the first pass was ensuring that all the necessary fields expanded when longer data was present. We have fixed all of these that were reported and found a few more in our testing. If you see any cut off items in your reports please let us know so we can update them.
Report Customizations
In some cases, customers have let us know that their AccuFarm reports are different from what we included in our system. If you are noticing this please let us know. In most cases, those users were running customized versions of the standard System reports. If this occurs for you, we can help create and install a custom report that matches your current report. The system reports that we install with our system will match the AccuFarm defaults, but we fully expect that customers will need some modifications. The way our installer works, future upgrades will not affect your custom reports but may update our system reports if changes or fixes are needed.
All of the included reports can be run against your current live database to test against your current reports. Please let us know if you need any assistance with this process.
Crystal Reports
Our original plan for customized Crystal Reports was to convert them to Fast Reports. That has proven to be more difficult than imagined. This version includes a Crystal Report Viewer. We have not put a lot of time into this viewer, as it is a proof of concept intended to show that we could run your old customized Crystal Reports. If this works and seems useful for you we will make the interface easier to use. For example right now you need to browse and find a report each time you run it. We would like to keep a list of your reports so you can just click and run.
The Crystal Report viewer requires that a crystal runtime be installed. When you click on the menu option we check your system to see if the necessary software is installed. If the runtime is missing there are links provided to the free runtime downloads.
The Crystal Reports runtime is free for viewers. If you want to use the new Crystal Reports creator for creating or editing reports it must be purchased separately. Our built in solution will continue to be Fast Reports. We understand you may not want to leave behind your investment in Crystal. This new viewer allows us to keep both options.
Transactions
Our transaction entry screens, including posting and un-posting batches, are 90% complete. We are still running some tests and making adjustments. We are not ready for you to start entering transactions on your live system. But we are ready for you to take a look and do some testing. To make things easier for you we have setup a test server that you can log into remotely and run the current versions of our software against a test database. Everyone will receive a second e-mail with their user name and password for logging into the server. We understand that you may not have used a remote server in this manner, so to help get you started we have a video showing you the steps for accessing the test server. (click on the blue text for the video)
If you have your own internal test system and want to run local instead of on our test system please call us. We can help you enable the transaction section for your own internal testing.
Transaction Question
Is anyone using the Inter-farm features of AccuFarm combined with Auto Fees? We have some live examples of each of those separately but not together. We would like to find a customer that is using both of these features so we can test our new Transactions to see if we generate the same results you are currently generating.
What’s Next?
Next we are working on all the screens found under Farm Data and Maintain Farm. A few of the initial account setup screens were already completed. We are now working through all the remaining items.
As we collect feedback on the transaction entry screen we will make adjustment and continue our testing. As a final testing step we are working on a tool that will take your transactions from the last year and recreate batches with in the new software. We will then have the program look for differences between your original transactions and our newly created transactions. Once we are able to do that on everyone’s system with no differences flagged we will be ready for you to start entering transactions using the new system.
At that point the Farm Section will also be complete and we will then start on the Statement Definition tool.
We appreciate your business and look forward to an eventful 2015. Please contact us at 605.791.4872 or email us at support@agmgr.com with any questions. Check out our website at www.agmgr.com for downloads, tutorials, and for help with install steps.