Support News

March 2003 Edition

New Feature Spotlight: Room with a View, Invoice Backdating
Q&A with Technical Support: System Requirement Changes
Smart Tip of the Month: Set up a SQL Maintenance Plan
Third Party Software: Markzware FlightCheck
Support Bookshelf: Help on the Internet


New Feature Spotlight

Room with a View

Have you ever wanted to browse through offline CD/DVD archives? Virtual Ticket gives users a virtual file system for quick and easy viewing of all digital resources in the database regardless of whether the image is online or offline. By using the Lookup from Database method in Virtual Ticket, you can find any digital resource that exists in the file system or was archived to an offline location.

To lookup digital resources from the database, perform the following steps:

  1. In the desired file collector, choose Lookup:From Database from the Database Tool. A dialog box will appear, displaying the virtual file system and allowing you to select the files or folders from the database that you want the Virtual Ticket system to look up and display in the active file collector.
  2. Locate the appropriate digital resource(s) and click Select. The system will look up the digital resources in the database and display them in the active file collector.

For more information on looking up digital resources through Virtual Ticket, refer to the Virtual Ticket User Guide available at: http://www.meta-comm.com/customers/docs


Invoice Backdating

Invoice Backdating allows any Job Cost Plus user with sufficient privileges to set a backdated invoice date for new invoices. This feature allows users to avoid manually entering the same invoice date on each invoice whenever a large number of backdated invoices are created. For example, if at the beginning of a period, your company wants to date a number of invoices for the previous period, the invoices created will need to be dated no later than the last day of the previous period. In this case, before the invoices are entered, invoice backdating may be enabled and the appropriate date set up as the default invoice date; invoice backdating may then be disabled after the invoices have been created.

  1. Select Backdating Setup from the Management:Invoices menu. This will open the Invoice Backdating Setup window, allowing you to enable invoice backdating and specify a default invoice date.
  2. Check the “Automatically Backdate New Invoices” checkbox to enable invoice backdating, and specify a default invoice date. The default invoice date may be the current date or any date earlier that the current date.

Q&A with Technical Support

What changes have been made to the system requirements for the Job Manager 3.0/Virtual Ticket 5.0 system?

The following items are required with the Job Manager 3.0/Virtual Ticket 5.0 system:

  • Mac OS 9.1 or higher
  • Windows 2000 Server
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000

For a full listing of system requirements visit:
http://www.meta-comm.com/products/virtual_ticket/prod_info_system_requirements.htm


Smart Tip of the Month

Set up a SQL Maintenance Plan

Your company database contains information that is of vital importance to your company. In order to ensure the safety of the information contained in that database, it is important to backup the database at regular intervals. Configuring a database backup procedure is a quick, easy process, performed using the Database Maintenance Plan Wizard from the SQL Server Enterprise Manager. The information saved by your database maintenance plan will be the crucial part to any database recovery plan.

A procedure for setting up a database maintenance plan is provided in Chapter 6 of the Installation Guide located at: http://www.meta-comm.com/customers/docs.


Third Party Software

Markzware FlightCheck

Virtual Ticket users can perform automated preflighting using the Markzware FlightCheck application by implementing a solution available from MetaCommunications. The settings may be customized for different types of preflighted files using FlightCheck Ground Controls. The solution contains a form with two file collectors (Preflighted Files and Ground Controls), a checkbox to "Run FLIGHTCHECK On Add/Update", an operator notes field, plus status and report fields. Simply drag the files to be checked into the Preflighted Files file collector. If you wish to use Ground Controls, drag the files into the Ground Controls file collector. Virtual Ticket form templates may be created with pre-associated Ground Controls for different types of preflighted files.

For more information and to download the solution, visit:
http://www.meta-comm.com/support/knowledge_base/article.asp?id=16081


Support Bookshelf

Help on the Internet

Looking for an explanation for an error message on your Windows server? Have questions that you cannot find answers to? Try looking in one of these places for answers to your most difficult questions.

http://groups.google.com – This site is a search engine for thousands of newsgroups available on the web. If you have a problem that seems obscure, try searching for the answer here.

http://www.developer.com – This page contains many articles which may be of interest to programming types. Find information about Java, XML, and database softwares. Free examples on some topics are also available.



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