New VIMS User
Portage Bay would like to welcome Career Counseling, Inc to the family of VIMS users. VIMS, the Vocational Information Management System, is Portage Bay's case management and billing system for Vocational Rehabilitation firms and counselors. To meet some additional reporting needs of Career Counseling, we'll shortly be adding a couple of new custom reports to VIMS. As soon as its available, support program members will receive this update automatically.
Filemaker Server Updates The Filemaker Server 7v4 update was recently released for both Macintosh and Windows and is recommended for all Server 7 installations. The update fixes several issues, including multi-client server performance and the issue whereby scheduled backups could become disabled due to an error during the Backup process. Filemaker Pro 8v2 was also recently released to address a variety of minor issues. The complete list can be viewed here.
Current Portage Bay Projects
Serial / Ethernet Interface
Many external peripheral devices have serial interfaces for connecting to your computer. Examples include data aquisition hardware and serial printers. Generally, serial devices are connected to a single computer and can only be used from that computer. We've recently installed a serial to ethernet converter at one of our clients to get around this problem. With the converter in place, their 4th Dimension application can now be used to interact with a programmable scale from any computer on the network, rather than just the computer connected to the scale, as was the case previously. This solution turned out to be relatively inexpensive at just over $200 for the hardware.
Bar code printing and scanning Implementing bar code technology can be a straightforward process. With a small thermal transfer printer and a USB laser bar code scanner, we've recently added bar code printing and scanning functionality to one of our custom database systems. The addition of bar code scanning capabiliy will improve both data entry speed and accuracy. This was another project where the hardware was quite reasonable at around $500 for the printer and scanner.
Interesting Technologies
We've all accessed webcams on the internet. Some of my favorites are the DOT's Snoqualmie Pass and Steven's Pass cameras, the Space Needle cam, and the Mt Rainier National Park cam. What I hadn't realized until recently is
just how inexpensive this technology has become. Linksys makes a webcam for under $100 that has an integrated
web server and wireless network interface. All you have to do is plug it into a power outlest within range of a
wireless network and your webcam is up and running.
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