A new version of Smartsport is about to be released that incorporates a new way of using SMS’s. The new offering charges 10 cents (ex GST) instead of the current ValueSMS rate of 16 or 15 cents, this is quite a saving long term.  The delivery of your messages remain the same (within 5-10 seconds), the difference now is you don’t need to sign up to ValueSMS, simply buy credits from within Smartsport by clicking a button. Please review the following images to see what’s required to use the new service.

1. Open the Company Settings module. On the Company Contact Details page, click the SMS Enabled check box, and choose Smart SMS as the SMS Provider.

2. Once you have specified you want to use Smart SMS, click the SMS Details tab. Simply specify the number of Credits you want to purchase and click the large Buy Now button. This will transfer you to PayPal where you can login using your PayPal account, or simply pay by Credit Card if you don’t. Remember, PayPal is regarded as one of the most secure payment gateways on the internet, so your details will be transferred safely and securely.

The minimum number of credits you can purchase is 500. Once you click the Buy Now button, wait a few seconds, your default browser should open to PayPal’s site where you can complete the transaction as illustrated below;

Simply complete the transaction by either logging in using your predefined PayPal account, or click the link Don’t have a PayPal account to pay via credit card. As soon as your payment has been authorised by PayPal, you will receive an automatic receipt email from Smartsport indicating your account balance. You can then use credits as you normally would in Smartsport. Clicking the SMS Credit Check button will give you a live up to date number of available credits remaining.

As part of the new SMS integration, we’ve added an SMS History tab to the client details so you can always refer to any messages you may have sent your clients.

We have also included a number of predefined queries in the Database Explorer that will help you send SMS’s to groups of people. The following table explains;

We will be adding additional queries incrementally, or if you have a good idea, please let us know.

This weeks blog focuses on using a feature that has been in Smartsport since day one, but one that we are quite sure hasn’t been used by anyone? (Please correct us if we’re wrong). We feel our blogs can be put to good use by unveiling the odd hidden secret…

In the past many of you have emailed us to supply you with an SQL (Structured Query Language) to perform a specific task depending on your needs. We don’t mind this at all, we’re the programmers, you aren’t expected to know SQL!! But, did you know Smartsport has a pretty nifty Query building tool that doesn’t require a geek brain?

So let’s get to it, we’ll build a query, let’s get a list of all active parents that have email addresses.

Step 1.

From within Smartsport, click the Database Explorer icon.

Step 2.

Down the bottom left corner of the Database Explorer screen, you will find a Green button such as this Click the button to reveal the Query Designer

Step 3.

Once the Query designer opens, you will presented with similar screen to the Database Explorer. Please review the following image to understand the logic a little more.

Now back to the query.

Step 4.

Click on the Clients node in the tree, you will see the fields inside the Clients table become visible. You will also see a small button with 3 dots … on each row. This is the fun part! Now, we want to get all active Clients, so scroll down until you find the ISACTIVE field. Click the 3 dot button on the row, a small dialog box will open with some options available. In this particular instance, we only want Active clients (Parents) so we leave the Equal To option selected and put a Y in the String Value(s) box as illustrated below;

Click the OK button to confirm your choice and notice how the screen now has ISACTIVE = ‘Y’ on it.

Step 5.

Find the Email field and click the 3 dots … and this time we are going to use the Contains type and put the @ symbol in there as illustrated below;

Click the OK button to confirm your choice and notice the screen reflecting your choices as below;

Step 6.

Now you are ready to click the Execute button. Once you do this you should see some results on the right hand side in the results grid.

Once you have some results, you can either print or export to Excel. Another handy option is to click the View SQL button to view the raw SQL you have constructed. You can then copy and paste this back into the Database Explorer and use the Email and SMS functions where applicable.

So there you have it, a nifty way to build queries to your liking. Why not try one yourself, have a little practice by building an SQL to give you a list of Active Clients with a Surname starting with ‘S’. Don’t forget, you can easily sort the data by clicking on any column header in the Results Grid.

Regards

Marcus

I thought this week I’d blog about the catastrophic event that affected almost 5000 Australian Small Businesses last week. It’s relevant to us and you as we move into an age of storing more and more information in the cloud. In a nutshell, Distribute IT (an internet hosting company) was hacked into on Saturday the 11th June in a deliberate and premeditated attack. Read the full article from The Age, here’s a brief summary;

“Thousands of Australian websites are vulnerable to being taken over by hackers following a break-in at Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT, security experts say.

It comes as the hacker group LulzSec followed up yesterday’s attack on the CIA’s website by today releasing 62,000 email addresses and passwords. A number of the leaked login details related to .com.au addresses and several government departments and councils.

Distribute.IT was hacked on Saturday in a “deliberate, premeditate and targeted attack”, the company said. Almost an entire week has elapsed since then and the company has still been unable to get its website online, explain what happened or notify customers of any stolen data.

It is unclear exactly how many Australian websites are hosted by Distribute.IT or how many domain names it manages, but Fairfax Media has seen a list of hundreds of customers and this is understood to be just the tip of the iceberg with thousands affected.

Complaints have already begun pouring in from affected businesses who are suffering as a result of the break-in.”

So how can this happen? Don’t Internet Service Providers (ISPs) take backups in case something like this happens?

I cannot say for sure, but I do know that as a result of the security breach, many businesses face ruin including Distribute IT. The following article from The Age illustrates the magnitude of the attack;

“At least 4800 Australian websites have been lost with no chance of recovery following a break-in at Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT.

The hack attack caused so much damage that four of the company’s servers were “unrecoverable”, the company said, leaving thousands of website owners in the lurch.

“The overall magnitude of the tragedy and the loss of our information and yours is simply incalculable; and we are distressed by the actions of the parties responsible for this reprehensible act,” Distribute.IT said.”

So how is this relevant to me and Smartsport?

Firstly, if you have a website and store important information on it, make sure you take your own backup, don’t rely on your ISP to do it for you. A large portion of ISPs out there simply don’t do as they say and don’t have the equipment and expertise to ensure your data remains secure and well maintained.

Now, as you know the new version of Smartsport is all about being hosted in the Cloud, so could this happen to us? Well, the answer is “Never say Never”, but the likelihood will be so minuscule as we won’t be hosting with a conventional ISP. The new version runs on Windows Azure, a hosting environment that scales applications in Microsoft datacenters. Now one thing for sure, Microsoft datacenters are the real deal, they can occupy entire buildings and have the most experienced expert technicians on hand 24×7.  I won’t bore you with other specifics, but will guarantee a disaster like the one described above simply can’t happen!

So aren’t we better off staying with the current version of Smartsport that isn’t hosted in the cloud?

No matter how good you think your backup procedures are, nothing will beat those of a large datacenter such as Microsoft’s.  Saying that, like I said in the first post, the current version of Smartsport will continue to be supported…

Marcus Lens

Step 1. Find the report you want to modify, click on it once then click the New Report button as illustrated below;



NOTE : You cannot modify existing built in Smartsport reports, you can only create new reports based on built in ones.

Step 2. Give the report a name and description. Using the above example, we are merely changing a few layout elements and colors, so we’ll name the new report MySwimSchool Deck Supervisors List.

Step 3. Once you have named your new report, click OK. The report Designer will then open as illustrated below.

As you can see above, we have changed a few elements including the title of the report to MySwimSchool Deck Supervisor List and the background color of same to black. Once you have finished designing your report, simply close the window by clicking the X in the top right window. You will then be prompted with a question whether you want to save the report. Once saved, it’ll belong in the same node that you created it from. You can then add it to your favourites if required.
The reporting engine in Smartsport has been built from the ground up using a Third Party component called XtraReports supplied by DeveloperExpress. To learn a little more, please watch the following YouTube video.

XtraReports Intro

While the reporting mechanism is comprehensive, it does take time to learn. If you want us to create a customised report for you, just ask and we’ll book in a time.

This weeks blog focuses on the importance of backups. We’re specifically talking about Smartsport database backups, not full system backups or Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) software solutions.

Smartsport has the ability to backup the database from the main menu to a location on your server or to a recommended external device. Let’s be honest, if you backup the database to the same machine, and the hard drive fails, you will lose the backups along with all other data. In approx. 5 years we have seen 2 faulty databases due to hard drive issues. We were lucky in both cases whereby we were able to restore the databases to their original state within approx. 2-3 hours.

Believe it or not, Hard Drive failures are a common occurrence. A minor discrepancy on the hard drive itself can render the whole system useless. I found out first hand recently when my external Western Digital hard drive failed catastrophically. I spent hours trying to resolve the issues on the hard drive all to no avail. So when it came time to acknowledge defeat I needed to work out what I’d lost. I had all my family photos, movies and other personal documentation on there, but fortunately I performed regular backups of the entire hard drive so I’d only lost data between the time of my last backup and the date the hard drive failed.

So I’ll ask you this question, how often do you backup the Smartsport database? Can you afford to lose 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week or 1 month of data? Lets be honest, if you’re not backing up regularly your playing with fire.

What can you/we do?

You can buy an external hard drive or USB flash drive, connect it to your server, and manually backup Smartsport regularly to that drive. Or we can install a small Windows Service that will backup the database to the drive at regular intervals automatically without any cost to you. We can set the interval to every 2 hours, it’ll date time stamp each backup on the drive and not take more than 1 minute to complete behind the scenes and thus not affect Smartsport at all. The backup file itself is very small, so you could buy a 16 gigabyte flash drive and store approx. 160 backups on it.

Take it offsite!

There’s no point having a backup on an external drive and leaving it connected to the computer when you close each day. What happens if there’s a fire, a break in or some other circumstance where the PC is ruined or disappears? That’s right you lose the backup as well! So I recommend you take the hard drive home with you.

How can we get the Automatic backup solution installed and working?

Step 1. Buy an external hard drive or USB flash drive

Step 2. Contact us via our support email and arrange a time to login to your server and install and configure the service

Thanks

Marcus Lens

There is much debate on what software will be like five to ten years from now. Our core business is providing Swim School Software, it’s in our best interest to ensure we keep a close eye on all things software and the hardware that it runs on. For example, it seems the iPad is here to stay, although there is a definite blur as to how ‘Line of Business’ applications can run on this mostly regarded personal use toy. Google jumped on board with their Android equivalent and it seems Microsoft maybe missing the boat, or are they? The new Windows 8 version looks promising, but how can we write software for all these different devices and platforms? The answers is, we can’t, well not in one programming language anyway.

Apple, Microsoft and Google are fiercely competitive these days, Apple has a tight hold on their products by ensuring application developers share their created applications with the rest of the world, The App Store. This is a guaranteed revenue stream for them so why would they let Microsoft or Google developers produce applications that bypass their store. That’s right, they won’t so the door is very much closed to those hoping to develop an application that runs on everything, it’s simply not possible.

So where do we stand and what is the future of Smartsport?

We have invested almost 8 months of solid development time to the new version of Smartsport. It’s not the first time we’ve taken a considerable step, and we’re sure it won’t be the last. Smartsport evolved from a Delphi version called Smartswim, the jump from Delphi to .Net was considerable, but the choice was taken out of our hands due to slow death of Delphi. So what are we building Smartsport in now? Well the answer is Silverlight, Microsofts amazing Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform.

The future is in the Cloud?

Believe it or not, this is certainly going to happen. We in Australia suffer from almost the worst Internet speed in the Western World, but that will change when the National Broadband Network (NBN) gets delivered….eventually…In the meantime, standard ADSL and ADSL2 cope and will continue to cope. So what exactly does this mean? It means that all data and software will be stored in the cloud (aka Data Centers) that have the most advanced hardware you can get. It means you will no longer install software on your PC/Mac, you will simply use software through your browser. I’ve heard many computer experts suggest that by the year 2020, a PC or Mac will come loaded with a browser and that’s it. All the software you want will be available in the cloud. Initially I thought this was a slight exaggeration, but over the past 12 months I’ve come to the conclusion it will probably HAPPEN!!

So what about Smartsport?

We hope to have the new version of Smartsport completed by the end of the year. It’s a Silverlight application that will run on PC and Mac, but will not run on iPad or Google Android tablets due to the aforementioned issues between the 3 big guns. Smartsport V2 will be hosted in the cloud, so you will not need to worry about maintaining hardware or put backup policies in place. Quality Data Centers have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, they also have load balancing whereby if a Server running Smartsport becomes a little slow due to the number of connections, it’ll move connections to another server for better performance. What about when our internet connection dies at the pool? Rest assured, the new version of Smartsport will run in Offline mode whereby you will be able to work and when your connection is re-established, it’ll push all the changes through behind the scenes.

What about the current version of Smartsport, will it continue?

The short answer is YES! Not everyone will want to migrate to a Web based version, so we respect that. We’ll continue to develop both products until such a time as the Desktop version is no longer supported by Operating Systems. Like I said earlier, there’s a good chance that by the year 2020, your PC will come equipped with a browser only, all installed software will be made redundant. If we don’t invest the time now, we’ll get left behind and have a product with a limited life.

We have been around for 5 years now, we’re taking steps to ensure we’ll be around in 25 years!!

Marcus Lens

Lead Developer/Owner

Smartsports Pty LTD

Smartsport V2 will be available for beta testing mid 2011. The new version will see vast improvements in both usability and functionality. V2 will also be available as a hosted solution (Server hosted in Cloud/Data center) or in house. More details will be unveiled closer to the release, but we are sure existing clients and new clients will welcome the new version…