Electronic Forms for Macola

I recently had my first experience with a product called ReForm electronic forms and I wanted to share this with the people on tek-tips.

ReForm is an electronic forms package that prints forms on plain paper, as well as supporting faxing and emailing forms in .pdf format. You can have company logos, grtaphics, etc on your forms and it works really well. It supports color and MICR fonts for checks, and all in all it is a very good product. I have used it both on Macola 7.6 and Macola ES.

Fabsoft is the manufacturer of ReForm and you can check out their website --

http://www.fabsoft.com

-- or you can contact me for more info.

For those interested, I am not getting any financial gain out of this, I am just sharing a positive experience with a good product. Software Sales, Training and Support for Macola, Crystal Reports and Goldmine
dgilsdorf@mchsi.com

 

[AKPolarBear]

Good luck getting it to work with Macola!
I have this product and it's intended use was the faxing of invoices and PO's. Got the forms all set up but ran into a major problem. In order for it to automatically find a new invoice to print (sent by the user) it must scan a directory for a specific form style. No problem but since Macola does not allow you to change the file location of printed items, you must search the common data directory. Ours has over 3000 files in it but (by design) the Reform product can only search the first 100 files. So after it finishes its first pass it will hang and slowly bring your system down as it consumes resources. Reform has no fix and of course Macola won't change the file location for printed reports etc. I have found one possible solution but I don't like the way it works.

Other than that, Reform works as promised but I would not recommend it for Macola.

 

[dgillz]

What possible solution did you find? Who have you been working with at ReForm?

I did not use the directory approach, I used the approach of placing a literal string "INVOICE" or "STATEMENT" on the form in Macola form designer. This literal does not actually have to print, it is there so that Reform can pick up the proper graphic overlay.

Please replay as I am very interested in your solution. Software Sales, Training and Support for Macola, Crystal Reports and Goldmine
dgilsdorf@mchsi.com

 

[AKPolarBear]

I found the solution is to sweep the directory every xx seconds looking for the specific files that you want to have Reform print. These are then moved to a separate directory that Reform is also pointed to. It then checks on its schedule and the file gets printed or faxed. The whole process can take about 20 to 30 seconds or so.
That was the solution but I have not implemented it. I am still looking for a better way to sweep the Macola Directory and move the files. I have tried another 3rd party software to do this and had some success. Another method is to write a script to do this but I did not like that method either. So this is where I stopped using Reform at.

 

[dgillz]

Can you try my method, and let me know your thoughts? Software Sales, Training and Support for Macola, Crystal Reports and Goldmine
dgilsdorf@mchsi.com

 

[SusanD5320]

I've just read some posts regarding the FabSoft Reform product and I have a few questions.

We do not have our own internal email server but are using Outlook. Would this product still be able to email the output?

The way I understand that this software works is that it does all of its work after the output has been generated in Macola so the print status of orders (such as PO and OE) would still be updated unlike the ICR versions. Is this correct? Would we have to change any of the steps in our current process to generate PO's, OE acknowledgements, invoices or statements?

Is it dependent on other software such as Adobe Acrobat to generate PDF files?

Are there any Macola & Reform users who can provide feedback, either good or bad?

What is the biggest challenge to implementing this? (We are current on 7.6.200 SQL)

Thanks, Sue

 

[dgillz]

Sue,

Reform uses a virtual printer -- similar to adobe -- and so as far as Macola is concerned, the form is printed, and the databse fields in question are updated. So this is no different than printing to a physical printer, except that you get the output you desire.

There is no other software that you need to rely on.

Please let me know if you have any questions.


Software Sales, Training, Implementation and Support for Macola, eSynergy, and Crystal Reports

http://www.gainfocus.biz

 

[crystalreporting]

For automated emailing of Macola reports or forms, you can use Event Manager. Another cheaper (and in some ways easier) method is Crystal and Visual Cut.

For automated faxing, we have had phenominal success with Faxware. Faxware is a fax server, that polls folder(s) for files, then processes and faxes them. We use Crystal to imbed fax numbers within the report output, then use Visual Cut to schedule, burst and export reports into the Faxware 'polling' folder.

Peter Shirley

http://www.linkcorp.com

 

[SusanD5320]

At the present time, we don't have our own email server. As I understand it, this is a requirement for Event Manager.

We are looking to save some money on custom printed forms and still have professional looking documents to send to customers.

To use Crystal, wouldn't we still have to process tasks as we do now in Macola to update the status fields, but add another step to generate the Crystal output?

Also, we currently don't have a fax server. Right now we fax PO's thru a fax/printer. It still takes manual input to enter the fax number. Until we have a fax server, this would still be a manual process whatever we decide to do.

 

[crystalreporting]

Yes - by definition, Crystal is a read-only tool, so you would still need to do the equivalent printing in Macola. Usually you 'print to file' to achieve this. In the case of invoices, the Crystal report is run after the Macola print, and before the Macola post - invoice numbers are assigned during the printing, so Crystal just pulls these from the open order tables.

It's worth noting that there is NO print to file option in ES....

Event manager is NOT capable of printing Crystal Reports - that's right, it can email, fax, page, make you coffee etc. but it cannot print a Crystal report triggered by an event. The only way to do this is by using clumsy scripts and running event manager in the foreground. I'm not sure about the email server requirement. I believe as long as you can specify a mail server name, it will email i.e. you do not have to host it yourself.

A fax server is not a big deal. Faxware can be run on a high end PC, or you can simply run it on your existing server. The documents you wish to fax will need to be done in Crystal, but this allows you to imbed the customers/vendors fax numbers in the document - Faxware interprets these, strips them from the document and faxes using the number stripped - simple. It even 'bursts' documents to allow you to have multi page faxes using one Crystal report. Hardware wise, all you need is a 56K fax modem, and a dedicated line. It can even receive faxes, and route them to an email address. It also comes with a fax client so that people can fax office documents from their PC's. Faxware is less than $1000.

Peter Shirley

http://www.linkcorp.com

 

[AKPolarBear]

It's interesting to see the need for faxing is still there directly from Macola. I wonder why they never added that and e-mail as an option. Reform does a nice job of setting up the form with logos and such and is fairly easy to work with.

But, it's still sitting on the side of my server as I was never able to overcome the sweeping of the directory problem and maybe one or two other issues related to using Citrix and Terminal server. Per our former VARs recommendation, we installed Zetafax to use with Reform. To be fair to Reform, a newer version is out and I have not tried it yet.

Still have Zetafax but it was not an easy install either as we had to use a local company to install it. I finally resolved the issues myself and it has worked well ever since. A rather simple trick is if your faxing program allows different coversheets, then fax yourself a blank copy of your invoice, statement or what ever and save as a new coversheet. Then print to file and then fax it with the selected coversheet. It lines up pretty close, not perfect and doesn't work with multi-page documents but the majority of our stuff is one page anyway. Not a perfect soution, It just another option.

So what ever you end up with, make sure they are compatible with each other and your system. Be aware of 30 day trials that do not guarantee 100% removal at the end of the test period.

 

[maccrystal]

Event Manager can email without an Email Server. If your ISP requires outbound SMTP authication, Event Manger cannot do that. You can work around this by using IIs and pointing Event manager to that SMTP server. IIS will allow you to pass logon creditials to your ISP.

http://www.appstratinc.com

 

[SusanD5320]

Since we aren't using Citrix and Terminal Server, I'm hoping that we wouldn't have the same issues as AKPolarBear.

If I could get this to work for us it would be a considerable cost savings even with having to purchase a fax server. It costs us $0.60 to mail an invoice between the postage, printed form, and special envelopes that we use.


dgillz,

I've tried to send you an email offline. I'm looking for a little more info on the FabSoft product. Let me know if you don't get it.

Sue

http://www.garnerindustries.com

 

[kbieber]

Maybe this should be another thread, but I'm interested in crystalreporting's comment that Event Manager cannot print Crystal reports. I am really ambivalent about the need for Event Manager in our house since we already use SQL triggers and one of the selling points for EM was the ability to schedule and run Crystal's. Can someone elaborate on the 'clumsy scripts and running in the foreground' comment? One of the other selling points was the ability to create E-Synergy workflows from events. Does anyone have experience with this? Does this work as advertised?

 

[maccrystal]

Event Manager:
Event manager works off a subscriber concept. A crystal report can be automatically created and sent to the subscriber by email, fax, FTP'ed to a specific location. That report can be delivered in a several formats including PDF, HTML, Rich text or as an RPT. The report can be trigger off an event or discretely scheduled.

For example Discretely schedule six crystal reports at 5:00pm and route the output. The subscriber(s) can then print or view the report as needed. It is true that a report cannot be scheduled to print on a printer, but I do not see this as a problem. The electronic format is much more flexable and portable. In fact you can deliver the report to a blackberry PDA.

The scripting comment may not have been approprate nor fair to the product. The scripting tool is basically what is used in VBA, t-sql... Most processed do not require a scripts, just a "Query", "Event(Action)" and "schedule".

e-Synergy:
E-synergy is almost always sold with Event manager. This can launch followup into workflow for customer that have not ordered in xxx months. Email documents and trigger workflow followup.

I would suggest that you download the manual from the Exact portal.

http://www.appstratinc.com

 

[crystalreporting]

A better explanation;

Out of the box, and running as a background service, Event Manager cannot print Crystal reports to a physical printer. It can run, export email etc. Crystal reports, but not print them. Some would consider this a basic requirement of such a tool, particularly given the loss of compiled Crystal reports.

Exact have a workaround that involves executing a script. In this scenario, the report is exported as RTF and the script steps in to forward the output to a printer - this script is available from Exact, along with instructions on how to use it. The exporting to RTF requires MSWord, and also that the Event Manager run in the foreground (in order to interact with MSWord).

The clumsy scripts comment relates to the insanely small area you are provided to create and edit SQL scripts. For most people, this wont be a problem, but it is not suited to anything more than the most simple (read short) SQL statements.

I do like the product, and customers who utilize it, get tremendous value from the functionality it provides.

Peter Shirley

http://www.linkcorp.com