Site Creator v4.0, Copyright (c) 2007 MSI - Mushroom Systems International (AU) http://www.mushroomsys.com/ Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:58:27 +1100 en-us (c) 2007 We've been busy delivering some very cool new features to Clear Enterprise users. :-)

We have some demanding requirements thrown at us these days.. How about this one; "We need the system to attach 3 different dynamically created PDF documents to an automatic email that is generated at time of invoicing.." The three documents are as follows - Firstly, a copy of the invoice as a PDF. Secondly a specially written Crystal report that provides the customer with details of the products on the order - sort of like a brochure. Finally, another particularly tricky Crystal report which provides the customer with labels to attach to the products on the order - when they arrive.

If you speak to Clear Objec...]]> Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:58:27 +1100 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsDevelopments.html We all know how poorly Foreign Currency is handled within Clear Enterprise - sad but true, it's been an issue for many years. MSI have created many improvements, add-on's and fixes during this time to help our users manage FC transactions from within Clear. We're now proud to announce the latest offering to the FC stable - Automatic Exchange Rate updates.

This simple system can be configured to update all and some of your exchange rates within Clear on a scheduled basis. Hourly, Daily, Weekly - whatever. We've used some clever web technology to extract the rates from free sources which means you don't need to sign up for expensive "data feeds" from exchange rate providers. Companies like xe.com will charge over USD$2000 / year for the service!

<...]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:40:13 +1000 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsCurrencyUpdate.html Whilst you may be forgiven for thinking that Clear Enterprise is dead in the water (What are the vendors doing to invigorate the product?) MSI are again turning an "OK" product into "Great" product.

After many weeks of R&D, we have now released a new product for Clear which allows developers a completely new way to design server side and client/server applications. The "MSI_IPC" (Inter-Process Communicator) allows two or more tasks running "Asynchronously" (That means that they are all running separately but may still need to communicate with each other) to communicate in a simple and easily developed way. The performance of the communication "pipe" far out-strips anything Clear could throw at it.. Try 2,000,000 transactions per second!

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:31:46 +1000 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsAnotherFirst.html
The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist.

Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection - and that won't be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.

Yesterday (19th March) Senator Conroy confirmed that websites on the Government's clos...]]> Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:31:19 +1100 http://www.mushroomsys.com/saveTheNet.html As some of you may have noticed, our Web Site and Support Portals were both down for the first time ever today (11/02/2009). The outage was caused by a critical fault at the server level that rendered all our systems inoperative for over 12 hours! Would you believe, our redundant backup server ALSO failed.. It took twelve hours of concerted effort to put things right, so sorry if it appeared we were ignoring you.

We sincerly apologise for any problems this may have caused, and hope that things will settle down over the next few days. The systems are back up and running, but there is still work to be done. This has been scheduled for out of hours time.

So - Business as Usual! :-)
...]]> Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:18:18 +1100 http://www.mushroomsys.com/siteDownNews.html It's an interesting question. Why would a company that has spent a considerable amount of money on their computer system, change their support from the original vendor to a third party "un authorised" company? The reason is simple - Service Levels and Attitude.

Many Clear Objective customers made that decision in 2008, and we are glad to welcome them into the fold.

We believe that customer feedback is the ultimate yard stick for our performance. Here is a direct quote from one of our new customers. Andrew Burton is the owner and Director of Shaw's Office National in Lismore. Andrew worked with us to ensure that our BAS reporting system would work perfectly for his site. He's what Andrew had to say..<...]]> Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:20:05 +1100 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsWhyChange.html Well, the Bike Challenge Fund Raiser was a huge success all 'round. Warwick managed to be the 4th largest individual fund raiser out of 7000+ riders, with a total over $2000.00! A big thanks to all the customers and friends who helped that happen.

Warwick's ride went better than planned, with him completing the 100K course in just on 4 hours. The average speed of over 25Km/Hour actually put him in the next speed category. As Warwick said after the ride "It was a lot easier than I expected - I guess all those Saturday morning rides have paid off!"

As promised, the hall of fame winner for the largest Corporate Donation goes to...

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:25:19 +1100 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsBikeResults.html As part of a growing tradition in Brisbane, this year marks the forth anniversary of the 100Km "Southbank to Southport" bike challenge. Riders from all over the state will come together to raise funds and awareness for two great charities - namely The Heart Foundation and Diabetes Australia (Qld). Last year, over 7000 riders took part.

Our director Warwick Prince (an avid biker) has taken up the challenge and has signed for the full 100Km leg. "I've been back on the bike since the start of the year and am looking for more challenges - The 100Km event is just the ticket! I've set a personal fund raising target amount of $10,000.00, and I trust that customers, friends and family will get behind me and help me reach that goal." It's a great cause after all (And a tax deduction to boot).
Site Creator has undergone some seriously cool changes. New page management features, better control of content in large sites, and best of all - it now has complete multi language support!

What does this mean? Well, if you need to have your web site in two or more languages, now it's incredibly easy to manage. Images can be language linked, or independent. Pages that don't have a version in the language of choice will automatically default back to the "base" language of the site - in our case English. This eliminates replicating a site simply so you can have a few pages in a different language.

Our Dynamic Applications Platform has always had complete l...]]> Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:03:15 +1000 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsMultiLanguage.html For many years, there has been a particularly troublesome bug in Clear Enterprise that caused the server to crash and then refuse connections until a complete re-boot.

One customer of ours (who shall remain nameless), endured years of very unstable server performance, putting up with crashes on a daily basis, and in fact on many occasions several complete server crashes per day! This of course lead to corrupted data, bad indexes and all the related issues that you can imagine. Our own system also experienced exactly the same errors on occasion, and even with the advantage of having the crash occur right under out noses, it was difficult to trace.

However, we have finally located the cause of the ins...]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:00:27 +1000 http://www.mushroomsys.com/newsCEBug.html