 |
Aller Finland Goes Live on Advantage
by Cindy Mikol Twiss
Congratulations to Aller Finland, who recently joined Sweden
and Denmark running their operations on Advantage. The combined Aller/AdvantageCS team put in many months of
hard work, and overcame the many challenges that arise when three different countries consolidate their businesses onto a single fulfillment system.
Every step had to be looked at in the context of each country to ensure there were no hiccups in ongoing production operations. Coordinating resources, project plans and priorities, and processing schedules made this project more complex than the average.
|
"
We are extremely pleased to now have Advantage running in three countries---Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Having Advantage as the single subscription system provides the efficiencies, cost reductions, and superior capabilities we need to move forward. The people at AdvantageCS are real professionals."
IT Director, Business Solutions, Aller Media
|
|
|
European User Group Meeting a Success
Aller Media hosted the annual meeting of the European Advantage Users Group in mid-April at their office in Copenhagen. Thirty-five users from eight companies and seven countries gathered for two days to get updates on the Advantage product roadmap, to attend feature workshops, and, of course, to meet and network with other clients.
After a warm welcome from Aller's IT Director for Business Solutions, Svend Erik Hansen, AdvantageCS VP of Sales and Marketing Dan Heffernan kicked off the meeting with a presentation on Advantage News and Strategic Direction. Dan reviewed our current projects and how they address the challenges our clients face in a rapidly changing industry. He also pointed out the many channels through which our clients can keep up with AdvantageCS news: our blog, newsletter, SharePoint site, and LinkedIn user group.
|
Can AdvantageCS Be Your Sixth Man?
by Tom Burbeck
Recently our contact at a major client organization called to announce that they'd been sold to a new parent, and, oh by the way, their internal Advantage support team had all been let go, so could we please keep the Advantage operation running while the new owners sorted out the whole thing?
Fortunately, we had a longstanding relationship with the new CEO, and by that evening, we'd jumped into the driver's seat, taking control of their Advantage production operations, and internal user helpdesk. They experienced uninterrupted Advantage service, running all commercial transactions for their publishing operation without a hitch. And it looks like we'll have a six-month managed services program in place tomorrow for continuing this service while the new organization determines how they want to run their Advantage system in the years to come.
|
Notes From the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin
by Mona Hidayet
If I were a composer in 2006 writing a score for a film called "Publishing is Going Digital---Sink or Swim," it would have sounded like a cacophonous mess. Ride the time machine a decade to 2016, however, and the clatter has transformed into a series of rhythmic, agreeable tones that are the opening chords of a sweet melody.
Leaders of publishing companies as large as Hearst, as specialized as Refinery29, as business-savvy as Burda, as technological as Time Inc., as edgy as The Economist (yes, edgy), or as evolutionary as The New York Times each related their stories of how they have successfully moved their companies digitally out of the danger zone and into a bright future bursting with possibilities.
|
Staying Out of (Technical) Debt
by Howard Brooks
A topic that you might hear software engineers discussing from time to time is technical debt. From the name, you can already guess it is something undesirable. To hear the developers talk, any software that has been around more than a few months has it. Software that has too much of it can't survive. It becomes buggy, unmaintainable, and irrelevant.
But just what is technical debt? How does software get into it and how do you get out of it? Or avoid as much of it as you can?
There are many different kinds of technical debt but here is a straightforward example. Software code is often organized into methods or functions that implement some piece of functionality. Simple applications may have hundreds of methods. Sophisticated enterprise-level software may have over a hundred thousand methods. Suppose somewhere you have the following method:
public void DoSomethingInteresting(
string A,
string B,
string C)
{
// Method body: Implementation goes here
}
|
Focused Searches in the Online Documentation
If you're running a version of Advantage that is 2014r1 or later, the online help you see was built using the Orchard platform (the same tool that is used to power Cider in Advantage). One of the strengths of Orchard is the ability to perform focused searches...provided you know the format and syntax that Orchard wants us to use.
Suppose we're trying to recall an element of functionality related to trial terms. If we enter the literal string trial term (without quote marks) into the 2016 online help, we get back a discouragingly high number of hits...516, to be exact. That's because the search query we've entered is looking for all occurrences of either the word "trial" or "term." Not surprisingly, Advantage has a lot of references to one or the other of these words.
We can do better.
|
Check out our blog for the most up-to-date news and information about Advantage. New posts weekly!
|
|
|
|
| |
Editor: Cindy Mikol Twiss
3850 Ranchero Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108 USA
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
