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Serving Retailers since 2000                       Newsletter
 November 2014
In This Issue
Mailing Labels
Apple Pay and EMV
Backups
Microsoft Updates
Quick Links...

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We know it's the busy time of year for most of you, but are you following basic procedures to prevent disaster, and are you taking advantage of opportunities the system gives you for marketing?
Mailers
  

Have you considered sending out a mailing to your customers for the holiday season?  There are a couple of ways you can go about this using the point of sale to help you.

 

First, you can print mailing labels within ExtremePOS on your barcode printer.  To do this, from the customer lookup (F3) screen, go to the customer you want to print a label for and hit Print Labels on the left hand side.  Uncheck the barcode option, and print the label - it will print in a mailing label format.

 

If you want to print mailing labels on a standard printer, using sheets of labels such as those manufactured by Avery, and you have Microsoft Office this is also fairly easy to do.  Go to the customer address list report, under reports -> customer -> customer address list, and select your filter criteria.

 

Hit the export report button in the upper left hand corner.  Select the file type as Microsoft Excel (Data Only).

 

After the file is saved, go into Microsoft Publisher.  Create a new document from the label template - select the label style you want, making certain it matches the model label you've purchased.  We use and recommend the Avery 5160 labels, which get you 30 to a sheet.

 

Go to the mailings menu, then select the step by step mail merge wizard from the menu.  You will then need to select Use an Existing List and browse to the file you had saved earlier.  From there, you can proceed through the wizard, following on screen instructions, to lay out the labels how you want.

 

Upon printing, you'll want to make certain you're only printing one copy of each label (use the multiple pages per sheet option), and then you'll have sheets of labels ready for your mailing.

Apple Pay and EMV
  

We've had a few people ask about our plans regarding Apple Pay and regarding EMV payments.  These will be supported in the future, given that the user has appropriate hardware, but are not supported at present.

Make Backups

 

Have you made a backup today?  This week?  This month?  This year?  Ever?  The sooner in this series of questions you can say yes, the quicker and more complete your recovery time will be in the event of losing a server.

 

Are you taking the backups off of the harddrive of the server computer?  Do you know where they are?  If not, the usefulness of making them is limited.  While a backup on the local disk may help in some circumstances, if the entire hard drive fails, the backup can be lost alongside the database itself.

 

What data does a backup get you?  The ability to restore your inventory, customers and balances, sales and invoice history, vendors, and many but not all settings - virtually everything other than a few cosmetic settings.

 

How difficult is it to make a backup?  This is literally as easy as a push of a button - namely, the 'Backup Database' button on the launcher.  By default, this is going to place it in the rather deep C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.EXTREMEPOS\MSSQL\Backup directory; you may change this under administrative settings -> change backup directory.

 

The backups are created as a single file, named along the lines of esc_v20_ and then date and time, followed by .bak.  This is to allow for you to easily see the created date.  These can range in size from around 10 MB for a relatively new or small store, into the hundreds of megabytes for stores with lots of inventory, history, and customer data.

 

For Enterprise users, you should also be backing up the store and especially corp databases regularly.  These can be done from within store and corp server by going to the database functions section.

Microsoft Windows Update Issue

There have been reports of issues with slowness following the release of Microsoft Windows updates earlier this month.  If you believe that you are impacted by this, you may contact support and we can try to help you with workarounds for this.

Version 3.4.0 is currently available to supported users.

We will be closed Thursday, November 27th and Friday, November 28th in honor of Thanksgiving.

Not supported?  Get supported here!

You may view an archive of our emails here! 

Sincerely,
 

Jeremy Spencer
Support Manager
Extreme Point Of Sale Inc
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