Real World Access (44)

One of a series of articles about where Microsoft Office Access applications have found a real-world niche.

 Ben Clothier’s Material Planning Reporting
        for Nike Corporation

This application was developed in collaboration with fellow Access MVPs George Hepworth and Oliver Stohr.

Nike's Material Planning department deals with factories and vendors all over the world, buying finished goods from factories. They also cooperate with factories and their vendors in planning ahead how much goods, and consequently raw materials, will be needed to fill orders.

Up to now, they had been depending on ad hoc reporting which they had to request from their IT to assist with their materials buying and ensuring that there was sufficient inventory. This process would take days or even weeks, and the department really needed to keep on top of the inventory fluctuations.

Thus, the department contracted with Advisicon to develop a reporting tool, using a combination of SQL Server, Citrix Metaframe, and Microsoft Access.

The SQL Server is used to collect and store large amounts of data from the corporation's main database. The users all over the world use Access via Citrix to define the criteria and options they want to see in one of a few different report templates.

Access then automates Excel, pulling a million rows of data from SQL Server, formatting the data into sheets and adding some calculated data into the Excel worksheets. The whole process takes less than 30 seconds to fill in the criteria and less than 2 seconds to return the generated Excel report to the user.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft+Access,Microsoft+MVP,Software+Development

Uncomfortable Feeling

As usual for a Tuesday, I was down at the Naenae Pool yesterday.

After my swim, I found the showers were cold, which was not really what I wanted.  There was another guy there with the same problem.

So, I told the pool manager, who sorted it out in a jiffy.  And then he patiently explained to us that if it should ever happen like that again, we just had to go to this certain washbasin, turn on the hot tap full bore for a few seconds, which should free up the flow to the showers.

Ok, so now that’s at least two people besides the manager who know about this little trick.

But it made me think of how often this kind of thing happens in software. It all works well, as long as you are aware of some of the ideosynchrasies of use.

I may have even been guilty of it myself at times.  Of course, if you are making a custom database application for a specific organisation, you probably don’t get so formal as to have a “Known Issues” list.  But I can certainly think of examples (not too many, but some) where I have asked the users to just remember to do things in a certain way, or in a certain order.

I guess, like the pool manager, it seems easier at the time to do the quick and easy work-around, rather than bite the bullet and fix the problem.

But for me, next time I respond to a client’s problem with an explanation of how they can do it different, I will be thinking of the cold showers.

Technorati Tags: software+development

Identity Theft

I got an email yesterday from a guy who runs an internet security business, saying "I would not recommend Facebook to any customer, friend or family for reasons of identity protection."

Does he have a valid point? I confess I don’t keep up with the play on many current affairs issues. Deliberately, in fact, because there seems to be so much scare-mongering as the basis of “news”.

However, I am a regular (though fairly new) Facebook user, and it would appear that if Facebook participation is a threat to identity, then many people, including me, apparently have no desire to protect our identities.

But for those to whom it is a concern, it is of course possible to have a Facebook account with absolutely no personal information (or none that is visible to other users), and membership of a Group, for example, being the only connection. In such a case, you would be pretty much invisible unless you decided to participate in any discussion in the forum for that group, and even then, it is only other members who would see it.

But anyway, I reached for Bing and did a bit of reading about identity theft.

I found this definition: “When someone uses your name, address, bank or credit card account number, or other identifying information without your knowledge to commit fraud or other crimes.”

On another site: “Criminals can find out your personal details and use them to open bank accounts and get credit cards, loans, benefits, and documents such as passports and driving licences in your name.”

Well, in a nutshell, my mind is at rest. All of the information I share on Facebook and other internet locations is stuff that is readily available elsewhere. I don’t know how things go in other countries, but I can’t imagine it is much different from here. You can’t get a passport or driving licence or whatnot, simply on the basis of supplying a name and address and date of birth. Sheesh, these days the banks won’t even give you a cash advance on your credit card without separate photo ID, which of course is totally bizarre because they just have to check the signature.

So there you go. Storm in a teacup.

I actually think it is a very sad thing that we see so often that the authors and commenters in blogs and forums are using false names, and I have sometimes tried to encourage them to use their correct names. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but there’s something rotten about communicating with someone who lies about who they are.

Technorati Tags: Identity+theft,Facebook

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://facets.datamanagementsolutions.biz/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you can click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://blog.datamanagementsolutions.biz/atom.xml.