Just two months ago I wrote about summer storms and having a disaster recovery plan. Well, the Red Wing, MN office had a chance to experience this very problem, and try out our plan.

Last Saturday evening, we had an electrical storm that knocked out power for a few hours. When the power to the building came back on, not everything restarted the way it should have. Our file servers that hold all our database information needed to be restarted. All individual computers had to be manually turned back on, which prevented employees from logging into their computer from remote locations. And, the computerized phone system would not reboot at all.

Larry, our “computer wizard” and IT Manager, worked Sunday and had almost everything back up and running by the time everyone arrived at the office Monday morning. He had a technician arrive at the office first thing Monday to repair our phone system. Knowing that the repair would take some time, he already connected an old analog telephone to our fax line and rerouted our incoming phone numbers to all ring in on that line so we could at least take incoming calls.

While Roxie could take calls and log them into our customer service software for support technicians to return calls when the system came back up, with only one line, we didn’t have a way to make outgoing calls to answer support questions. Not wanting to make our customers wait an unknown amount of time to receive a call back, our support staff took it upon themselves to use their personal cell phones to make the return calls and take care of our customers even before the phone system was fixed.

This certainly doesn’t qualify as a major disaster, but it does show the importance of having the right people in place and a plan to get things back in operating condition. Thank you to our entire staff for pulling together and minimizing the effect of this temporary problem, and to our customers for being patient through this process.

Ken Hilton - President

Due to popular demand, customers are able to sign up for classroom training sessions online! Simply go to our web site and from the top menu select Training and then select Classroom Training, choose the name of the Classroom Training session you are interested in, and then click Register on the lower left-hand side of the page. (Note: If you are signed in before performing these steps, your customer information will automatically appear during the registration process.)

You can access all of your activation codes and/or registration codes online. Just sign in at www.redwingsoftware.com, click on My RWS in the upper right, click on the My Products tab, and you will be able to view all of the products you use, along with each of their activation/registration codes.

On another note, up to 96% of support calls to Red Wing Software are taken directly from our automated phone system, meaning those customers reached support directly, rather than waiting for a call back. To access the number for your own specific product and access the technicians directly, sign in to the web site, click on My RWS in the upper right, and you will see your support telephone number on the lower left.

Sometimes what seems to be an insurmountable problem can have a simple solution, if only we look at it from a different perspective. Here are a couple examples that I have been directly involved with. The first happened at a recent event I attended in Indianapolis, and the second happened early in the development of the ratio/index analysis functionality in our software and forever affected how we look at new software features.

I was recently at a conference attended by a large number of Certified Public Accountants. They were all highly educated, extremely sharp people. At the final break, the sponsors of the event provided milk and cookies as an afternoon snack. The cookies were large, and the milk was in individual serving bottles with a small opening in the top. I was talking to one of the participants as he stood with a cookie in one hand and milk in the other, when he said, “It sure would be nice to be able to dunk this cookie, but it won’t fit in the top of the bottle.” I just politely suggested he dump the milk into one of the glasses that were neatly stacked next to the big bowl filled with milk on ice, and he could dunk the cookie.

Over twenty-five years ago, I was having an intense discussion with our (then and current) Development Manager on how the data in our Ratio/Index analysis program should be displayed. This was as close to a knock-down, drag-out fight as we’ve ever had over a software feature. I thought the trend information on the reports should be presented in reverse chronological order so the most recent information was closest to the line titles, and he thought that was crazy, because financial information should always be in chronological order. One of our partners, at the time, entered the conversation at about the breaking point and after hearing just a small portion of the discussion, he suggested, “do it both ways and let the customers decide how they want to see the data,” totally ruining a perfectly good argument.

Next time you are confronted with a problem that seems to have no solution, step back, take a breath, and look at the issue from a different angle.

- Ken Hilton, President

All of our CenterPoint products are currently compatible with the Windows^® 10 pre-release versions and will be compatible with the final released versions of Windows 10 when available late July, 2015. Our legacy products are being verified and the compatibility chart on our web site will be updated. Check the compatibility chart for more information closer to the Windows 10 release date.