Victim Of Changes, Progress (the database)?

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

We all try to stay ahead of the curve. No sooner we have Windows 7, we have Windows 10, then 11. It’s a constant fight to stay current and protected. 

The Silverlight support deadline has been & gone. Woe betide any Socialhousing organisations still on Keystone asset management cowering behind their firewall.

One de-support notice that might have passed your attention however, is the close of Progress OpenEdge database version 11.7, next April 2025. Apache Tomcat 8.5 security support has already ended, back in March 2024. While from April Progress based solutions will still operate, however will no longer receive security updates and patches. While not generally web facing, that reduces but not totally eliminates risk.

Progress, very much a database of the 1980’s and mid-90’s still has a large footprint in UK Social Housing. This is due to the number of IBS/Capital OpenHousing and MRI/Orchard housing systems still in use and the large footprint of openAccounts as finance solution, often sold with those solutions. Of course a lot of folk are looking to the market to research alternatives, some with housing/Finance combined.

The sector does have a severe problem with not keeping application solutions up to date. Of course this is not limited to the above examples. I have found it endemic across many applications, regardless of contracts attempting (but generally failing) to enforce frequent upgrades.

Many users will be expected to be way behind with versions of OpenAccounts, Pro2, Ebis, OpenPeople as well as housing solutions.

While there is a good nine months to upgrade, bear in mind that many dozens of sites will need to take this leap and also a year-end will sit in the way of finance users. So how if you are a site affected by this, to move forward smoothly?

Getting across to Progress Version 12 is crucial and a pre-cursor is to get upgraded to MRI Orchard’s latest version, in order to be Progress v12 ready. This will be more clunky for organisations many versions behind. This will involve applying a number of incremental versions with attendant testing/UAT. Interfaces are the most important areas to concentrate on, in addition to any local development outside of what’s supported as supplier IP. Although often helpdesks fall down in spectacular manner!

For OpenAccounts, the target needs to be v10.1 – If this can be achieved by late summer, this would be ideal. Where existing users are still on OA versions 8 or 9, it’s a heavier upgrade path. Getting up to v10.1 will then provide Progress v12 compatibility.

Where Orchard/OpenHousing is used in conjunction with openAccounts, there are bound to be dependencies. Be sure to check these out in detail with whoever supports your solutions.

This all kind of underlines the good sense of upgrading often where you can. You know it makes sense!

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ *** Join the discussion with Claire & Aiden *** _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

If you are stuck on a legacy SocialHousing system, reach out

please just get in touch , for a chat over a slice of LDC ☕😋

       Related Post: Is your finance chart of accounts, the size of Saturn ?

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Judas Priest – Victim Of Changes.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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You Got The Vlookup

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

Wow, I have often joked that if I had charged everyone over the past 20 years £50 for every VLOOKUP problem in Excel I have ever solved, I would have my pension, right there. It would be a vast sum. However the easy going nature I have does not permit me to be anything else than helpful and sympathetic, whenever anyone asks me to solve one.

For a customer I have been doing lots of Excel manipulations lately and from the mark its left on me here is my contribution to VLOOKUP peace in the world.

Excel is great and VLOOKUP / HLOOKUP are in the premier league of functions to be mastered. Also probably the cause of many people giving up functions forever. Well, that's sad and if that's you, please I implore you, read on....

In this article I use both VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP interchangeably.

It seems simple, here's one I wrestled with earlier:
       =VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet2!C1:F10,22, TRUE)

So, the first hurdle is not going with the default, 'TRUE'. Spandau Barry tried to persuade us things could be 'True', but here it means 'find the best match you can'. OK if that's what you want, but on the whole it wont be. False, means do a direct match. Swap it now.

Check your values (either the one you are trying to match OR the area you are trying to find it) dont suffer from trailing spaces. You wont see them in the spreadsheet, only when you edit a cell and notice the cursor is not exactly at the end of your value to search. Use Trim() to remove any excess space characters.

Leading zeros in text formatted cells may also cause you problems. IE '009089' will not match as '9089'. This can happen a lot where data such as rent account IDs are infact textual, but look like numbers (ie having leading zeroes). Try multiplying by 1 or adding 0 to these values before searching OR within the first parameter of the VLOOKUP function. EG 'VLOOKUP( C2 + 0, ' or 'VLOOKUP( C2 * 1 , ' etc.  This will turn '009089' into '9089'.

Often people get one VLOOKUP working in a single cell, only to copy and find it only works some of the time. Well, fix your columns or ranges, using $. E.G. 
       =VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet2!$C$1:$F$10,22, TRUE)
So that when copied, the whole matrix searched is unchanged, when copied. This is sometimes called 'Reference Locking'.

The other 'Gotcha' is to define a range and then try to return a column to the left of the defined Table Array range. In this example, a range takes in columns C to F. Column 22 as a return value will never work. Extend the range to the right (ie C to X), in order to pick up the correct values.

Still getting #N/A, but quite obviously you can see a match?  I bet you are trying to locate a number. Have you considered utilising TRUNC( ?? , 0). Excel often will try to be clever and compare 6.7 with 6.700 and decide the values are not the same. Having numbers, that are actually just textual IDs, formatted as Text makes sense.

Excel macro's can also be problematic when adding VLOOKUPs to child links, having child links open first, makes a macro work better.

I hope this helps, you have cost my pension £50 chum, but I don't mind, I am doing my bit for world peace....

Related Post: Are your staff on top of Asset Sustainability & Living Wills? How do you start?

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You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

Prince - You Got The (v)Look(up) .


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Wishing (I had a Photograph Of You)

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

Are there any users of Yahoo Flickr out there? A lot of my work contacts take photos and many are on Flickr. I have been on there for about 4 years. If you are unfamiliar with it, Flickr is a photosharing website angled towards a photographic community. People on there know me as HotpixUK and I have nearly 6,500 followers and have had 1.5 million views on my 1,055 images.  I take my photography seriously and Flickr allowed me to make friends around the world, share techniques and tips etc.

It is a community of people bonded together by photography and few of my contacts I know in real life. Most I will never meet as they are in Iran, Argentina, India etc. It was a very clean and minimal user interface. Like a gallery. I pay £15 a year for a Pro account with stats and no ads.

If I go to The Tate, The Photographers Gallery in London, Bluecoat in Liverpool, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Ufizzi in Florence or the Louve in Paris, we see images/paintings/photographs surrounded by lots of wall or white space. That's how those things are best appreciated. There’s generally a caption telling us about technical or image details. Flickr previously focused on the image, caption, comments on it, groups it may have been added to and sets that the photographer organised images into.

I have completed a number of projects over the years and organised them into sets. I have one of the homeless winter night shelter in Warrington - http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157622888049236/ , various numbers 0-30 http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157629892831953/ and Edinburgh Festival Performers http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixuk/sets/72157631463655258/ among others. I am proud of my images and quite keen to show them off to anyone who might appreciate it.

Change is a constant and I am an agent of change. I am constantly involved with helping change systems that people use and the processes they use. Change generally is worth doing if it saves time, effort, adds efficiency, improves things. They work best if the target audience are part of that process and over donkeys years have had this confirmed, time after time. This prototyping enables tweaks to what is being proposed before we are ‘pre-maturely’ physical. That phrase sticks in my mind from my old lecturer at Manchester Poly, Ian Beeson. I think he eventually ended up at Bristol University Of The West Of England. Get in touch mate if you read this!

A design project I have involved with recently has involved lots of prototyping with wire-framing (maybe more on a future post on the attractions/benefits of that) and that effort will drastically remove doubt and slash development costs. I saw that myself with a HPM (Housing Process Management) project at my old MIS-AMS shop with ActiveH. 15 months of discussion and only 9 months of development got us 90% to where we needed to be. More jaw-jaw, not code-code (adapted from Churchill). 

Anyone who knows me will perhaps confirm that I am a bit of a ‘sponge’. Sit me near any customer, employee or user and before long my curiosity will mean I ask and try to understand the context in which people work. What they need, what’s important to them and who they are, what they feel. Only by knowing that, can something (a product, software, service) can be shaped around them successfully. There needs to be a channel of trust too. For me that was my mobile number. If any customer of mine was dissatisfied they could phone me directly, any time of day. I still do it today. I doubt if any other customer of a HMS (Housing Systems Supplier) has a direct line to their system suppliers director, and could rely on fast action to resolve issues via it? Customer relationships are the keystone to successful systems.

Yahoo did a radical redesign change to Flickr this last week on a Monday Night with no prior notification or seemingly understanding of their customer base. A help forum thread at http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/ shows the extent of the response to this upgrade. Thea Lamkin, lead on the thread (http://www.flickr.com/photos/thealamkin/8744800801/ ) has tactfully disabled comments, as the only ones expected are negative ones.

Spookily enough she was clever to do this as over 24,000 Flickr users (so far as at 24/05/2013) have shared their opinion on how they feel about the recent ‘upgrade’. Unfortunately 98% of feedback has been less than complementary. For some reason the tempting carrot of 1TB of free (yep free, really free, like Wild Willy Barrett) didn’t calm the backlash. Tackling that one, anyone with even a slight photographic skill, will probably not want people stealing their shots on the net. So like me they probably post small watermarked versions with high JPG compressions (5 or 6). 1TB would only be useful if I could upload RAW format, which I can’t. Therefore a free TB makes a great headline, but is worthless to 99% of Flickr users.

No users to my knowledge were warned this was coming or had the chance to provide feedback of any kind. The new layout is very much ‘montage of images’ which is slow to load. There is limited emphasis on comments and sets, one of the keystones of what I found useful and other semi-serious photographers. Many of the forum comments describe how Flickr has been transformed to a Facebook timeline style. In many ways Flickr has chased the FB way. Surely though, if photographers wanted to post on Facebook they would be doing that already? Well I do, but rarely serious stuff that I want to share with a very different audience on Flickr.   

Worse than not telling folk, Flickr (and Yahoo) are not now listening either. Apart from above mentioned irritations, pages now take an age to load (at least here on my ADSL line in Warrington, Cheshire, Old England). I am not in silicon glen or silicon roundabout, so not seeing lightning downloads on my devices, I am afraid to report. Customisation options are not available either like in the past. I cannot have a gallery type view with white space or easy and fast to navigate thumbnails.Yahoo knows best.

I am acutely aware that we all need to turn a dollar. I visited the USSR in the 1980’s and inter-railed Prague, Yugoslavia & Bulgaria in the soviet era and accept that capitalism is not perfect, but can and does work, if we tackle it in a caring way. If Yahoo are needing to move to an ads model for all, just give us pro accounts for free, give us an ad in the top right hand corner and some stats. If we click through we make the 30p for Yahoo. For goodness sake though, don’t mess with the mechanisms proper photographers use on the site, like sets, notes, comments, tags, white space etc. Don’t bother suggesting you are building massive data centres Yahoo either, to give us all 1 TB. As your bean counters will already be aware, only 0.02% of Flickr users might find that useful.

A very revealing insight into the lack of understanding of Yahoo’s Flickr customers is to be seen right here:
Asked at a Yahoo press conference on May 17 2013 whether Flickr would be "shuttering" its Pro accounts, CEO Marissa Mayer said that she wanted "everybody to have professional-quality photo space", and that "there's no such thing as Flickr Pro because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there's no such thing, really, as professional photographers". In response to "outrage" from professional photographers, Mayer apologized via Twitter for wording her answer "terribly", saying that she was referring to the changes to Flickr's storage space and the number of photographs that people take.

I find that quite insulting. I sell quite a number of images. 90% of people roaming the streets with an iphone, Galaxy or whatever who upload dozens of images a day, could never produce that type of stuff, or have images published.
Its ignorance. Understand your customers and you understand your product Marissa.

I am happy moving on however, search for ‘HotpixUK’ on Google and I am sure you will find me. Let’s see if Yahoo wakes up to the mistake that they have made here. There are plenty of Flickr alternatives more focussed to photographers, I will mourn the loss of my valued contacts, but here are some of the more tuned in alternatives:

http://www.technewsdaily.com/18170-3-flickr-alternatives-for-disgruntled-photographers.html
http://www.ipernity.com/apps/gm
http://www.smugmug.com/

I was so happy with Flickr up to last week, but now I find myself looking seriously at other places. Yahoo may becoming the 21st century version of Lycos, Flickr like Geocities. The moral of this blogpost is respect your customers. Remember we have two ears and only one mouth. More listening is what we are made for. Get into your customers minds, understand their needs, fears and aspirations. If you don’t, you may be toast. Little more than a footnote over at the internet archive, that's where you are heading Flickr, I am afraid.





You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (I had a photograph of you).


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Little Fluffy Clouds

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK

Never a week goes by without someone, generally a user or department manager asking me about ‘cloud computing’. How are other housing associations and groups getting on with this and should all their computer systems be in ‘the cloud’. It always makes me frown a bit, I must admit. Having said that if I had £50 for each of those queries, I would have a useful top up to my pension fund!

The hype and advertising collateral has done a great job of confusing users and making many rash promises that in many cases are simplistic at best. “Put all your applications in the cloud and have them work together seamlessly, access them everywhere on any device, yadda, yadda, yadda...”.  In many cases suppliers are offering what used to be the dull and boringly named ‘hosting’. IE move your data to their servers to host, offsite, rather than in your IT department or data centre. Depending on the application, this might not even make it more accessible on more types of devices; smartphones, tablets, ipads etc, without more expense.

Please however, don’t get the idea that I am anti-cloud, I am certainly not. Many applications (or ‘apps’ as the you’t would have it) work and belong in the cloud. Webmail, Spotify, Evernote all spring to mind. In the housing world, applications like TPTracker and EBS React are often delivered using a similar model, with no software required to be installed on PC’s, laptops or other devices. Integrated links with Housing Management Systems (HMS) can pose challenges, but are not insurmountable. Some HMS systems or part of them can be accessed via browsers, this is more a delivery method than use of the ‘cloud’ however. A true cloud app does not require local software to be installed. Microsoft’s Office365 breaks this rule where used in large business situations. For interfaces with the traditional HMS applications, fat client installs will almost certainly be needed.

Using cloud storage and services does provide scalability. Peaks in requirement can be easily managed, you just rent a bit more of the service, bandwidth or space. The lack of big upfront costs attract many smaller organisations. Rather than spend £30K on a little server area, a similar amount can be paid on more of a pay as you go model, over fixed term contracts, monthly. Strong SLA’s and guarantee of service are essential. Sometimes a ‘private cloud’ can be the best option, for larger organisations, particularly where vast quantities of data are being managed or generated. Costs based on data volumes or bandwidth can often be expensive. One other factor can be your bandwidth availability to the outside world. If you are on the edge of a town or conurbation, an upgrade to your local node might be a pre-requisite. If you cannot, it may derail your plans.

How fast applications run will certainly be affected by cloud hosting. While I don’t mind waiting 10 seconds to complete my Amazon or Ticketmaster purchase, you probably would not like your staff waiting around too long to update a rent account or a repair request. Use of a private cloud might be more controllable however.

The last elephant in the room is can you rely on your sensitive resident data being stored in the cloud, maybe not in the UK or even Europe. All those NI, HB numbers, DD sort codes and accounts, birth dates etc. Extremely useful if hacked. For me I would be reluctant to put sensitive customer data in the cloud or an application that provides competitive advantage. It’s a tough call and if you feel you want to, needs a reliable partner with some tight contracts!

Read on to: Why you need to name your projects well

Chillout to this.


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk

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CHR,Citrix,Civica,Clearview,CMS Template,COA,Coactiva,Codeman,Comino,Competitive Dialogue process,complex IT procurements,Component Accounting,Consilium,Consolidation,Consultancy,Consultant,Contact Manager,Context, MD , Director , Housing software, UK, United Kingdom,

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