dvanderkolk (5/15/2008)Thanks John,
Good news indeed.
Re. the off-line availability, that’s a pity Ayanova doesn’t have it.
I used to work with Lotus Notes in my previous job, the replication mechanism in that package is just awesome.
Since you choose to not to use large BLOBS in Ayanova the amount of data in the DB is limited to my opinion and replication could be an option.
Anyway, I’ll see if I can get this field service report issue automated. Would there be an interest for something like this?
Cheers,
/Dick
Hi Dick, you’ve inadvertantly hit upon something we feel very strongly about andsince I haven’t been up on my soapbox for some time: 
AyaNova doesn’t have offline ability by design. It’s not an oversight on our part. The original software that we wrote for in-house use that was the genesis for AyaNova many years agowas designed for offline useage. Every service person had a notebook computer and would sync up their work orders back at the shop.We put a lot of thought into it and the software we wrote worked perfectly for that purpose, we were quite confidentand proud of thesoftwareunfortunately over time it proved to be disastrous.
It was a mess not because of the software but because of human nature: computers got stolen or lost or crashed losing valuable data, people would neglect to sync up for way longer than they were supposed to affecting billing and inventory, I could go on an on about the trouble with it (loss of revenue, big screw ups with inventory missing or unaccounted for etc etc) and we were a small shop with less than 20 technicians, I can only imagine that multiplied over many more, but suffice to say it turned us into very ardent supporters of live data at all times via remote entry if necessary.
After that experience we put a lot of thought into how to find every possible way to avoid an offlinedelayed synchronising system because of our experiences with such a system.It’s such a core part of our thinking that AyaNova for windows can be remotely run over the internet it’s supported right in the program, also we have the web interface and now even a cell phone interface all because of our experiences with delayed synchronisation.
Also as the developer of the software we can’t pick and choose what features or data we would include in an offline system and many of our clients have huge inventories and histories that they would want to have at hand and up to date in an offline situation (we’re talking gigabytes here)which wewould have to try to find some way to support on limited platforms whichis just not practical.
Having live access to up to the second information is the way we decided to focus all our efforts. It’s simple, reliable and 99% of the time a perfect fit for remote technicians.
An offline interface has been asked for over the years and we’ve avoided it like the plague because we don’t want to be responsible for offering a system that will lead to the same problems that we experienced, particularly in this age of nearly ubiquitous wireless data access.
That being said I know there are cases where it might still be useful, there are stillplaces where there is no wireless service although less every year,so remote techs can not use products like our WBI web access interface or simply remoting with the standard AyaNova which supports it built in. I’m sure you may find some interest in it if you made it into a product and I have no issues at all with listing it here in our 3rd party solutions area etc.
I just implore you to keep in mind the potential downsides and try to minimize them any way you can in any system you come up with. Keep in mind human nature at all times. 
