Hi and great to hear that you are looking at AyaNova for your in-house maintenance
AyaNova is used by many for managing their own in-house maintenance scheduling, service and preventive maintenace.
A suggestion for in-house use is that you relabel what is called “Clients” in AyaNova to be called “Machines” - entering each of the machines you want to manage service for now as a Machine. You could also then further specify parts of the machines being serviced by entering these parts as “Units” of each manchine so that in service workorders you can identify specific parts of the machine that need to be serviced.
Check out the Localized Text Designer feature of AyaNova with which you can relabel fields in AyaNova to whatever best for you - start with http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/localized_text_designer.htm as well as follow along with the tutorial http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/customize_an_existing_locale.htm
Question 1 (licencing):
according to Ayanova documentation (online and manuals) we need 3…4 licences - right?
Yes. AyaNova is licensed by the number of scheduleable users - the number of people you want to schedule in AyaNova. You can have as many people viewing and entering data in AyaNova, but only need to purchase user licenses for those that will be scheduled in AyaNova.
The 2 maintenance employees that you want to schedule would require 2 schedulable user licenses, and if want to schedule 2 external subcontractors in your AyaNova they too would both need schedulable user licenses for a total of 4 schedulable user licenses.
Question 2:
if we do not want to use WBI for registering repair requests for machines (clients) then is it possible to insert the necessary records directly into Ayanova database via in-house built web-interface?
The reason being that we do not want IIS in house - all our servers (Oracle, Sybase, PostGres, MySQL) are running on linux virtual machines.
You do not have to use WBI to create service workorders for servicing your machines.
Instead you can use the Windows AyaNova program that would run on a networked computer that is connecting to your AyaNova database. - also check out example how to’s in the Help documentation on creating service workorders such as http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/creating_new_workorder_for_client.htm
To explain this - do first review the section on networking in the AyaNova Help documentation starting with http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/ayanova_network_installation.htm
As outlined, the AyaNova database would be on a “server” that is running one of the database server’s - either Firebird Server, SQL Express or SQL Server.
As its sounds like you only have Linux servers, do note that you CAN use the 2.1.x Linux Firebird Server (instead of a Windows Firebird database server).
Specific configuration steps if using the Linux Firebird Server as not in the AyaNova Help documentation, but if you are familiar with Linux, the steps are similar to those of the steps for configuring the Windows Firebird Server in the AyaNova Help at http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/network_firebird_server_config.htm - do review first.
Download the 2.1.x Linux Firebird Server (SuperServer) available for download from http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=engine_213
Review the steps in the AyaNova Help on using the Firebird Database Server <A href="http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/networ