BHD Upgrades T-1

On Tuesday January 31, BHD staff is updating the company's T-1 line. Customers and everyone else should be aware that disaster looms. "Murphy's law is in full combat mode whenever we do internal work on the office," jokes BHD VP Rob McGormley. The upgrade will provide faster routing for data and voice lines.

SHIFT4 USING PINPADS OR SIGNATURE CAPTURE DEVICES

Shift4 has informed BHD that they do not support using USB to Serial adapters to plug in pinpads or signature capture devices. According to Jarrod, a senior technician for Shift4, they have had problems in the past with the UTG not recognizing the device properly, and sometimes dropping the connection. We have had possitive experiences with this setup in the past, but due to the concerns expressed by Shift4, we are no longer going to setup these devices on a USB adapter. INSTEAD, if there are no available com port on the machine, we will move a device that is using one of those com ports, and set it up on the adapter. This will allow us to plug in the pinpad or signature capture device directly to the com port.

AntiSpyware and RealVNC

If you have RealVNC installed (most BHD customers do) and you elect to run an AntiSpyware program, be aware that RealVNC may be detected as Spyware. When the AntiSpyware finds the program, the user will typically have the following options:

Ignore

Quarantine

Remove

Always Ignore

Obviously, since RealVNC is one of the primary troubleshooting tools used by BHD, choose "Always Ignore"

Samsung/Bixolon SRP-350 Printers

Big Hairy Dog has been selling Samsung SRP-350 receipt printers for quite some time. Our latest shipment of SRP-350's are now labeled as Bixolon brand printers. These are, in fact, the same printers, previously labeled as Samsung. From Bixolon.com, "Bixolon is a reletively new EPOS printer division of Samsung created in January 2003 as an independent company to accomplish faster and more focused business evolution."

There is no difference between these new printers and the ones we have been using for the past few years. Bixolon has been working with Samsung the entire time, but now they are putting the name on the product.

NCR Units and the External CD

it takes about 10 minutes, but if the NCR is not recognizing the external CD-RW, I was able to convince it to do so by the following:

Updated all four of the USB controllers with the USB2 (zip) file (ftp://username:password@216.20.227.101)
Then I "rolled back" all of the updates to the previous version.

Paymentech gets an upgrade

Beginning next week, Paymentech processing will get a much-needed upgrade from its current dial up to broadband. Customers using Paymentech will be able to upgrade to the broadband solution. Assuming a customer has DSL, or other broadband solutions in the store, they will be able to upgrade their credit card processing to the faster broadband. Retail Technologies International, Retail Dimensions and Big Hairy Dog are working to upgrade the processing to broadband, as well as, make corrections to the gift card features associated with Paymentech. "We want to offer our customers the latest technology in processing," states BHD President Mick Malaney. "Working together with RTI and Paymentech, we can move our customers from dial-up to a much faster solution." Malaney would not confirm a release date, but anticipates a general release to customers within the next month, or so. "BHD is participating in the financing of the programming with an expectation to bring the broadband and gift card features to our customers very soon. It is the first time RTI has worked with a reseller in financing improvements for Retail Pro and its subsidieary products.

ITEM #0 Printing on Tags

As of the current Hotfix for Retail Pro version 8, you can go into Style View and enter a new item, then select PRINT TAGS before selecting SAVE at the top of the screen. Hitting Print Tags before Save doesn't seem like too big of a deal.

The result, though, is that tags print (appearing to be just fine) with the barcode of Item# 000000. That's bad. So, make sure that when you're entering items in Style View you select SAVE at the top before PRINT TAGS.

This issue has been logged with RTI.

online training

Last night, Jeff (BHD Trainer) led eight companies through a review of uploading physical data collectors. General questions were asked as Jeff demonstrated the steps to successfully uploading both PT and Pam units into Retail Pro including saving data and reporting.

Credit card encryption in 8.52

Due to new CISP credit card compliance in the 11/05 8.52 HF CC numbers are encrypted. even if you have the see card number rights in secadmin, it will still show XXXXXXX for the numbers. you need to add a button in menu designer called show card. when you click that if you have rights to see card it will decrypt the card number so you can see it.

NTI BACKUP NOW AND DRIVE DATABASE UPDATES

I worked with 3 clients this week that got new CD burners and thier old version of NTI didnt see the drive. if they are on verison 2 we also need to send them the update of the software to version 2.541. if you are on a verion before 2.541 it does not support the BDB file (drive data base update) so we need to send both files the software update and the BDB file.

Registering Older Versions of Retail Pro

Recently reported and confirmed by BHD. If you, for any reason, need to register Retail Pro version 8.4 or earlier, you must first install Acrobat Reader 4. Because these older versions of Retail Pro were released prior to the current version of Acrobat Reader (7.0.5), the registration form does not recognize these installs and cannot display the registration form. This issue does not affect more current versions of Retail Pro, such as 8.52.

PHYSICAL INVENTORY

Any questions regarding PI's Please download the PI instructions for your verison.
version 8 PI Download here: http://www.bighairydog.com/TECHDL/V8PI.doc
version 7 PI Download here:http://www.bighairydog.com/TECHDL/V7%20PI.doc

This is a internal conversation regarding 7 series PI:
Please be very clear when doing a 7 series PI press START> then IMMEDIATLY press SAVE. press Save after every download or every 10-15 minutes if entering manually.
Had a client not press save on thier start, since they didnt enter any manual counts they didnt save so thier start wasnt saved.
SO START>SAVE> SAVE EVERY 10 to 15 minutes

Reply:
I tell them to save after every download.
The big word I have them write on their notes is SAVE, SAVE, SAVE. I make sure they know they cant save ENOUGH

REPLY
that is great, but in this case they were told to save after every download or ever 15 minutes between manual entries. they were not using PT's so they were not doing downloads. they were told to save every 10 to 15 after manual entries, but they didnt do any manual entries into the PC they did it on count sheets to be entered at a later date, THUS THE POINT, START> THEN IMMEDIATLY SAVE. then it has nothing to do with when counts get entered. Start takes the picture and you save it, then if all the inventory gets counted when the store is closed they can enter the counts when ever since the begining quantites are saved correctly. this would also appy to RGIS. PRESS START AND SAVE when RGIS starts counting, when you get the disk doesnt matter the Begining Quantities are OK.
I am going to post this to the blog for clients as well.START>SAVE, save save save...