Wayne and Steve were talking about servers and some of the new updates that are going on. Wayne is helping to fine tune and monitor the servers. He wants to be in charge of that portion of the puzzle. He is very good at it and knows what he is doing. Steve and I are trying to encourage him to keep going in that direction. Some of the discussion items were dealing with servers, up-time, redundancy, database table locks, response time, active vs passive monitoring, and empowering our users and clients to view stats (maybe limited views) on the server. There was quite a bit of talk about new news and updates talking about the server monitoring and even possible mirror and/or redundancy back-up and/or mirror server options (insurance and roll-over technologies).

Wayne was asking some great questions about the current model and where we want to go with things. Steve was responding and answering the questions. We left off with a charge on Wayne to get in there, dig around, and come back with a plan. We may end up rolling some of the new changes out over a series of months. Good stuff.

We touched base with some of the other developers on the meeting and then broke out into our own work sessions. I was working on the sales tax branch and trying to cascade new sales tax changes through the black box pages. As a fun side note, there are around 400 (ish) black box pages that are part of the master code branch. That doesn't even include ones that are created and uploaded without being merged into the master branch. What that tells me is, that our clients like custom options and that section, black box or custom code, is a huge part of our model. It can be a pain in the rear some times, especially if we are trying to update things, but it also fills a need and our clients seem to like the options of being able to customize things. That is awesome.

Once everybody left the meeting, we all just worked on our own little projects. I was doing tech support and follow-up on some sales calls. Towards the end of the session, Steve and I chatted briefly about the client who may want to do some tracking on their assisted living facilities. We talked about maybe setting up a play site for the assisted living and running things with locations, elements of time, etc. Lots of good ideas.

We also talked about the adilas label builder that Calvin is working on. We are getting close on this round of the project. We would like to see where all of that goes and what comes out of it. We are looking to close out phase one and then start using it to see what else may be needed (round two or phase two).

Steve - we are a solution for solution minded persons. We are really seeing that the clients that like customization, they tend to be some of our greatest clients. Very interesting. We are also seeing that some of the reps are a great resource and are throwing some ideas and monies at things (pieces of the puzzle) that they need and/or want. Some of them are getting funding from their clients to help push things forward.

Random idea... what about opening up the door to our customers to get their own developers and let the custom side of things grow a little bit deeper. Maybe use the adilas market and let some of the independent developers run with things a little bit.

Training - we were talking about ideas and timing. Things are a little bit crazy right now, but we don't want it to get out too far before we circle back around and setup some more training. We were also talking about costs and paying for that. On a different note, we have tons of hidden benefits like hooking up Marisa and Drea on training. We also have Calvin who was at the last training and got tons of great info and feedback about his labels and Gmexting (group mass texting). Lots of hidden benefits and getting people trained and more involved.