Weekly meeting with Alan to go over projects and code stuff. Both Cory and Sean joined us on our meeting today. We started out with Alan reporting on his current projects and findings. He was working on a page and did a search and found a number of other similar pieces (say 500 ish). He is currently refactoring that part of the application and going to be replacing code so that it runs more efficiently. The code happens to be dealing with custom page settings. We use these custom settings to store both corporation specific settings as well as user defined settings for different pages and sections. We gave him the go ahead to do a little bit of maintenance and refactoring - prepping for the future. Maintenance sometimes isn't that fun, but it plays a key role in the life cycle of a system.

The last half of the meeting was turned over to Sean to show Alan, Cory, and I some of the new stuff that he and Steve have been working on. We logged into a client's site and Sean gave us a great demo and tour of the orders homepage, backorders, fulfilling orders, training amounts requested, remaining, filled, etc. Steve and Sean have been busy. Here are some other notes from the meeting.

- As new features are developed and released, we need to make sure that everybody knows about them - sometimes distributing that information is a big challenge.

- We build special quotes without having real inventory to back them up... Then as the real inventory comes in, we distribute and fill the correct orders. This is a whole new section of the application and Steve and Sean are out there pioneering things.

- The quotes just hold parent items or parent placeholders. Then as the invoices are created, the real parent/child relationships get put in place on the outbound invoices.

- The orders and backorders homepage has three main ways of viewing and sorting the data. It may be vied by quote (order), by item (what orders want what), or by customer (what other things are they still waiting for). Pretty cool!

- Lots of great demos and showing us flow, approval processes, pagination (next page of n), drill-down and filtering options.

- We are gaining some good traction by getting a client who wants something, doing some planning, putting a MVP (minimal viable product) out there, beating it up and refining it - with some hand holding, and then officially releasing it to the public as a new feature. Nice little process.

- Sean also went into some new pages and sections for mini units. This is serialized units that are within the realm of parent/child inventory. The parent is the primary placeholder. The sub inventory or child inventory are the new batches or packages. Then within the new batches or packages, the individual mini unit data is help and recorded. It also shows usage on where it came in, where it went out, etc. (PO's and invoices). The whole process has a tons of great new features.

- Lots of talk about relationships and one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-many-to-many. It can get deep, but sometimes that is needed. We play in bulk where possible and then record individual data (and maybe even hide it unless asked for). It makes it look simple, but the whole story is really all there, just nested and/or strategically buried or hidden.

- We spent a bit of time talking about the pains of trying to keep multiple sets of records and juggling multiple systems. We are trying to relieve this burden, but sometimes the transition process is difficult. We have found that clients are so busy, they almost always need a person or small team to help them transition and get the training that they need. Without this, they end up failing on the transitions (switching over).

- Sean did a great job. I was impressed with his demo and knowledge of the system. I can see him doing more and more of that type of thing. He gets in there and spends the time to learn things (tips, tricks, etc.). That makes a difference.

- The value of real live data and real live work flow testing. You have to have a client who will play along, but you gain a ton from that tight of an interaction and/or relationship.