March-April 2014

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In This Newsletter


No Two Businesses are the Same. So How Can the Same Accounting Solution Work For All of Them?

New Updater Tool Allows Update Policies to Be Set in the Cloud

Web Apps, Dumb Terminals, Terminal Server: An App By Any Other Name...

It's That Time of Year Again

AVAware Booth Number Change

Allegion plc 2014 Catalogs Available for Download




Catalog Updates


 U.S. Price Books:

  • Arrow
  • Corbin-Russwin
  • Curries
  • Dorma D.C.
  • Dorma E.D.
  • Dorma L.K.
  • Falcon
  • Glynn-Johnson
  • Ives
  • LCN
  • National Guard
  • PDQ
  • Pemko
  • Republic
  • Rutherford
  • Sargent
  • Schlage
  • Schlage E.S.
  • Securitron
  • SOSS
  • Stainless Doors
  • Stanley
  • Stanley Commerical
  • Stanley Precision E.D.
  • Steelcraft
  • Trimco
  • Von Duprin
  • Yale



 Canadian Price Books:

  • Corbin-Russwin
  • Dorma D.C.
  • Dorma E.D.
  • Dorma L.K.
  • Dor-O-Matic
  • Falcon
  • Glynn-Johnson
  • Ives
  • LCN
  • Monarch
  • Pemko
  • Rutherford
  • Sargent
  • Schlage
  • Schlage E.S.
  • Securitron
  • Von Duprin
  • Yale



No Two Businesses are the Same
     So How Can the Same Accounting Solution Work For All of Them?




A company’s accounting/ERP system has a huge impact on its daily operations. Every aspect of the operation from sales, to purchases, to financial management. Selecting the right system for your business is as important – and individual, as selecting the right person to run it.


AVAware has always taken the position that companies should be able to choose the accounting/ERP system that best suits their particular operation. While many business are well served by the straight-forward simplicity of packages like Intuit’s QuickBooks, others require advanced features such as those found in systems like Microsoft Dynamic’s GP.

The point is: One size definitely does not fit all. It's curious then, why nearly all detailing/estimating systems only support one or maybe two different systems. By selecting one of these ‘front-end’ solutions, the company effectively locks itself into the lone accounting system that one supports. The only way to change one system, is by abandoning the other.

AVAproject Fusion provides a feature that is unique in the architectural openings industry - choice. By installing one of an ever-growing library of “connector” modules, users can create a ‘live’ integration link between Fusion and their accounting system of choice.

This flexibility means that a company can move forward with the implementation of their front-end detailing and estimating package even if they haven’t yet made a final selection of accounting system. In addition, companies can easily migrate to a different accounting package if they find themselves regretting their first choice, or if they find they’ve simply outgrown it. AVAware clients can simply swap out their Fusion ‘connector’ module, while their entire front-end system remains unchanged.

AVAware’s list of supported accounting systems is growing constantly. If the accounting system you’re interested in is not on the list, it is nearly always possible to create a custom ‘connector’ as needed.




New Updater Tool Allows Update Policies to Be Set in the Cloud


AVAproject users will be the first to receive a brand new Updater tool that will not only make the process of updating applications and subscription content completely automatic – but allow complete control of it through web-based settings.


AVAware developers are always searching for ways to improve and streamline the way our products are deployed to our growing base of users. Nearly all software developers today offer some form of online update system; some applications check for new product releases automatically, while others require users to periodically check a website or their email for notifications.

AVAware employs many the same procedures used by other software companies throughout the industry, dealing with the usual issues of efficiency and security. Our developers have always made an effort to go even further; AVAware’s notification and deployment tools offer a number of options and facilities that are specifically designed to accommodate the individual policies of many of our user companies. Many companies wish to exercise control over when application or catalog updates are deployed, as well as limit which individuals are able to download those updates.

For that reason, AVAware has made several software “switches” available both in the applications themselves as well as in the AVAware.com customer portal; administrators can restrict which users are given notifications of updates. Last year, AVAware launched a revolutionary new download facility that allowed those same administrators to create customized deployment packages by selecting any collection of catalogs they wished (from those being subscribed to) and having a self-extracting installer created for them automatically. This year, the process is taking another giant step forward.

In the last issue of AVAwire, we announced new cloud-based user accounts for all AVAware users. These secure and fully-encrypted accounts feature, amongst many other things, the ability to set update download policies for each individual user. When users launch AVAproject without logging into their online account, the update notification screen works essentially as it always has – displaying update information based on global or application-specific settings.

When users do login to their accounts, and they have been given “permission” to do so, this impressive new updater tool is presented.

Once again, based on the permissions granted to that user by the administrator, they can not only update their entire catalog library with a single mouse click – but they can download entirely new catalogs as well as update any AVAware product installed on their system.


The new AVAware updater tool

This is only the first in a growing number of tools being developed that will leverage the new cloud-based user accounts, that are accessible to all clients via the AVAware.com customer portal – right now. The updater is currently being tested by select AVAproject users, and will be featured in a May update.


Web Apps, Dumb Terminals, Terminal Server: An App By Any Other Name...


Over the past two decades, the faithful PC application has been challenged by lower costing, lighter weight variations that threatened to replace the traditional deployment model. This long-fought debate has been re-fueled by the new mobile technologies.. can we now, finally, lay it to rest?

Even those who have had only a passing involvement in technology have probably, at one time or another, heard about such things as “dumb” terminals, Terminal Server, Citrix, web-based applications, and so on. These are all alternatives to the traditional PC application model of deploying and installing applications on individual PCs to make them available for all the various users within a company or organization. Subtle nuances aside, all of them are based on a single concept: installing an application on a machine other than the one on the users’ desktops and sharing that installation with everyone else.

Although this may sound a little strange, there certainly are advantages; the most obvious ones being cost and ease of deployment. In a shared application model, only the main application server needs to be one of any significant power, and I.T. administrators need only install applications on it. Everyone else can make do with a very basic machine - with a minimal version of the operating system – just enough to connect to the server and share the applications running on it.

Along with the advantages however, come just as many (if not more) disadvantages: First and foremost is “fault tolerance”; put simply, that is a barometer of how easy it is to bring a system down and leave the company (and all its users) with an unexpected holiday. When everyone is sharing a single server, and it goes down... everyone goes down. The more serious concerns arise when that shared server is located “off-site” or is controlled by an outside party. In situations such as those, a multitude of concerns for data security and privacy begin to emerge. For most companies, their data is their life blood – giving someone else – any someone else – control over it is unthinkable!

It’s not the intent of this article to re-hash this long-running debate; many experts have devoted entire books to one position or another, but the one factor that things always seem to come back to, is the all-important “user experience”. As its name implies, it means simply, how comfortable – or how effective – the app is to use.

In the years ranging from the late 1990s through to about the mid-2000s, the most popular topic in the world of computers was of course, the internet. Amongst developers and people in the tech industry, the hot trend was “web applications” – apps that were installed on web-based servers and shared by users over the internet.

Web apps were held out to be the solution to every problem in the PC universe – and there were a lot of them! So what happened? Despite the promise, no one went on to use web-based version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. Accounting and ERP systems (despite a few exceptions) have never found a home on the internet. A little over a year ago, Microsoft launched their Office 365 product. Office 365 is a “cloud-based” version of their popular Microsoft Office product (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, etc.) Instead of selling copies of the software outright, they are now offering them to customers on a subscription plan.

Based on the product “mix” required, customers pay a monthly fee to access them. You might ask, “How did Microsoft - the people that invented Terminal Server and happen to run the largest web host on the planet (Microsoft Azure) – implement their new “cloud-based” service?” Web apps? Nope. Office 365 is distributed just like AVAware distributes AVAproject... native apps are downloaded and installed on each and every client machine. This deployment model simply works much, much better.

In many cases, it’s the only way to offer advanced software technologies. The emergence of mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones provided the web-app with a new potential lease on life. With so many choices in the mobile arena (Apple’s iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc), developers were faced with their ultimate nightmare – having to create multiple versions of all their apps! There is nothing more costly (and risky) for a developer than having to subsidize the development of two or three versions of their apps before they ever find out which (if any) will be successful.

The web-app was the perfect solution; the most important promise it brought (for developers anyway) was that it no longer mattered what operating system was being used – so long as the user had a web browser, they were good to go! Write one web app and run it on every platform... so what happened? If web apps were so great, why did every service provider and vendor of consequence go through the time, trouble and expense to create “native” apps for each separate platform? In other words, why did companies like Amazon create traditionally-deployed shopping apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc. when they had a perfectly good website that all of them could use for shopping? Same question for Twitter, Facebook, Best Buy, Future Shop, Staples, Federal Express, UPS... get the point?

Even Google – the guys who basically re-invented web apps and maintain more servers than every government on Earth combined – created native apps for each and every operating system – even several for desktop users as well!

One could go on and keep listing companies, but the picture appears to coming into focus. Much to the dismay of the development community... no one wanted to work with web-based apps! They simply provide a terrible user experience – sluggish, limited in their scope and ability to really make use of the features of the machine its running on.

The reason for the last one is actually pretty obvious when you stop and think about it... Web apps are designed to run on any device that has a web browser, therefore they are designed, by definition, to accommodate the lowest common denominator in terms of technology. For example, apps can’t use graphics that exceed the capabilities of the worst device the developer intends to support!

In 2007, just following the release of Apple’s iPhone, Steve Jobs informed an anxious developer community that they would have to create web apps in order to have their applications run on the new iPhone. The developers weren’t having any of it! Rather than embrace the new HTML 5 standard for web-based apps, they chose to await the initial release of iPhone’s first native-code development kit in the months following the historical iPhone announcement.

At this point, it should also be pointed out that systems like Citrix and Terminal Server are, conceptually, very similar to web apps - except that they run on a private “web”. Ironically, the only people that still prefer these kinds of implementations (and the only ones that really benefit from them) are I.T. people who see them as a way to avoid the work of having to deploy and maintain individual users.

As a final example – just to quell any remaining doubts, there is the one-and-only Adobe – the company that makes world famous products like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and many more. They also offer a subscription-based alternative to purchasing software licenses outright, called “Creative Cloud”. (There’s that “cloud” word again). Just like Microsoft – and so many others – they did not choose to implement web apps, but distribute native code applications – just like Microsoft – just like AVAware.

It's That Time of Year Again


After taking a break in 2013, the annual DHI convention is back – at a different time of year and with a new schedule


Industry veterans have clearly noticed that something was missing in 2013 – the all-familiar DHI convention. The annual event that brings together distributors, manufacturers and all the related disciplines that drive the architectural openings industry to one place for some much anticipated face time. The absence of this event in 2013 left a void in the industry; one that was felt by all... or was it?

The DHI convention has certainly had its challenges over the past decade or so. The massive consolidation of manufacturers in the early part of the millennium saw the number of exhibit booths at the show drop dramatically in the years that followed. Companies such as Assa Abloy whose various brands (ie: Sargent/Essex, Yale-Corbin, Curries, Graham, Ceco, etc.) all used to occupy their own booth spaces, now share a single common space. The same can be said by others such as Ingersoll-Rand (now Allegion) – anyone remember Newman Tonks?

While this consolidation obviously resulted in a much “smaller” show (at least in terms of booth count and size), other factors such as the reduction in number of hours and the move to a mid-week event had an impact as well. Gone were the much-anticipated social events such as Hager’s Saturday night extravaganzas and the late Friday night hospitality suite circuit.

As a result, some vendors have elected to exhibit only in alternating years; both as a cost saving measure and in recognition of the fact that fewer clients were making the trip in recent years.

Given all of this, perhaps the “year off” was exactly what the venerable convention needed. In 2012, the DHI had re-branded the DHI conventions as “CoNEXTions” the “DHIndustry Convention”, presumably in an effort to rejuvenate the show and differentiate it from its past incarnations. Although we still not clear about the correct pronunciation of new name, the strategy does make sense.

Perhaps even more importantly than the return of the DHI convention in 2013, are the signs of economic recovery seen throughout this industry and others over the past year. After the economic devastation in 2008, we are seeing a renewed confidence in the economy, an increase on the global value of the U.S. dollar and a much-needed willingness on the part of business owners to make capital investments in their businesses. The construction industry is not only a principle economic indicator, but a vital driving force for the economy at large.

Like many exhibitors, AVAware is looking forward to a very successful convention this year. By moving the event to the spring time - and especially by making it a “week end” event again, the show organizers have created a tremendous sense of optimism around the event.

AVAware Booth Number Change


Apparently there has been some re-shuffling of the floor plan for the annual DHI convention. After some exhibitors have made changes to their booth sizes, the show organizers have felt it necessary to move around a few of the other booths – ours included.


Fortunately, the AVAware booth (along with a few others) has been moved forward, closer to the main entrance.

AVAware’s new CoNEXTions booth number is #318. If you are planning to attend the convention, please stop by the booth and visit.




Allegion plc 2014 Catalogs Available for Download


Brand new 2014 releases of the former Ingersoll-Rand catalogs are now available for download in both their U.S. and Canadian editions.

In December of 2013, Ingersoll-Rand spun off its iconic ‘Safety & Security’ division into the newly formed ‘Allegion plc’. Although the individual brands remain essentially unchanged, new catalogs bearing the new company name and shiny new orange brand logos came into effect on March 3, 2014.

Although the revised books were not released until well into the New Year, AVAware’s catalog development team has worked tirelessly to make the bulk of the collection available by the effective date. In all, there are 15 price books in total (8 U.S. and 7 Canadian) including:

  • Glynn-Johnson
  • Ives
  • LCN
  • Schlage
  • Schlage Electronic Security
  • Von Duprin
  • Falcon (containing the Dor-o-Matic and Monarch)
  • Steelcraft (U.S. only)

 

The U.S. editions of each catalog have been completely updated for 2014, while the Canadian side has merely repackaged the existing 2013 editions under the Allegion name.

Subscribers to AVAware’s D8 hardware catalog service may now download the both the U.S. and Canadian collections. As the names of the individual catalogs have not changed, these newer versions will automatically supersede any existing Ingersoll-Rand editions that may be installed.


Note: As of March 5, 2014, AVAware is waiting clarification from Allegion on some final pricing details. Once the required information is received from Allegion, the final catalogs will be made available as well.



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We welcome any questions, comments or suggestions about any topic mentioned in this edition of AVAwire. Please visit our website for more information, or contact us directly at (416) 239-9099.