From: Arnoldbilansky@cs.com [Add to Address Book] [View Source]
Subject: [Vfpboston] Meeting Wednesday
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 09:26:18 +0000

Event: Boston Area FoxPro User Group Monthly Meeting

Time and Date: 7pm - Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Location: Microsoft, 201 Jones Rd., Waltham, MA

Bonus: We have a couple of doorprises provided by Microsoft

Topic:

John Ganson gives us a talk which focuses on the business value rather
than the coding aspects of his company's VFP application.

Here is John's description"

"Demo of a generic services (rather than SKU) order entry and tracking system
with a customer data base. It also handles accounts receivable, deposit
allocation with differences from billed amounts, and produces reports to
interface with accounting systems. It easily handles complex orders of many
elements to prevent expensive remakes by the company. As well, it prints
rather complex management reports, some on a daily basis and some on a
monthly basis. It is used by people with no computer or accounting training,
and has saved us the cost of an accountant on staff.

The basic system was operable in 1990; and was modified and extended over
the next ten years or so. The compiled app is about 4.8 meg in size and is
using a data base with 600,000 records or so. At present it is a single user
system. Virtually no program maintenance has been required for the last
several years. Over the entire period I recall only one crash involving
serious programming intervention: otherwise, our employees are able to
invoke a recovery system without my involvement.

Several efforts have been made by competitors to get the programs, but I
have been unwilling to take on the responsibilities of maintaining them for
someone else.

The thrust of this presentation is emphasis on the user entry aspects of the
system. Realistically, much of the code is less than elegant and although
there are a few tricks that make the system work well, more of the code is
'museum quality' for its antiquity.

The company for which it was developed, Color Services, is known throughout
much of the museum and photographic world as a high quality custom photo lab
with clients throughout much of this country. However, because the system is
data base driven, it is hardly restricted to use in any one industry."
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