Note from the Editor

Welcome! In our fourth quarter newsletter, we proudly present MORE new features and functionality in Version 8. We tell you "What's New", what's "Coming Soon", introduce you to another of our staff, and highlight another of our awesome CMS customers! Read on...

At press time, seven users have converted to Version 8, and one user began using CMS with Version 8, for a total of eight Version 8 users. Currently nine more users are preparing to convert - eight from Version 7 and one from Version 6!

We here at CitiTech Systems would love to hear what our users think of Version 8. What's your favorite feature? What can we do to improve Version 8? What new features or functionality would you like to see added in the future?

Please continue to let us know what YOU think of our newsletter, and to suggest articles, give us feedback on your (our) software, or volunteer for our User Spotlight section!

Version 8 Features & Functionality

Find the report you're looking for! Have you ever gone searching for a report?

You may or may not know the name of your report, or even which category it's in...

Find it anyway - by clicking on the "Report Search" button! (It's the "binoculars" icon in the Reports screen)

You can enter text, and click the "Search" button; CMS8 will search report titles, summary text, and dataset names, and return results based on how closely the reports match your criteria - with the most likely report listed at the top, and the least likely at the bottom.

Select the report you'd like, and click on the "Select" button. CMS will navigate to the correct location and select your report!

Simply click on "Preview" to display your report.

What’s New

Periodic Inspections Form & Functionality – Want to drive down the road and create inspections and/or work orders as you go? Use Periodic Inspections. Periodically (daily, weekly, monthly, annually) take a look at your physical assets with your trusty laptop beside you. When you access the "Periodic Inspections" form, it displays your predetermined Inspection factors. Spot a factor that needs to be repaired. Enter an extent and severity or an LOS measure. The button click will build both an inspection and a work order for those GPS coordinates read from your laptop-connected GPS at the time you pushed the button. It will use the first activity associated with the inspection factor. It will search for and use the asset at those GPS coordinates - or offer a selection if more than one asset of the proper type is found.

Check the checkbox for "Inspections" and/or "Work Orders" to tell the system whether to create an Inspection, a Work Order, or both.

Enter a search radius, if desired, to set a search radius for assets within that unit of measure (displayed after the number field, and determined by your System Preference). As an example, pretend you entered 25. If your GPS Units - Search Tolerance Units field is set to "Feet - Meters", the number here will mean a search radius within 25 Meters. If your GPS Units - Search Tolerance Units field is set to "Dec. Degrees - Feet", the number here will mean a search radius within 25 Feet.

If your GPS unit is not on or is not functioning, a message that says, "Could not find GPS" will be displayed when you enter the form, and the form itself will show you text, highlighted in red, that says "GPS Off".

Coming Soon! Advanced Import Functionality

Want to save yourself tons of time? Instead of entering records (such as bridge assets) one by one, use the improved import tool - and suck 'em all in at once!

If your records exist in a database, spreadsheet, text file, or can be accessed through an ODBC connection, then the Import tool is for you! With very little effort, you can select what data you want to go where through what's called "data-mapping."

Soon you'll be able to create defaults so you don't have to set up the same import every time, helpful tool tips will explain what data can be imported where, user-defined fields will be included, data-mapping will be easier, and more.

You'll also be able to tell the system whether you want to ignore records during the import if they already exist in CMS, or whether you want those records overwritten if they exist in the data you're importing.

Another improvement will be that should you come across any problems importing, you'll be able to remove the imported data quickly and easily.

Check the Version 8 Webupdate notes for announcement of the Import application update!

Guru's Corner - Featuring Ariell Vano (Programmer/Analyst; Lead Tester)

Ariell Vano has been with CitiTech Systems since August, 2008.

She's lived in Wisconsin, Idaho, and Wyoming, but has been a resident of Rapid City, SD since 2000.

She holds two Bachelors degrees - one in computer science. And, although originally she pursued a degree in Microbiology, she loved math so much she got one in Applied Mathmatics, instead!

She is in charge of primary testing of new functionality and existing anamolies.

Her favorite parts of the job are making the interfaces more "user-friendly", and the fact that the job is challenging.

She's looking forward to doing more development, in terms of creating NEW forms and NEW functionality.

User Spotlight/Case Study

Lee County, Mississippi    Lee County, one of 82 counties in Mississippi, got its name from Robert E. Lee. It was created on October 26, 1866 from Itawamba and Pontotoc Counties. Its county seat is Tupelo, and is in fact in the Tupelo metro area. The estimated population in 2004 was 78,102. This was an increase of 3.10% from the 2000 census.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 453 square miles (1,174 km²), of which 450 square miles (1,164 km²) of it is land and 4 square miles (9 km²) of it (0.78%) is water.

Since May 18, 2001, Lee County has been using CitiTech Management Software, Version 6, to track their inventory of roads and the work done to maintain them.

In addition to the basic system (with a multi-user license), they own the Work Order, Pavement Management, and Roadway Features modules. They use CMS to report work against pavement assets – whether they are working on a road or a bridge.

Recently, they upgraded to Version 8, skipping Version 7 altogether in the process! We caught up with Tim Allred, Lee County Road Manager, to see how that went – from conversion through training to using the new version.

Allred, whose job includes administrative functions within Lee County including supervising, hiring, firing, and managing projects, also serves as Sheriffs Deputy. He handles all emergency calls and other after hour events. The software was already in use when he became the Road Manager.

Although engineers inspect the bridges, Lee County is provided a list of the results for each bridge and a rating indicating how critical the repair is. Lee County then either contracts the work out or does the work against the bridge themselves. “We use the parts of the software that we need, in the way it works best for us. Although labor, equipment, and material costs are charged to the road the bridge is on, road activities and bridge activities are used, so I can easily determine what was done to the road and what was done to the bridge”, Allred said.

Monthly, detailed reports to the County Board of Supervisors are mandated, so Allred relies heavily on the Pavement History Report to illustrate the activities done by his department and show associated labor, equipment, and material costs. That’s where Tammy and Judy come in!

Tammy Coward, the Assistant Requisition Clerk, adds new pavement records when applicable, using the Official Road Registry. She enters the Work Reports daily, adds new resources when needed, and prints reports monthly or as needed. Judy Thompson, the Assistant Purchasing Clerk, enters Work Reports as needed as a backup for Tammy. During the recent training, they discovered that although Version 8 looks and acts differently than Version 6, the same information is being captured, and the reports they rely on are still present.

Allred has indicated that in the future, he would like to expand usage of CMS to include Fleet Maintenance. “I want to be able to determine equipment maintenance costs to help me determine when it becomes more cost-effective to replace, rather than repair, my equipment items.”

Lee County may also begin using Roadway Features to track their signs – they will need to track things like reflectivity. They anticipate capturing the sign data using GPS coordinates.

We asked Allred what he thought about the training. When Lee County purchased CMS, they chose to set up training on the software right way. When they upgraded CMS to Version 8, they immediately got training for that, as well. We wondered how that worked out for them.

“The timing was perfect”, he said. “Version 8 was installed, the data was converted, and the trainer arrived to show the staff how to use the new system. The trainer did a marvelous job; we received excellent training. I would recommend [CitiTech’s trainers] to anyone!”

Organizations large and small can use CMS in ways that works best for them. Training is key, from the “how-to” operation at the data entry level, to a “big picture” view for managers, from report modification to meet their organization’s unique requirements, to illustrating functionality with potential for future implementation. It's an investment that pays off!

Back Up Your Data!

What if your server's hard drive crashes (or worse, dies completely)? What if your office building burned down, or was destroyed during a flood, hurricane, tornado, or other natural catastrophe? How far back would you want to re-enter time tickets and/or other data?

Users who back up their data won't have to worry about it! They'll be able to recover ("restore") their data. There are two ways you can approach backups with CMS7 (or CMS8). You can back up your data using the software we created for doing backups or, if you have purchased SQL Server, you can set SQL Server up to perform your backups for you. It is suggested that if you have purchased SQL Server, you use the tools provided by SQL Server to perform your backups since they have much more flexibility than our tools possess.

If you have purchased SQL Server, proceed to the sections beginning with “Performing Backup with SQL Server” later in the document.

Performing Backup using the CMS7 (or CMS8) Software
CMS7 (or CMS8) accepts certain command line parameters that will perform a Backup and Restore for you with very little information. The backup is very simple in that it will backup the complete database to a new, single, file every time you request to backup the data. The simplest thing to do is, in the CMS7 software (or the CMS8 software), go to the menu File>>System>>Backup, and it will backup the data right then. Backups do not require exclusive use of the database so backups can be done at any time. The backup file will be located in the same directory as the Data but in a folder called “CMS7_BAK” (or "CMS8_BAK"). If you did the default install of MSDE (or SQL Server Express), this directory would be “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$CITITECH\Data\CMS7_BAK\” (or \CMS8_BAK\). The file is named according to the date and time the backup was done: Year, Month, Day, Hour(1-24), Minute and second with a BAK extension. For example, the date and time right now is May 18, 2006 1:54 PM. The file that would be created would be named 2006518135400.bak.

The important thing to remember here is the reason for backing up the data. The most common problem that will affect you is a hard drive crash. Using the simple backup strategy, the Database and the Backup are on the same hard drive; this is ineffective. Therefore, once you back up your data, you should move/copy the backup files to another hard drive or computer. If your IT dept is doing a backup of the files in this directory, you are covered from a hard drive crash because they also have a backup of your backup.

The manual process works but it requires a user to perform an action. The best thing to do is create a scheduled task that will backup your data on a regular basis. Since the CMS7 (or CMS8) software can accept a command line parameter to backup the data, this is a simple thing to add to your Windows Scheduler. But, we will add some additional functionality to the command line by moving the file after it is created. To do this, you can create a batch(.BAT) file that will do all of this, and that can be put in your Windows Scheduler.

About the command line parameter for performing a backup... Call the CMS7RUN.EXE (or CMS8RUN.EXE) with 2 parameters, “BACKUP” and the SQL Server instance to backup. For example: cms7run.exe backup (local)\cititech. This will perform the backup and tell you when it is done. You can run this from a command line or the RUN command. To create a batch file, open NOTEPAD. In the notepad program, type the full path of the cms7run (or cms8run) executable, the word backup, then the name of your instance. On the next line, put in the DOS “move” command to move the files from your local drive to another drive. Save the file - change the extension from TXT to BAT. You can now add this batch file to your Windows Scheduler to run whenever you want to. (Note: your computer must be on for the Windows Scheduler to perform a scheduled task)

EXAMPLE BATCH FILE:

C:\Program Files\CitiTech\Cms7Run.exe backup (local)\cititech Move C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$CITITECH\Data\CMS7_BAK\*.* d:\Backups

You may have a folder called sqltools in your cititech directory that contains 4 batch files. You can modify the backup.bat file to meet your needs. If you do not have this directory, let CitiTech know; we can zip and email it to you.

Restoring data using the CMS7 (or CMS8) Software
Restoring the data is no harder than backing it up. There are a few requirements to restoring the data:

1. Restore, unlike backup, DOES require exclusive access to the database.
2. The file to restore must be in the CMS7_BAK (or CMS8_BAK) folder.
3. The CMS7 database (or CMS8 database) must already be part of the SQL Server Instance you are restoring to.

Once these requirements are met, you are ready to restore your data. Simply run the restore.bat file in the CitiTech\SQLTools folder and select the backup file to restore from the list. You will be told when the restore is completed. Anytime you restore the data, you should perform a Web Update to ensure that your Software and Database are compatible.

Performing Backup with SQL Server 2000
There are alot of options for backing up your data in SQL Server 2000, this document will just cover the basics. In SQL Server Enterprise Manager, drill down to the instance you want to backup. The best thing to do is a Database Maintenance Plan. Now, choose MANAGEMENT>>DATABASE MAINTENANCE PLANS. Right-click on Database Maintenance Plans and in the menu, choose New Maintenance Plan. Follow the wizard.

Performing Backup with SQL Server 2005
For a one-time backup: In SQL Server Management Studio, drill down to the instance you want to backup. Right-click on it, select “Tasks”, and “Backup”. Name it (if applicable), and specify a destination. Click on OK.

Or, set up a Maintenance Plan. To start the Maintenance Plan Wizard: Expand the server. Expand the Management folder. Then right-click Maintenance Plans and select Maintenance Plan Wizard. Follow the wizard.

Note: To create or manage maintenance plans, you must be a member of the sysadmin fixed server role. Object Explorer only displays the Maintenance Plans node for users who are members of the sysadmin fixed server role.

Also Note: If you want to create or manage maintenance plans in a multiserver environment, additional configuration is required. For more information, see SQL Server 2005 Help for these topics: Maintenance Plans and Automating Administration Across an Enterprise.

Restoring data with SQL Server
Because there are so many ways to backup your data in SQL Server, restoring your data will not be covered in this document. If you have questions on how to do this, call CitiTech Systems; Tech Support can help you. Note: anytime you restore the data, you should perform a Web Update to ensure that your Software and Database are compatible.

IMPORTANT: Regardless of which process you use to backup your data, the first thing you should do is restore it after a successful backup. This will not only make you familiar with the process but also ensure there are no problems in the process you have created.

Other Backup Issues
A server file backup should backup the CitiTech Program Files folder which contains the program executable and function libraries as well as the report definitions from a standard installation.

Data backups should be maintained on-site and off-site. CitiTech offers complimentary off-site storage capability on CitiTech Servers. Some users send us back-up data monthly. We can provide this data for recovery purposes, at no charge! If you would like to use this service, please let us know.