April 4, 2000
- Highlights:
- Idlewood Electric announced the acquisition of American Electric Supply
- Brock McVey recently installed Core Technology's Multibridge gateway software
Idlewood Electric announced the acquisition of American Electric Supply in Chicago. The new branch will become Idlewood's third location effective May 15th. Like their other locations, the new branch will have both supply and lighting showroom departments.
Brock McVey recently installed Core Technology's Multibridge gateway software with Java for Windows. This product allows users to access Brock's system via the internet instead of having to dial up the mainframe. Multibridge carries kind of an expensive upfront cost of $5,000. However, it can more than pay for itself if you have multiple employees having to make long distance calls (or 800 numbers) to access the Clear/Path, since they now would just make a local call to their ISP or use DSL lines. You also do not need multiple lines and modems to allow more than one user to "dial up" simultaneously.
This approach also has the advantage of not having to install terminal emulation software on the PC's. Rather, when a user attaches via their Web browser, a Java applet for the terminal emulation is downloaded. You can, however, permanently store a configuration file, which would mainly be done to save soft keys.
Finally, response time is faster than traditional poll/select lines since you are using the IP protocol.
PSI is a dealer for Core Technology.
Another nice enhancement has been done to the OE30 order entry screen. Now, you can bring up the list of the customer's favorite items to order from. The favorite list can be built using either the new FM81 screen or with a program that would consider anything ordered more than X times a favorite.
For the first time ever, PSI-ers won our annual NCAA pool. Mike Salins and Chris Costakis finished 1-2. But, since we didn't feel it's polite to win our own pool, we instead split the pot evenly with the top 4 players. This added Ron Kohlenberg of Hein Electric and Bill Seifert of Mapes Supply to the winners circle.