Download Reminder

This one is really simple but the solution slipped my mind this morning.

Downloaded policy was going straight to history csr tried it 3x and they all went to history.

Called Applied and and it was the effective date on the policy billing screen and the effective date on the downloaded policy didnt match up.   Changed and requested new download.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately things have been running smoothly here.

Josh

Excel Exercies

Just had our chapter meeting and had Sue Good for Excel training. I highly recommend her.  We learned a lot about tam and excel.  Now we are going through and cleaning up our data. She even has up a macro that can help with reporting in excel.  Its on the ascnet website under education freebies.

Josh

Stop the Presses

Or the printers that is.  Last night was our last night to print out follow up and exception reports from close day.
Why were we still printing them?  Probably because we always have.  Habits don't change unless someone questions why you do what you do.  So at Tencon in a paperless class someone said just don't print them. People see them on their tam front screen so why waste the paper.  You might have to go through and check that csr codes match op id's otherwise people may not see their activity on their front screen.  We have one csr who had that problem.  Applied is looking into it and should give me a call later today.  It wasnt as simple as changing the op id through utilities.

Let the quest for reducing paper continue!!

Josh

TENCON Update

Went to the first day of TENCON today.  They announced TAM version 11 will be coming spring of next year.  They encouraged everyone to update to 10.3 as its very stable.  They are continuing to make stability improvements instead of new features.  They encouraged us to submit PMR's as they do read everyone and try to work them into the program.  I went to 3 classes today some better than others.  I will soon be writting about setting up benefits in tam 10.x. How to use the basics of benefits in tam to get all of your information in tam and help benefits to become paperless as well.  It may not be a perfect benefits solution but it will help to organize and unify the way benefits stores information.  If you havent been to a TENCON I highly recommend it its not a vacation at all but a bunch of very good information and so many classes to choose from that I wish I was 2 people.

More info soon.

Off to Tencon

I am off to my first Tencon.  So watch for exciting updates from Tencon.  When I get back and put into practice what I have learned there will be lots of new updates. 
I look forward to meeting some of you there.

Josh

The story of 2 emails

Did you know that you can attach an email to tam 10+ two different ways?

As you can see they are both the same email but they have different icons which means they were attached differently and since they were they will act differently.

The top email was attached via drag and drop and the bottom email was attached via the attachment menu.

Now you ask what is the difference?

The drag and dropped email keeps its outlook style and allows you to view the html and reply or forward the message just like if it were still in your outlook.
1. Keeps the message the same as it was in outlook.
2. Allows you to reply or forward the message even after you delete it out of outlook. (You have to reattach the forward or reply though it wont auto attach.)
3. You can select multiple emails and attach them all at once. 

This is the menu style of attaching.
1. It converts your email to text.
2. You can reply but its not as easy.  (You have to retype email address)
3. You lose all formatting options.
4.  It can auto attach when you send it.

This is the attach box on the menu attaching style.
1. It doesnt allow grouping
2. You cant attach multiple emails at once.
3. You lose formatting.

This is the attach box when you drag and drop an email.
1. Looks just like the attach file box.
2. Allows multiple attachments at once. (See prev and next at top left)
3. You can give each file its own cat subcat and description.




So you can decide which way works better for you or which end result you prefer.

Josh

Using Applied as part of your backup strategy

Many of you probably know this already but I thought I would throw it out there again. If something were to happen to your building you can mail your backup to applied and they will set you up with tamonline and get you back and going until you are able to return to your office or building.
Just to make sure all of your ducks are in a line. I would go ahead and find out who you would contact what it would cost and how many days till you can be up and running like this. You can never be too prepared for a disaster.

How often to backup?

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about our backup solution lately. I am impressed by some of the new solutions like the bdr backup device but not impressed by the price. It backs up every 15mins which is that really necessary? Maybe it is maybe not. I think the price is outrageous considering its just a simple server with software. Never affraid to try it on my own I have been looking to create my own server that does the same thing.
1. Backs up multiple servers to a single server.
2. Will virtualize that server if it fails.
3. Will send backups off site.

Currently we backup nightly and it has been tested and works as planned. It will even do a bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware. But what happened last year is our raid card failed. Cant pick one of those up locally so we had to order one. Well it took 3 days to get here. So I had to setup a temp server in the mean time and that wasn't fast either so I am looking to a solution to avoid that.
I know tamonline is an option but it isn't a great option for us as we use our server for more then just tam. So do I just stock a whole spare server just for parts? Which seems expensive and wasteful for it just to sit there.

More to come as I try to solve these problems.

Let me know how you have solved some of these problems?

Josh

Going paperless with night utilities

Are you tired of the 10+ pieces of paper that print out every night with night utilities?
I came up with 2 solutions to this problem. The key to this is you need a pdf creator that auto saves the print out without asking for a name.

1. http://en.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator its a free software called pdf creator. I installed it on the server and under options auto save I put this command \\servername\users\<REDMON_USER>\PDF\ replace servername with the name of your server and the path to the users directory. It will auto put the file in the users home directory under a pdf folder. There is another command that will auto email the file to the user also but its not 100% reliable. (let me know if you want that code)
So in the morning the night util person just opens the pdfs and reviews them or forwards them on to who needs them.
The key to this is pdfcreator has to be your default printer before starting night utils then in the morning you can change your default printer to what you want it to be just dont forget to change it back before you run night utils again.

2. If you have a version of acrobat where you can print to pdf (not the free version) you can use that.
a. go to control panel > printers
b. right click on adobe pdf click properties
c. click printing preferences button on general tab.
d. click adobe pdf settings tab at the top.
e. adobe pdf output folder (default is prompt for a filename) change that to a directory of your choice.
f. make adobe pdf your default printer before you start night utils and check the output directory you defined in step e in the morning.

I use the first option as its a great utility for the rest of the office also and its free.
Contact me if you have questions or comments.

Josh

Upgrading inscope to 10.2.2

Inscope Relay agent seemed to update fine.
Inscope Data service popped up with an error about the pdf printer uninstall.
Remember during data service install it needs admin access so fill out the password screen this way. domain\administrator

Reinstalling data service to see if the error will be fixed.
Reinstall fixed the error and all seems to be running fine it reinstalled the pdf printer component which is what it hung on the first time.

It also comes up with an error stating you are installing inscope 10.2 on tam 10.3 I hit ok since this is the latest version and it seems to work fine. Normally tam versions and inscope versions dont line up.

Run Time Error 91

Run Time Error 91 Object Variable or with block variable not set.
Received this error after upgrading to 10.3 you get this error right after you put in your password and before the homebase screen loads.

This morning this happened on a windows vista machine.

I fixed it by
1. Delete or rename the c:\wintam directory
2. Start run "g:\wintam\tamini /r "
3. Start run "g:\wintam\asupdate /rr" Where g is your Tam Drive.

Then the station loaded correctly.
I received this error on the machine I did the upgrade on Friday morning so the weird part is the vista machine ran tam just fine on Friday but now come monday it came up with the error and just asupdate didn't fix it.

Update to 10.3

So this morning I updated us from 10.2 to 10.3 the install went well no errors. The station I did the install from (which I did via remote desktop from bed this morning before anyone was at work) came up with an error on first launching tam. The error was fixed by running g:\wintam\asupdate /rr (which re registers all of the tam components) That fixed the error and it was off to try it on some other stations.
So far most of our other stations have had no problems updating to 10.3 and work is going as usual.

Will update more later as I attempt to upgrade inscope to the latest version.

Josh

Hello welcome to My Life with Tam

Hello I am Josh Conner I work for an insurance agency in Indianapolis In. We have about 20 employees we run Applied Systems Tam with Inscope add on. We are in the process of going paperless

I plan on using this blog to share some of the tips and other information I discover using tam in an agency.

I am a member of the central Indiana applied user group and run their website. http://www.appliedusergroup.com

Enough about me back to the tips.