On the morning meeting with the guys. One of the first topics of the day was a client's system stats and how to monitor who is big, small, or somewhere in between? We have a few small reports, but we really need to beef that area up and make it more available and visible. We would love to do some visual stats, like the new invoice homepage that Alan made. The difference would be that instead of just invoice and sales data, it would be corporation (world) or location level stats and data. That would be really cool. We went into one of the servers and checked around. The data 0 box had over 1,000+ unique logins yesterday. The corporation in question had over 55 unique users yesterday make and/or modify an invoice. That same company had over 110 unique users affect an invoice in the month of October. We would like to make those kind of stats available and ready for viewing. It helps with decisions and what not.

As we were talking about shared hosting plans, we had the idea of creating an in-depth news and update with information about shared hosting plans (standard adilas accounts), semi-dedicated plans (limited number per server), and fully or full dedicated plans (private server boxes or cluster). We also made a note that some of that info may go well in our ecommerce pages and section. Basically, let the companies decide if they want to upgrade and what not. Show the features, advantages, and benefits of what we have to offer.

Along with that discussion, we had some talks about how fast things are changing all around us... think of technology in general, software packages, servers, hardware, and even versions of existing products. Everything keeps advancing. It becomes a maintenance balance to keep up with things.

Steve wanted to be fair and look at upgrades and maintenance from both sides. What are the clients wanting and/or expecting (their side)? What are we wanting and/or expecting (from our side)? Where do we meet in the middle and who pays for what? Great questions.

We also talked about the fear of selling and making the sale. Sometimes it is scary to virtually rock the boat. This was mostly on my part, but I was expressing that sometimes my angle and strategy is very open and doesn't commit and/or over commit on certain things. Each person needs to be their own style. Later in the day, I was challenged to write a big email to open the door to a client about getting on their own box. It made me think of a quote from Spencer Johnson's, "Who Moved My Cheese" book about dealing with change. It says - "What would I do if I weren't afraid?" That is a good question to ask. It is even more fun to ask yourself that question and then actually go do it. Difficult but fun.

Historically speaking, we are seeing things such as the data 0 server. It was setup in 2011 or 2012, it is on a 2008 server, it uses older versions of ColdFusion (coding environment) and older versions of the MySQL database. That conversation moved us to talk about older technology like fax numbers and other older hold-overs and such. It is amazing as it comes down to a form of maintenance and upkeep. Lots of the new things are going to faster processors, solid state drives, and up to date versions of both software and hardware.

A quote from Steve - "Lessons in time". It is amazing what we have learned over time and by trial and error. We keep learning as we go.

Towards the end of the session, I helped merge in some new code from Bryan. His code was dealing with show/hide option for 2nd vendor/payee tied to PO's. After merging code and pushing things up, he went in and did some live testing. After that, I helped get Steve's latest code branch merged into the master code repository. His code is currently all in custom pages and mostly dealing with the cannabis vertical. He's got some good things going. On that note, he would love to turn over his code work and swap it out for more sales work. He is really good at that.

I worked on some feedback for Dave Forbis and a new graphic that he sent to me. See attached for a copy of the new graphics.

Eric popped in and we setup some bigger blocks of time to work on his special account tracking projects. As we were talking, Eric was talking about project management and the "risk factor" within project management and risk management. He is excited that our current project will help other pieces and clients, but it not dependent upon other pieces in the system. Our goal is to get that section finished and launched by end of the year. That would be awesome.

This is an observation, but there is a growing need to keep breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces. Eric had questions, just today, about how to show/hide fields, change names and aliases, etc. We have a mini project that was done and created for the customers add/edit page, but it doesn't go any further than that. We really need to break each section into smaller pieces and have group settings, page settings, and personal settings. That seems to be a growing need. Along with that, we also see a future need to sub divide the permissions into virtual functions within the functions themselves. It is crazy to see how deep those fractures are and will be heading in the future. Crazy customizable levels.

Lots of ideas and potential there. See Element of time id # 4147 for some flow charts and ideas

Phone call with Dave Forbis to go over progress on the concept drawings. We talked about ideas and where we want it to go. We came up with an idea to try to mix older scratch graphics with real graphics to give things a flavor of concepting and/or iterations (cycle of putting things out there and then refining them as we go). We are hoping that by showing both types of graphics, it will allow people to contribute and see that things are in a constant state of development. Basically, like allowing people to come as they are vs having to be in a white shirt and a tie - heck, we'll allow you to come in your PJ's, if you want. Approachable learning model.

Recording notes, emails, and writing a mini proposal and teaser to a company to look at expanding their options and look into the benefits of going with a dedicated box (cluster level). I recorded the email in the client log for future reference. I also sent them a copy of a report showing their existing stats and hopefully enough to encourage them to look into some new options. I'm not very good at that kind of thing. Good afternoon session.

Working with Alan on a backend database project. We were flipping a table name and it was giving us problems due to master database privileges and permissions. We got in there and were able to get it fixed. Emails and small updates.

I also wanted to record a small conversation between Steve and I on the GoToMeeting session this morning. We were talking about ways to encourage companies to move out of the shared environment and onto their own dedicated servers, once they reach a certain size. One of our developers was reporting that a medium sized company was creating around 6,000 new database entries per day. That was for a medium sized company. That got us thinking about some of the bigger companies and how many records they are creating per day.

I mentioned to Steve that my wife, yesterday, simply said... "Do you have a limit that requires a company to leave the shared environment?" I had to answer, no. We currently don't have any limits and/or rules in place to help us with those decisions and/or levels. While Steve and I were talking, he mentioned that his wife said a similar thing the other day as well. Kinda funny, but we didn't even think of putting in a limit and/or rule to protect ourselves. That idea had to come from the outside. Long story made short, I'll bet we'll start looking into some rules and limits and make them standard.

Tech support and helping to fix a custom page setting error dealing with 2nd vendor/payees for PO's and expense/receipts. Pushed up new code. Emails to other developers and sending some new setup info to Michael Webber with McCorvey's Bowling World. Michael did some work for us back in 2012 and will be helping with an upcoming project. Good stuff.

On the morning meeting. We briefly talked about some updates from the weekend. We had a number of different developers pop in and make small reports.

Steve and I were about system stats and reports at the higher system level. We also need some rules and how we allow and/or don't allow play. Not just reports on how much data we are carrying along (total stats and counts)... but also, what is added new per day (incremental reporting). We need to be able to analyze usage, storage, and even analyze bandwidth. What are they truly using.

From Calvin, there may be potential in monetizing the usage of the application. If we are incurring a cost, we need to pass that on, plus adding in some profit. We have some clients that come in at a super low rate. Then they grow and develop and build and become more successful, but the system fees haven't increased to match that (at all). Basically, no one is monitoring the growth, storage, usage, and system stats. We need some report matrixes that we could show and then charge for. 

Calvin popped in and gave Steve and I pretty deep demo of the adilas label builder. We got pretty deep, we played, asked questions, and even got into some of the funding and financing of how do we pay for this, how do we fund it, and how do we keep supporting it? Good stuff.

Some people want to buy it modular (every little thing) and some people want to buy it as a package (get everything and use what you want).

Some of the matrix values might need to be: How many things get created? How often are they being used? How much data is being transferred back and forth?

How do we monetize things and get a real ROI (return on our investment)? It comes back to sales, rules, and what we setup. Steve and Calvin were talking about putting all of the tools out there and then letting them (the adilas users) use what they need. Kinda like a big giant rental center... they could use the big tools, the small tools, and everybody could use whatever they needed. They were talking about small mom and pop shops, percentages, set fees, or some kind of mix between those different models. Lots of options.

By us not monitoring server stats and usage, we and kinda killing ourselves. We want to come up with something that is fair and workable for all the different parties. That is where we want to get to. We want to track the cause and effect of data storage, file storage, processing (API socket calls, queries, data in/out), and maybe usage and bandwidth.

Looking forward... We may need some snapshot info (aggregated data) to show corp to server stats. We may need to start counting reads (queries and looking at things) and writes (inserts and updates). We may need just counts per day per corp. This could become some of our general matrix values. Steve and Calvin were talking about possibly charging for the net results (what are they getting out of it). We need to store it, and then go back and use that as the histories, stats, and usage.

Just an idea... what about showing stats per user and what they are browsing (who is generating the usage - who is looking at what). We could add some counters on the actual method calls (yep, Holly used me or pulled me).

Steve - Every year that a company is with us, we keep adding a virtual train car to what they are pulling and/or hauling. At some future point, we may need a way to snip and clip some of that older data off (how much are they hauling). This could be in and may include standalone declarations and other watchers, feeders, and triggers. Certain tables just keep ballooning and we are storing and storing data. We need to figure out a way to archive some of that data.

Working on some image concepts that Dave Forbis sent over. See attached for some fun new images of the cart and the horse (horse and cart) and how that analogy relates to operations and accounting.

On the phone with Steve for half an hour going over ideas and options. We are looking into some strategic moves and how to increase sales. We also have a number of clients that we need to collect from and get our accounts receivables down a bit. Good meeting and we talked through a couple of good options.

I spent the rest of the time following up on emails, making client phone calls, light tech support, and recording notes. Good day today.

Jumped on the morning meeting with the guys. I got pulled away on a phone call with a potential client. He showed me some of what he is currently doing (all on spreadsheets) and we talked about where things will and/or could go next. Great meeting and we will be doing a small demo with him and his people tomorrow morning. After that, I did some small to do list stuff and buttoned up a few pieces.

The last hour, I spent some time working with Dustin on his custom pages. He has a semi-complex system that allows for items to be checked and then grouped into mini sub groups. We planned some stuff out and then actually went in and started working on the code. It ended up being a bunch of mini loops. We had fun talking about the steps and then actually doing the loops within loops and figuring out the data pieces. Great session.

As a side note, Dustin is gathering tons of info and then needs to auto increment a huge 24 digit number that has a mix between alpha and numeric values. That is part of his loops within loops stuff. We gave him a smaller page that does a similar process and he will be working through the logic and making it part of his page. The values can be pretty complex.

10/6/22 Videos for the auto email, email report and invoice due date functions.

10/6/22 Page URLs for completed project. Note: These URLs are primarily from the auto email part of this project.  The URLs for the email history report, use credit terms and invoice due date project were not included as it would take a significant amount of time to dig up this past information. 

Large edits

1. public/afb_email_preview_action.cfm

2. public/auto_email.cfm

3. publictop_secret/cfc/Services/EmailService.cfc

4. top_secret/cfc/Daos/EmailDAO.cfc

5. top_secret/secure/classic/email_report_body.cfm

6. top_secret/secure/email_report.cfm

6. top_secret/secure/afb_corp_email_home_action.cfm

6.top_secret/secure/afb_corp_email_home.cfm

Small edits

1. Application.cfc

2. public/auto_email.cfm

3. top_secret/cfc/search_15.cfc

4. top_secret/cfc/security_4.cfc

9/29/22 The auto email project was pushed live and  tested.  It will be used by Shari O for a week or so then the automation will be added to each of the servers by Wayne.  The auto email project was completed and pushed to data 0 about a month ago.  Several bugs were identified by Bryan and Shari O, but were put on hold as other higher priority projects were being completed.

6/13/22 Met with Brandon to clarify some specifics on the 2.2 plan.

2.2 Email history report (email_history_home)

1. new table (not the same as invoice history)

a. new update that creates table

I. Look at tables for examples (history and text) 

II. Email_history table variables – like custom_text table: email_history_id, corp id, payee_id, datetime, app_type_id, main_id, table_name, special flag, history_note (13, 3076, statement).

III. Types of special flags: Invoice, quotes, pos, statements, customer, eCommerce, custom, auto due date, multiple invoices.

2. Set up history capture on email

a. design email capture (from/to email addresses?, status: success/failure) 

b. search for pages to put history code on by using adilasuniversity.biz

c. add email capture on all pages

3. Create email reports page

a. be able to search by: type, time period (day, week etc).

I. model after invoice_home_basic.cfm

4. Show email history on invoice history, PO history, quote history, and statement history reports  (invoice_history.cfm etc).

a. bold line below reports saying “Email History Actions” and then email reports

b. ? auto_sent column in email_history. 

5. Report on my_history.cfm page

a. Tie to invoice app type similar to how statement works.

6. If it goes out manually it also goes into the history.

5/31/22 Met with Brandon and developed plan for part 2. Broke it down into 3 sub-sections

    2.1 Add setting (Use Credit Terms) and if selected change due date on Cart

        2.1.1 Add "Use Credit Terms" settings to Corp Wide Settings

            1. create database update and add tiny int

            2. research standard invoice credit terms

            3. standardize credit terms on Corp Wide Settings, add_edit_customer.cfm page and Corp Email Settings page

            4. Add verbiage to Corp Wide Settings Page

        2.2.2 Use Credit Terms to switch out default session due date

            1. Working on cart_4.cfc

            2. check if "use due date" has been selected in settings

            3. get due date session default

            4. check if "use credit term" has been selected in settings

            5. if "yes" get credit term variable.

            6. check if a number exists in it and it is less than 100

            7. if "yes" switch out the session default variable

    2.2 Check due date and automate email (not planned out yet)

    2.3 Email history report (not planned out yet)

5/27/22 Met with Shari O regarding moving forward to add auto email to the Invoice Due Date function:

    1. Bug on invoice due date: the due date is showing current date. Is this a normal bug or  happening at server update? (1:59).

    2. Can we make due date default "Credit Terms" on the Customer  (add_edit) page.  If Credit Terms is different than due date it will trump.

    3. Email template "due date" reads from due date or credit terms.

    4. Different (edited template if paid). Reads from due date or credit terms.

     5. Auto send out reminders if 5 days from overdue. Adilas is due upon receipt, late fee at 30 days and shut down at 45 days overdue.

Alan is making good progress as of August 2019.

Brandon and Russell were working on this. It got to a point, and then got dropped. Finishing this up would really help with accounts receivable and cash flow. See branches ram-37 and BWM-33. Steve asked me to work with Shawn on this project. I lightly got Shawn started on the project on 4/10/19.

This is an invoice due date project. It is a prep step to get a corp-wide header that could go from server to server to help prompt for overdue payments. Basically, a way to speed up the adilas receivables or A/R accounts. Once the invoice due date feature is in place, we can then figure out the aging of how old an invoice is, regardless of payment history. Once again, this is a prep step for a bigger project, but much needed.

Russell and Brandon started the project back in December of 2017. Due to craziness, it got almost finished and then mothballed. We (both Brandon and Russell) picked it back up on 2/23/21. Project turned over to Bryan on 5/17/22. See media/content for a 26-minute video overview of the project.

Project planning and scratching down ideas to help an assisted living center with multiple locations. Trying to use what I have and what I know.

This is a small note from this morning, while I was on a hike with Brian Stewart. These are some summed up lessons learned from King David in the Old Testament (David and Goliath).

1. Use what you have.
2. Take what you know.
3. Run to the fight.

Shannon joined the GoToMeeting session. Our original plan was to do a work session on the adilas user guide. We ended up spending the entire time talking about and going over ideas for a demo that is scheduled for tomorrow. It is for an assisted living center and a group that manages those facilities. I was showing her some scratch ideas and getting her feedback. See attached for some notes that we recorded during our session.

Bryan popped in and had a couple of questions. Nothing major, just checking on things and what not.

Meeting with Will over a GoToMeeting session. We briefly talked about the transitional PO project. This is where an order (purchase order or PO) starts, and then has a payment applied even before any inventory is received and/or sent. It is somewhat of a PO that is between a request (order) and a received (live) PO. See attached for a couple of notes to get the project started.

On the morning meeting with the guys. We had both Wayne and Calvin pop in briefly. Most of the morning session, Dustin and I were working on his code to auto increment these huge RFID tag numbers. Basically, you start with a huge 24 digit and/or character tag and then increment just the tail end. It has tons of zeros, alpha/numeric values, and an incremental portion. We spent a lot of time going over the sub loops and loops within loops. We got it and it seems to be working great.

Around 11 am (ish), Steve was showing us some cartoons about a dog. Anyways, Kat, Danny's wife, was telling Danny (one of our sales guys and label developers) that adilas was kinda like a dog. You tell it to go and do something, and it tries to go and do it. Anyways, Danny took this idea and worked with a guy from his church and came up with some fun cartoon dog images. Really fun. The artist's name is Naters Art from the Salida, CO area. Adilas is the word Salida spelled backwards. Kinda fun. Anyways, Naters came up with some great images of this dog, rolling over, with a bone, searching, and tilting it's head. The developers on the morning meeting were saying that they could see some of these images being used as icons while waiting, searching, success messages, error messages, info messages, etc. Lots of good laughs. See attached for a screen shot.

11 am -  meeting with Gene Spaulding with the SAL Management Group. GoToMeeting

We started out the demo and meeting with letting Gene show us around in his spreadsheets and what was connected to what. Really cool and he has taken things to a huge and super deep level. Steve and Gene were able to briefly talk about how both of them started at the spreadsheet level and then eventually grew out of that and into a database type technology like adilas. Good stuff.

One of the main pages that they had was titled - Census and Roster - who is where and what is what (simplified operational and accounting data). This fed the rest of the reports and pages.

Steve - what would be mission critical for you guys? They answered that it was the census and roster reports (getting data into the system). Simple screen to gather that information and then disperse it as needed.

They do have a 3rd party that does all of the onboarding platform stuff. All the paperwork, contract stuff, legal stuff, etc.

They have looked at some of the big huge platform applications out there... they are kinda looking for something smaller and maybe more custom. We did a demo and I think it went pretty well. I had Dave Forbis and Steve on the call with me. They had a controller and head manager on the call. Good back and forth and we had some fun.

Working on a fun historical entry for the adilas logo. I was working on this earlier today before the demo with a client and finished it up during this small window. It has a number of older pictures and drawings of the adilas logo and some original concept drawings. Here is the text on the top of the image.

Adilas, LLC or adilas.biz was created in 2008. Prior to that, it was called the Morning Star System and was a custom write-up system for a local company. Up to that point, all of the code work and the full application had been created in Salida, CO. The name Adilas, is actually "Salida" spelled backwards. We came up with an acronym for adilas of - "all data is live and searchable". Kind fun. Also, the adilas logo was originally a stylized version of a major icon in the Salida area. It is called "S Mountain" or "Spiral Drive".

Bryan and I were looking into some possible errors when outside parties are using an auto add to the queue API call. What we found was that the outside entity was putting the corp id (what world) in as the payee id (who did it). Both were id's but it was messing up the queries trying to pull the data because it couldn't join tables correctly due to the wrong id number being used. It took a little bit of digging.

On the morning meeting with the guys. Steve had a number of questions about static IP addresses and locking servers down based on IP addresses. He also wanted a report about the demo that was going on yesterday with the assisted living guys. I gave him a report and he made a few comments. Oddly enough, some of the same things that the assisted living guys need and/or want, the campground folks want the same things. Both companies are virtually selling and/or renting one or more of their locations (camping spots, RV spots, or apartments or rooms). Interesting stuff.

This is just for me, but I wonder if we should add a small flag to the locations table to indicate what is rentable or not. We could then pull certain reports and show what is available or not based off of that flag and elements of time. Just a thought.

Alan popped in and reported. He is working on gathering up all of the permission based code and putting in all together in one cfc (component or file). That way we don't have to search all over the place for that same code. Another thing he is doing is limiting the number of page level queries that run to populate the snow owl drop-down menu system (tons and tons of links all based off of permissions). We set up a time to meet later today.

Josh, Dustin, and Steve were going to jump onto a Zoom meeting to go over things. Dustin is working on bulk cultivation pages and custom code. Josh is working on a new and upcoming discounting rules and discounting engine for system-wide discounts. All great projects. We merged in Steve's branch of code and got him all set that way.

I spent most of the session doing tech support emails, a small bug fix for duplicating expense/receipts, and working with Drea (adilas tech support) on a question about updating child inventory quantities. I didn't quite get finished with the bug fix, so, I'll be working on that after lunch.

Back working on the duplicate expense/receipt bug and doing some page clean-up. The original page was created back in 2015. Just making it comply with our current page standards.

Meeting with Alan on a number of different projects. We spent some time talking about an inventory counter piece that Alan did back in January of 2018. It is done, but has not yet been tied in and launched. We have a client who needs that piece fully live before the end of the year. I took a few notes while Alan was explaining it. We also talked about a project to add in-line discount options into the existing my cart favorite buttons. That would be really cool. We have a client who is willing it chip in on that project. The other project that we talked about is speeding up and more fully automating the reoccurring invoices section. We decided to wait on this project until we get some more funding. See attached for a few notes.

Finished up some testing on the duplicate expense/receipt bug. Merged in code and pushed it live. Sent an email to the client to let them know to try it again.

Mostly a work session today. When the meeting started, we had Steve, Josh, and Dustin on with us. Steve had a few questions and was trying to get some direction. He is making tons of progress on his manufacturing and build pieces. He now has in-line transfer invoices happening when you use his bulk build pages. I worked with Dustin a bit on some dynamic looping (not straight forward looping but associated looping or random looping). After that, I worked on my own projects and everybody else did the same.

Recording expenses. Looking into some black box code for the sales tax project. It is close to being done, but still needs a little bit of work on the black box part of the project.

Small GoToMeeting session with Molly. We looked at a small API socket connection question. They were really close. Just missing a who did it id number (transaction processed by id). Once they got that, they were good.

We also briefly talked about the possibility of setting up some hooks to help with a 3rd party solution and an API socket feed out from Adilas to woocommerce and back from woocommerce back to adilas (syncing up products and quantities). Molly and Spencer may be looking into that option and building a new 3rd party solution to help bridge that gap (building and selling a woocommerce plug-in for adilas clients). Good meeting.

Working with Bryan on some custom bulk print PO labels. It got a little bit tricky as each label needed a unique barcode (created dynamically on the fly). We did some testing and got it to a semi-working level. Bryan is going to take it from there and make the final tweaks. Basically, we were just advancing the ball a bit and then he will run from there.

Wayne and Steve were talking about servers and some of the new updates that are going on. Wayne is helping to fine tune and monitor the servers. He wants to be in charge of that portion of the puzzle. He is very good at it and knows what he is doing. Steve and I are trying to encourage him to keep going in that direction. Some of the discussion items were dealing with servers, up-time, redundancy, database table locks, response time, active vs passive monitoring, and empowering our users and clients to view stats (maybe limited views) on the server. There was quite a bit of talk about new news and updates talking about the server monitoring and even possible mirror and/or redundancy back-up and/or mirror server options (insurance and roll-over technologies).

Wayne was asking some great questions about the current model and where we want to go with things. Steve was responding and answering the questions. We left off with a charge on Wayne to get in there, dig around, and come back with a plan. We may end up rolling some of the new changes out over a series of months. Good stuff.

We touched base with some of the other developers on the meeting and then broke out into our own work sessions. I was working on the sales tax branch and trying to cascade new sales tax changes through the black box pages. As a fun side note, there are around 400 (ish) black box pages that are part of the master code branch. That doesn't even include ones that are created and uploaded without being merged into the master branch. What that tells me is, that our clients like custom options and that section, black box or custom code, is a huge part of our model. It can be a pain in the rear some times, especially if we are trying to update things, but it also fills a need and our clients seem to like the options of being able to customize things. That is awesome.

Once everybody left the meeting, we all just worked on our own little projects. I was doing tech support and follow-up on some sales calls. Towards the end of the session, Steve and I chatted briefly about the client who may want to do some tracking on their assisted living facilities. We talked about maybe setting up a play site for the assisted living and running things with locations, elements of time, etc. Lots of good ideas.

We also talked about the adilas label builder that Calvin is working on. We are getting close on this round of the project. We would like to see where all of that goes and what comes out of it. We are looking to close out phase one and then start using it to see what else may be needed (round two or phase two).

Steve - we are a solution for solution minded persons. We are really seeing that the clients that like customization, they tend to be some of our greatest clients. Very interesting. We are also seeing that some of the reps are a great resource and are throwing some ideas and monies at things (pieces of the puzzle) that they need and/or want. Some of them are getting funding from their clients to help push things forward.

Random idea... what about opening up the door to our customers to get their own developers and let the custom side of things grow a little bit deeper. Maybe use the adilas market and let some of the independent developers run with things a little bit.

Training - we were talking about ideas and timing. Things are a little bit crazy right now, but we don't want it to get out too far before we circle back around and setup some more training. We were also talking about costs and paying for that. On a different note, we have tons of hidden benefits like hooking up Marisa and Drea on training. We also have Calvin who was at the last training and got tons of great info and feedback about his labels and Gmexting (group mass texting). Lots of hidden benefits and getting people trained and more involved.

There was a server outage. I got a few text messages, phone calls, etc. I got on with tech support and they were calling it a UDP flood. So, I looked it up online and this is what it said - A UDP flood is a type of denial-of-service attack in which a large number of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets are sent to a targeted server with the aim of overwhelming that device's ability to process and respond. Anyways, everything seems to be back up and running. I'm grateful for the server guys who know what they are doing.

Working with Bryan to debug an API socket call to add a customer/patient to the queue. We were checking and checking all kinds of things. We ended up figuring out that the actual API socket code, was older on one box and newer on all other boxes. The problem was the old code was being used instead of the new code. It was that simple but it took an hour of both of us pushing on things to figure it out. We finally found it by running the same code on two different boxes and got different results. The old code was still adding the record, so it appeared to be playing well. The only difference was an adjusted time zone value vs a straight server time stamp. We needed the adjusted time zone piece to make it work and age correctly.

Quick graphic work and light tech support for a developer/designer.

Just for fun... Steve, Dustin, and I were talking about the cartoon adilas dog concept. Steve had a colored prototype of the little adilas dog and we were talking about it. See attached for a colored prototype of the little dog adilas. As a question... what will I train my little adilas to do today?

Steve was working on some changes for ecommerce and being able to show tiered pricing out in ecommerce. Alan popped in and had some questions about in-line discounts for my cart favorite buttons. We are trying to see where they need to be attached. We are seeing three possible options. One is on the exact search (known item or known sub item), as a standalone or cart as a whole option, and also as part of the smart group buttons (tiered pricing). Alan is going to check more into this and get with a client who is looking for these options.

Wayne Andersen popped in and help both Alan and Brandon with some server stuff. He is implementing some server monitors that check services, CPU usage, RAM memory usage, database activity, and other monitors. He gave Alan and I a small tour and had us setup some things, in order to play.

While I was looking through some older papers, I saw this graphic. I'm not sure if it was ever pushed up online. It has a date of 1/11/17 and deals with adilas world building concepts. These are things like: 1. Adilas Universe Level (all adilas systems), 2. Galaxy Level (linked servers), 3. Cluster Level (individual boxes & servers), 4. Solar System Level (databases inside of the boxes or clusters), 5. World Level (corporations and/or companies inside of a database), 6. Location Level (sub areas within a corporation or company), 7. Group Level (any of the 12 main system player groups), 8. Individual Level (actual players or individual items within a group), 9. Data Level (how and where things are stored and what relationships exist between the pieces), 10. Run all levels over time (foundation concepts of time, space, and money (resources) that make up 3D world building).

The attached image is of the first few levels (universe, galaxy, cluster, solar system, world).

Dave Forbis called and we talked about some marketing ideas. We setup a meeting for tomorrow to talk with both Steve and I. One of the things that he would like to do is help push some of the community funded projects as an alternate funding source. He created a small flyer that could be emailed around to help generate awareness. We talked about some things and even went in and made some small changes on the actual element of time for the reoccurring invoice automation project. I will attach the mock-up as documentation. It is not done yet, but it is at least a start.

Other notes - Here is the link directly to the reoccurring invoice automation project - https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/community_funded_projects.cfm?projects=1355 

- Read over the page and update some of the verbage. Small tweaks. Also, we talked about a quote from Steve, just the other day. It was "Choose your solution and then invest in your solution."

- I thought that it would be good to have the contribute button wired to point to the URL above. Also, it might be good to put the URL (web address) in plain English so that they could copy and paste it into a browser.

- If we are going to be asking people to contribute, we need to show the advantages and benefits of what they would be getting. In Steve's words, if we are asking for $10,000, we need to give them a $30,000 reason.

On the phone with Bank of America going over some business funding options and what not. They would like to reschedule a call for next week with Steve and I.

Back on the merge process for the sales tax project and the black box custom code.

Talking with Wayne, Bryan, and Steve about new servers, specs, and the configuration process. Wayne was talking about a virtual recipe for the servers and then using a program called Puppet that helps with special configurations and even bulk server setups. Bryan has been helping us with some server setups. We are trying to get things transferred over to Wayne and let him run with things. He really wants to do that kind of stuff. He used to do it for his other company that he worked for.

- Looking at server configuration options and such - lots of ideas and options.

- Steve had some questions about inbound and outbound API socket access (external traffic above and beyond what we know about and/or control). This could be outbound pieces to state compliance tracking systems and/or inbound ecommerce requests or inbound API socket calls (general data stuff). Lots of unknown potential and/or uncontrolled amounts of traffic (in/out). That is a big variable and is widely unknown. Steve doesn't think we have even remotely seen what is possible and/or on the horizon.

- Wayne was talking about a frontend software application called Cloud Flair or Cloud Flare. It helps to filter the traffic good/bad and what actually hits the servers. We were talking about protecting servers against attacks and what not.

- We were talking about different models where we break up the databases and keep things all on their own servers. Or we could build super structures and configure a super Linux box with a non web facing database server. We could then have a number of smaller web servers (code files) that connect to the super structure. See the attached for a couple options that we were drawing (possible configurations).

- We were talking about amounts of time, costs, and resources to duplicate things and spin things up and then manage them. Currently, we are on a two-week to a month spin up process for a new dedicated box. We would love to get that down to under 24 hours and/or something similar.

- Steve was talking about doing some costs analysis, prototyping, and calculated experimentation. Lots of good ideas but still lots of unknowns. We need to be smart as we venture forth. We need to keep the main adilas ship rolling along so that we can fund some of these new experimentations.

- As we improve the process, we are planning on circling back around and bringing the older servers and older software versions up to speed. We may end up cycling through the servers and slowly bringing them up to a new standard, as that get established. Lots of new ground.

- As part of the meeting, Wayne was showing Steve and I some of the Nagios (monitoring server) and its stats. We were seeing what updates ran and did not run, what CPU usage was going on per server, and what database traffic load was going on per server. Some of the servers, are close to 2 million queries since the nightly reboot at 1 am. It is only 10 or 11 am and already they are close to 2 million queries into the day. That ends up being between 30-50 (ish) queries per second as an average. That is tons of traffic. With some of Wayne's tools, we can now see some of the stats and trends. Pretty crazy.

Steve and I - meet with Dave Forbis to talk about marketing and direction

- Touching base

- Get an invoice from Dave

- Talk about marketing ideas and how to help generate funds - Dave has designed an email flyer... he would like to help test the waters and send it out to some of our adilas users. This is a direct campaign to point people to a specific adilas community funded project.

- Assisted living stuff - we would like to create a play site (corp 478 on data 0 - sunrise estates - assisted living) - Dave comes from that world - what is the dream - what is the most basic level and how can we solve those problems.

- Small game plan to help and work with Dave - see attached for some new docs and planning.

- Dave was a consultant, helping in the assisted living environment. He and his company were called in to help fix the major problems. His goal was to be in front of the curve vs being behind the scenes.

- Currently, there are a number of assisting living software packages but they are all very expensive. We could come in and provide a great product at a monthly rate with no contract.

Quick bug fix. Bryan found a small bug, made the fix, uploaded it, tested it, and thought that we should make it global. We merged it in and pushed it live to all servers. Super small, but good clean-up.

We had a bunch of screen shots that we uploaded for a meeting earlier today. Once they were up, I thought that they had too much info on them. I went in and added some sensor boxes to grey out some of the values (business privacy stuff). I reuploaded the images. I was also on a tech support call with Shari O. We have a client here locally in Utah that will need some in-person training done to get them going. We also chatted about some other internal email functionality options. It looks like we may need to revisit the email functionality sooner than later and expand the reporting, history stuff, and error catching. We may also need to go in and create corp-specific emails and put them in place in order to cut down on the number of returned emails. Basically, this will limit exposure as well as let the client know what is going on with the emails that are sent.

Lots of emails and tech support. Some of the topics were data imports, new transitional PO's, internal email options, and sales and marketing ideas.

Email between Danny and Steve at adilas. They are looking to see where we best can use our marketing dollars. This email came from Danny Shuford.

Good morning Steve,
I think it would be good for me to start recapping our meetings on Friday.  This way I can go back and see where we need followup.
 
This morning we discussed looking at other vertical markets that we are already in.  I made the suggestion that we go back to adilas and pull reports to see which markets have been the most profitable for us.  I think it's easy to assume that has been the cannabis industry but as we discussed the cost of doing business in this industry is extremely high when you factor in development cost and what we would really need to be competitive in marketing and advertising against some of the already established giants in the industry.  
 
We might be better served at going after bowling pro shops for instance.  That market could expand to tennis, golf, frisbee golf, ski, etc.  These rec sports all have specialty shops that need a product like ours.
 
We also discussed other industries that have serialized inventory such as trailers, motorcycles, auto, mobile homes, storage containers, etc.
 
In summary I will start pulling reports so we can analyze this even deeper.

Went into town to give a demo to a tool company (kinda like a mini home depot or lowe's). They had three people in on the demo. It went pretty smooth. I was able to answer all of their questions. The one thing that they asked for, that we didn't fully have, was inventory alerts and full reordering thresholds. We have a mini/sorta version of that, but it could use some good loving.

I had an owner, an accountant, and a tech/computer guy in on the demo. They all had some great questions and we bounced all over the place. We setup a return meeting for after Thanksgiving. Fun to be out of the office and playing in the sales and training ground. It can get kinda lonely in the coding and developing world all the time. I like the interaction and just getting out. Good stuff.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We started out with some light catch-up on what everybody did over the weekend. Steve had a question on some ecommerce stuff. He is working on getting some tiered pricing out into ecommerce. Bryan Dayton came by my house to get the Dymo label printer. He is working on some custom labels for a client. Wayne popped in and gave us some updates on the servers. Having someone dedicated to watching and helping the servers out will be huge. Alan was on as well, working in the background while the meeting was going on.

Eric and I had a work session on the sub special account tracking project. This is where we are going to be allowing rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, and other special tracking needs. We spent most of the block reading over a brainstorming doc and refining it a bit more. We made a few decisions and added a number of new notes. Towards the end of the session, we even added a new payment type (money type) to the data 0 box for "Rewards/Loyalty". Our plan is to hit it again tomorrow.

See attached for a copy of the current notes.

Here is a new set of images and graphics from Naters (artist from Salida, CO), dealing with the adilas dog (mascot or marketing) concept and idea. The graphic shows concepts of: fast retrieval, organized inventory, efficient search, secure storage, and user friendly. See attached for some concept art. Fun.

Bryan and I jumped on a meeting. We went over three small projects and questions. One was some label stuff mixed with hardware and printer settings. Another was dealing with API access and outside processes affecting internal data. The other question was dealing with access to the data 11 server. Fairly short meeting.

Emails and light tech support.

Steve was showing us a small demo of some of his tiered pricing out in ecommerce. We had Kelly come on and gave him some feedback. It is literally crazy to hear what they, the users and consumers, really want. It gets super crazy and they want a multi-flipping gymnastic display with super easy functional and beautiful at the same time. The deeper we go, the more things are really flowing and trending towards more configuration settings and then being able to display things in a really simple format. Another thing that I am seeing is the need for specialized and specific interfaces, per business vertical. It is crazy how much people want and how quickly they want it. That makes for a tough mix.

Creating a layered approach seems to work better. The user experience is huge. On that same level, we are seeing a growing need for a developer to code it and a designer to help with flow and the user experience.

As Kelly and Steve got deeper in the ecommerce demo, they, were asking for more searchability, more multi select, more JavaScript show/hide filters and menus, etc. They want the moon and even demand it. Kelly would like to do a different session where they, (Steve, Kelly, and Dustin) go in and do a look around on other ecommerce sites and get ideas of good/bad/ugly and then make a plan from there.

These are some questions that are going on in my head, who is coordinating all of these decisions? How is it all going to work and play out? Who is funding what and who is driving what functions and features? Assuming that we have the funding, who is going to plan, design, and code it? Huge demands and huge questions.

The conversation started rolling over into complaints about look and feel, server up time and/or perceived up time, and other perceptions for the users. They were talking about levels and costs to get to those levels. It then got into a discussion between web, on-sight servers, software, hardware, hybrid solutions, apps, mobile, etc. What are the expectations and what is expected?

Kelly wants us to get pricing on what it would cost for this and that. Steve came back and was talking about how the system keeps growing and developing and who is going to pay for this and/or that. Kelly then was talking about costs and choices that need to be presented to the clients. If you want this and that, you need to pay for this and that. If you only want a smaller set, you would hope that you only need to play for that piece.

Steve was talking about the cost of, even say, your worst employee? It most likely will be $2,000 to $5,000 per month. What is the cost of the adilas system? Say maybe $200 - $400 per month. There is a known disconnect, the adilas system provides tons of functionality, but yet, the price is itsy bitsy tiny and therefore sometimes perceived as less important. The conversation then turned to how do we support the bigger clients and what are their needs.

Wayne popped in and was reporting on servers and server stability. FTP and FTPS - normal and/or secure file transfer protocol issues. He had some questions on how do we keep the servers up to date, synced up, and how do we manage the custom code (things that are different per server or per corporation). Custom code is somewhat of a wildcard piece and/or variable per server. We talked about core adilas code and custom code and how they relate and interact. We also talked about ways to manage custom code and who has what code and/or reports (we need a system of recording who has what and what it does). We have had requests on the client side - am I running custom code? We have also had requests on the tech support side - are they running custom code? We have also had some developers ask the same question - are they running custom code? Kinda interesting - lots of different angles to cover and what not.

I got a call from Bank of America to talk about some term loans and/or revolving business credit lines. I was on the phone for 20 minutes and the rep is going to be sending us some information. They have a couple nice looking products that have way better interest rates as compared with Kabbage and other high interest options.

Steve and I were talking about the future of software of a service is - we do build a product that has as many permissions and features as we can see to solve the needs. The future is that the clients want to customize the results and/or the output. They all want some kind of specialized output. Each client wants to mix and blend the variables in a different way. This could be seeing the data in a certain way (report and/or dashboards) or they have a slightly different process (add/subtract certain steps). Steve is seeing that there is a cost to switch systems, so we are hoping that our clients have basically, choose your platform and then invest in your solution to make it almost your own. Custom solutions that fit people's needs and how they want to play.

Sometimes with bigger clients, you actually get beat-up more and they still may not be happy. We need to find the clients that are happy with us and even bring us donuts... :) We want to find the correct level for us and our company. Bigger is not always better. From Shannon - it is an abundant model. That is awesome.

Picking your battles and multi-concept decision making. That is quite the game. Fun, but very challenging. Question - who wants to play? Great, let's play. Lots of indicators, you just have to make decisions according to those indicators. Adilas is a giant idea farm. We will keep building and breaking things. That is somewhat of our model. We want to help businesses succeed. Those who want to play with that model, we love it, let's play. On the financial side, we are so glad that we don't owe anybody huge amounts of money. That is freeing to the mind and the soul. Good stuff.

This is on a different note, we would really like to circle back around and see where we are at on the accounting side. Most of our current efforts are still focused on operations and operational flow and process. There is some huge potential for future growth in that area. We need to keep working on and refining our plan. The other area that could really use some loving is the user interface and the look and feel. There is a constant progression from one thing to the other. That is fun and exciting to see and even revisit those pieces.

Steve jumped back into a recap of where he started with the coding and development side - simple HTML and web stuff on the old steps to success. As you get deeper and deeper, you keep needing to step outside and get deeper in the complexity and background pieces. Lots of moving pieces under the hood, but it looks super simple on the outside.

 Steve and I are realizing that we can't do this whole project by ourselves. We have a great little team and we are even refining things within that model. That is exciting. It is the team that wins the battle, not an individual. We are learning tons and tons about the software as a service (SaaS) model. Our plan it to keep going at the current pace, keep building, and keep listening. Our plan is to run as fast as we are able within the bounds of not running faster than we are able.

We are happy to keep building up the core pieces. We are seeing numerous outside parties that are catching the vision and building out more and more custom stuff.

We currently do direct deposit. Research this for Wayne etc

On a call with Steve. We were looking over some tiered pricing options out in ecommerce. We did some coding, testing, and playing with the options. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about menu level selling. This is a small analogy to a restaurant menu, but menu level selling is basically saying, what would you like? Once we know that, we, inside or the user fulfilling the ticket, actually appropriates the correct item. The ecommerce part of it is just like a dinner menu, super vague, but it gets the ticket started. I think Steve was really getting it and buying into the menu level concept. Good session. 

Working with Bryan on the bulk edit PO page. We added in the sub barcodes and talked about adding in sub attributes to the bulk edit page. The sub barcode was pretty easy. The sub attributes was much tougher. We opted to break the project into two sections, that way we could release things quicker.

Dustin jumped on the GoToMeeting session and had some questions about his custom bulk cultivation page. We are working on the action page (making things stick and/or be recorded in the database). His code allows for small pieces to be selected and then either transferred and/or flipped between a phase of the cultivation cycle. His code gets pretty deep as it allows multiple things to be flipped at once. We spent the whole session going through a small build out process of taking what we have (passed through the form scope) and creating a complex data structure or object to represent what was submitted. Tons of arrays and structures within the arrays. We had to write things out in plain English before building it... it was quite deep. We finished up and left him in a good spot with some minor tweaks to make for that part of the page logic work. He still has more to go, but I feel good about that part of the logic map.

- Tons of emails and light tech support from things over the Thanksgiving weekend.

- Brandon and Steve talking about updates on people - we were talking about Shannon, Russell, and Dave Forbis.

- Alan popped in and had some questions about his new projects. He is working on discounts on my cart favorite buttons.

- We lightly talked about vertical (business verticals or industry-specific) templates and settings. Make it easy to cater to specific verticals.

- Talking about system stats and storing that info in a daily watcher or feeder type table. We also talked about queued back end services that run on daily routines. We also talked about pulling reports and monitoring growth and changes.

- We were also talking about "rules" or standards per vertical (industry). Each industry is different, and thus may need some general rules based on the type of industry that they are. Basing the pricing off of processing and storage vs charging for the code. Some users may or may not be using certain features and/or modules. This discussion ended up going into questions about what do we want to do with the adilas databases (make it bigger and better or break it up into small faster pieces). This is still an active discussion and we are trying to gather pros and cons of both.

- Alan was talking about vertical and horizontal scaling - add more and more servers (distributed or cluster model) vs single server and up the capacity and resources. This lead into a small discussion on back-ups, redundancy, and disaster recovery options. Currently, we are doing somewhat of a modified horizontal scaling method.

- Steve had some questions about the API socket level and what that load may be and/or take?

- Alan had some ideas on risk mitigation and how to help our clients even do their own risk mitigation processes. Lots of talk about what are the vulnerabilities and how do you treat, track, and deal with those vulnerabilities. It always tends to come back to an analysis of what is the threat and how much do I care, need, want, and/or require? Talks about server up time and reliability. What maters most and what are we willing to pay for and/or spend?

- We would love to show all of the corporations (virtual worlds) what their stats are and what we (as adilas) are carrying and helping them out with. That helps us show a benefit and advantage for those who use adilas.

- We lightly talked about an offline adilas mode and allowing a user to use the main web system, if a problem, they could use a local copy, and then sync up things later on. This sounds awesome, but it could be a huge project and could be riddled with loop holes and gotcha's. Possible, but hard to tell what the real costs are and/or would be.

- The technology wave and what is here, coming, and already gone (outdated). We are constantly riding those waves and making decisions. Alan lives down there in Arizona and could maybe pop in and check things out with the actual server farm. We could even branch out and spread out our exposure to other server farms.

- We could update older servers to help with stability and up time. We could upgrade to using solid state drives, bigger processors, more RAM memory, and updated server and software packages. That could be a great upgrade for the time being. We also talked about optimizing our existing servers by tweaking settings and such (performance tuning).

- We may end up needing some new training on how to configure and upgrade the things that we need. This is just a possibility, but there is an upcoming ColdFusion summit convention coming up in April 9-10, in Washington, DC. Just looking at ideas and options. Our goal is to get the most out of what we can by either upgrading to the newest models and/or versions and getting the proper training needed to make it dance and sing. ColdFusion is allowing more and more scripting languages and is gaining some momentum.

- There was some small talk about upgrading from Windows servers to Linux servers. Wayne is the one that knows a lot there. Lots of possibilities.

- Some new shortcuts and getting up to speed. Alan was showing us some coding shortcuts. Params, is defined, and quick conditional processing. Things like a turnary operator (one line true or false if statement - switch), elvis operator (reference something and it is able to self-define if it doesn't exist but will use a real value if it exists - less breaking code for things that are undefined).

- There are many paths that we could take and would work. Let's make a plan and then work that plan.

- What we do is not easy. There are so many moving parts and pieces. As we build, we keep finding that it comes back down to more and more permissions and settings. Subs of subs. Eventually, it could become simple if you get enough sub pieces built into the mix. Kinda crazy.

- We are also seeing more and more needs for bulk tools and such.

- We are also seeing that people are really looking for a system that could do almost everything with both global tweaks (per business vertical) and also granular control (permissions, settings, etc.). Almost a wish list of sorts.

- As we get out, in the field, we may end up adding some icing here and there. Maybe even some icing per business vertical.

- On black box stuff - what if we had a list of what happens and/or what black box code is running? We may need to use some kind of technology to help us monitor and/or use what black box code that is out there. Maybe a way to notify our developers, consultants, and even our users what code they are using.

- Small concepts - creating an adilas fracture account - future concept once we get a few of the other pieces in place. This was an idea from Steve, clear back in 6/22/17. We would basically, allow the normal or classic adilas to keep going, and then start building out the adilas fracture accounts. Everything would be broken up into tiny modular controls but would also have bulk tools, templates, and industry specific defaults to help play the game. This subject could take up volumes, as far as other ideas and concepts that we would like to include. Super cool idea and future project.

- Steve would like to see us work on breaking out users from the systems... They, the user pools, exist and can interact as needed but they become their own entity - Imagine pools of professional (adilas community members and power users) users that could work for other companies as needed. Separate users and systems, even more than what they currently are. Steve has some good ideas on that. Kinda like a marketplace for features and functions as well as power users, employees, and people talent. Fun ideas.

Emails and recording expenses.

Bryan and I jumped on a GoToMeeting session. He had some questions about creating a super simple form and then having that form populate a quote. His questions were dealing with the amount of data that needs to be looked up and gone through before adding a quote line item. Some of his questions were dealing with calculating taxes, discounts, costing, etc. I showed him a couple of pages that already do similar things and hopefully pointed him in the right direction.

As a side note, it sounds so simple... (certain user requests) however in the background, we have to have the system doing multiple back flips in order to make everything go where it needs to. Kinda interesting. Appearance vs reality.

Emails, tech support, and general to do list stuff.

On the morning meeting with Steve. We merged in some of his code and then made a few new changes. Alan popped in and gave us a small report. Dustin was also on the meeting and working on his own stuff.

Eric popped in towards the end of the main morning meeting. He and Steve were talking about category level rules on expiration dates and how to track and process items as they age over time. Basically, keeping track of expiration dates and helping to flag and move inventory to help keep things fresh and moving.

There was also some discussion about part/item categories and parent attributes. Both tools are well used and there is some cross over between them. The difference is how many things may be applied per item. Only a single item category may be assigned per item, but an unlimited number of parent attributes may be applied. Sometimes, the clients and users, and doing some mixing and blending. We may need to keep looking at that and maybe even allow for some rules, flow processes, etc. What we are hearing is the need for high level rules and then applying those rules to the items that are cascaded under that category. Basically, grouping and sub grouping, even inside the categories. Steve and Eric would like some other filter options for the main categories. Almost a mix and blend of categories and attributes.

There is still a growing need for sub categories within the main part/item categories. It is amazing how many new feature requests keep coming in on a daily basis. Pretty crazy.

This is just a side note... but we are getting more and more requests for some of the subs of elements of time to be applied to other pieces of the system (other 12 main player groups). We would love to push that out and allow for it to happen, but it just hasn't been built out yet. These are things like: color codes, sub dates/times, sub flags and tags, sub locations, sub phases, sub grouping, sub notes and comments, and sub sign-off's, and such. We have tons of ideas on this (virtual adoption process between elements of time, subs of time, and other system players). I'm excited to see where these things go. As a side note, we could create daily elements of time for certain things and/or tasks (this almost creates its own group) and then you move things or flip things from there.

We are also seeing a problem with some companies that use adilas for just one or two processes, but they don't use adilas for the whole thing. That creates problems because things can't flow from phase to phase and state to state. They are kinda wanting things to flow to a certain level and then just magically appear over in some other section. That gets tough to automate that because it is basically skipping steps.

Steve was showing Eric how to setup custom page settings and storing those values in JSON. As another side note, our original goal for the custom page settings was to give every page an id number (web_page_id from the web_pages table). We also wanted to give every CFC method or virtual API socket connection a similar web_page_id number. That way we could track what is being used and how often (behind the scenes stats). We started that process, but got pulled off due to other projects that needed attention. This is a huge piece of the puzzle and would really help if we go to the full adilas fracture account level. Dealing with page level id's, we also need to figure out what is needed for black box takeovers and extended settings of settings and/or conditional settings. It gets pretty deep fairly quickly.

Steve was just dreaming, but he would love to see the adilas application as an artist pallet where you could pick and choose your widgets and where to place them. Basically a build your own dashboard and build your own layout. Steve would also love to see a configurable shopping cart, where users could pick and choose what they wanted to see. Just some dreams.

Another huge observation today... Steve was showing Eric (who has done tons of development for us) around the system. This was huge for Eric and he could see and catch the vision. Sometimes you don't even know what you do not know. One of the down sides to adilas is the current size of the application. It is huge and has tons to offer, because of that, some people never venture into certain areas, even though they could really use the functionality offered. Maintenance and training are huge concepts that need to be pushed and available to our users.

Steve - Question - Is that even a tree you want to cut down? Steve was cutting trees as a winter job, just out of High School, and was talking to a old sawyer (tree cutter) and the older guy was telling Steve to leave a certain tree alone because it wasn't worth it. Steve was young and wanted to conquer and do a good job. The tree had some old barbed wire embedded in the bottom of the trunk. The old sawyer was telling him to leave it alone because it would be a ton of work and may end up ruining your chainsaw. Business is like that, you may not want to cut down every tree in the forest. Abundant model - next! Great advice.

After the morning meeting part of things, we flipped over and started working more on sub special account tracking (rewards and loyalty points) stuff. The first part of the session was just Eric getting some things off his chest as far as project scope, and what will be part of round 1 vs round 2 deployment. See the attached notes. Some of the thoughts were dealing with existing custom code, cross-corp integration options, how best to stack the multi-corp model and allowing for some kind of shared customers between systems. Some of the ideas came down to either wait until later and/or do some application flex grid and some cross mapping to help things happen.

After Eric left, Steve and I started talking about adilas goals, direction, and who we are and where we are headed. We have received a number of emails about certain clients not being happy with what we offer and threating to move off of our platform. That is nothing new, but we were just talking about our take on things and the direction that we want to go.

Meeting with Dave Forbis and going over his assisted living flow chart stuff. He has posted 3 different flow charts to date. We spent a good hour and I took a number of notes on what he is thinking and where things are going. Dave has been working on ideas, concepts, how data will flow in/out and interact between the facilities and adilas. Great stuff. See the element of time # 4147 here in the shop.

Shannon jumped on just before 3 pm. She listened in as Dave and I were talking and chatting. Once we were done, we talked about getting some of the adilas developers up and on the adilas market or in the adilas world (marketplace stuff). That is great place to start. There is already a huge demand for that service.

Around 4 to 4:15 pm - Janna popped in and we covered some WordPress stuff and some small tasks that she is going to do. She is a technical writer and will be helping us with content and making sure things are good to go there. This was the first time that she virtually met both Shannon and I. We told her that eventually, we would have her helping Shannon and I on the adilas user guide.

The last part of the session was actually going through and working on the adilas user guide. We did a small session and were recording some notes to help us document each of the players and what they do and/or may do. Nice little work session. Shannon and I rescheduled for next week to continue chipping away at our internal projects. Good stuff.

Somewhat of a quiet morning this morning. Steve was flying out to Grand Junction, CO, to meet with a new adilas developer. His name is Spencer. My first task of the day was getting a non-compete and non-disclosure document ready for Spencer. Alan popped in and had some questions about discounts for my cart favorite buttons. We went over some options and ideas.

I spent some time adding drill-down links to advanced search reports (PO's and invoices). I chatted with Wayne about digital file uploads and importing inventory for a client. After that, I worked with Eric more on the sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, rewards, and gift cards). See attached for the latest notes.

I just wanted to record a note about bulk price changes and discounts. Currently we have a permission and a special page that allows price changes in bulk. It only deals with the parent items. It does, however, allow for a salesprice change or a mark-up change in bulk. I'm thinking that the same tool may need some more power. I would love to be able to update prices for sub or children items as well as set global discounts. That same tool might really benefit from some web or ecommerce specific functions as well. It could include show/hide on the web, special web pricing, and other sales options listed above, such as price changes and discounts.

The current permission is: id=74 and the actual page name is: top_secret/secure/global_parts_home.cfm

Maybe think about beefing that report and page up a bit. I really think that it could help.

Merged in and uploaded new changes to the advanced search reports. Uploaded 8 pages with some tweaks. Also added some new links to the global price change report from some of the parts and items reports and home pages.

Went into town and met with Mindy at Industrial Tool. We spent the afternoon getting their adilas account up and configured. We went over logins, setting up users, permissions, departments, clock in/out, admin time clock stuff, settings, look and feel, and some other general training. Good session and Mindy seems like she will pick it up pretty quickly. I left her with some light homework (users, permissions, department assignments, and expense types). We have a return appointment for next week for some deeper inventory training.

Recording notes and creating reminders and other clean-up stuff. Light tech support and emails.

Steve reported about his meeting with Spencer yesterday (flight out to Grand Junction, CO). It sounds like Spencer is quite sharp and also really likes to work with CSS, user interfaces, and graphical look and feel stuff (UX or GUI stuff). That would be really cool. We could really use a good designer and maybe even a person to help train us on what to do as well. I would be super stoked on that.

Steve had a question on how to filter some data out in ecommerce land. His current project is a work around for showing tiered pricing out in ecommerce. We started out looking where he was at on the normal big huge pages (ecommerce searches and search results pages). That was pretty deep, so we did a full test page and coded a small sample file to get us the info that we needed (concept and database level). It was a good exercise and we literally went clear back to the beginning and brought up the small test page from virtually nothing. That exercise helped both of us realize more about parent attributes and where and how things are stored in the database. That project was originally done by Russell and Alan, so we knew about it, but didn't really have deep hand-on knowledge. Good stuff.

After Steve and I finished, I worked with Dustin on doing some sub filtering on his custom cultivation pages. Basically, we ran a pre-query to get certain matching records and then then used those records to filter the next major (actual) query. We then worked on some dynamic AJAX calls. It was working if we called his helper files in smaller chunks, but it would break if we passed too many requests to the helper and builder page. We did what we could and eventually I recommended that Dustin get ahold of Alan to work out the deeper details.

Working with Bryan on coming up with a plan to help limit certain my cart favorite buttons and only allow them to be used if a certain password was entered. This is for specials (special pricing and/or discounts)... basically, the client doesn't want the user to be able to use the special buttons unless they get clearance by a manager. We came up with a whole page of possible options. Bryan has that file.

Our best idea, without going into all of the details was, creating the special buttons as private buttons vs public buttons (existing feature). We could then add a new button to the view cart page where they could click it and go to a page that prompted for the password. It would then show the special private buttons. They could then use the private buttons from that page. There were a number of other questions, concerns, known issues, etc., but that is the super skinny version. It still could be a pretty decent sized project. Some of the other options were doing multi-page black box options and controlling the page flow tigher. The one above seemed the easiest without going into brain surgery (pretty deep and cascading changes).

Recording notes, quick phone calls, and emails.