Your customers can look up the status of their repair jobs online, freeing your staff from repeated phone calls.
Each new license purchase of AYS comes with a free trial of RepairStatus.net – our hosted solution for your repair status data.
Follow these steps to set up your Repair Status data upload:
Startup
Run the Process Manager. This can be found in your Start menu by searching for “Process Manager”. In previous versions of the software, it was called “Internet Utility”. You can also launch it from the File menu in AYS. The utility will look like this:
Notice the arrow is showing which database is opened by the utility. In this instance, the sample database is open. You will need to open your current database if it is not shown in this area of the application.
You can see the status of all of the tasks, running, waiting, paused or disabled. On the bottom status bar you can also see the overall status of the Process Manager – in this case, it is “Idle”.
You can choose to minimize the application to the system tray (the area next to your system clock), which will clear up your task bar. You can configure this option under File – Minimize – To System Tray. You can also choose to immediately minimize the window as soon as it is launched.
Configuring the Web Site Upload Process
Click on the Setup menu and choose “Repair Status Web Site…” (or right-click on the “Generate Repair Status Web Site” task).
This will bring up the configuration dialog for Repair Status Web Site.
This page will allow you to enable or disable the task. If the checkbox is unchecked, the other tabs will be disabled.
This will show the options for triggering the process, including the interval between runs and the daily start and stop time for the process to function.
The first option in the destination tab will automatically configure the fields for single-record and multiple-record lookup. Click the globe icon to the right of the field to preview the site in your browser.
If you purchased the option to upload the data to your own web server, then you can configure the destination in the other two tabs, either to a Local Network Folder or upload it via FTP.
The next tab lets you set a limit for how long completed repair orders (completed or refused, with no balance owing) will be uploaded, as well as the message that shows above the entry fields on the initial single-record lookup page.
The next tab will allow you to attach a web-ready logo on your web page. Please note: there will be no automatic resizing of this logo on the web. You can see the dimensions on this screen, verify that this is correct.
The final tab will allow you to specify an action and error report via email if you choose. You can also log the actions of all Process Manager actions for later analysis and troubleshooting.
Running as a Windows Service
By default, the Process Manager runs as a standalone Windows application, requiring the user to log in and have the application running. It is also possible to run it as a Windows service, which runs in the background and can also run without the user logging in to a desktop session.
To begin, click Startup – Install Process Manager Service.
When you click this, Windows will prompt you with an administrative prompt, asking if you want to allow this. As soon as you allow it, a bar at the top will show you the status of the service. Initially, the service will be stopped.
You can start the service using the Startup menu option. You can also see the service in the Windows services application. You can see the Process Manager here set to start up automatically.
The Process Manager runs as the Local System Account, which may not have access to the database file. You can ensure that the file is accessible to this user by adjusting the permissions, or you can configure the service to run as if a particular user was logged on to the system. If so, the service will inherit the file access permissions for that user. Similarly, if the user connects to a SQL database using Windows authentication, then you will have to configure the service to use that user to connect to the SQL Server.
Click on the service and choose the Log On tab to adjust this if necessary.
1 person found this article useful
1 person found this article useful