RPMS News You Can Use
Volume II, Issue 2, December 2006
In this issue...

An update is available - Version 7.5.30  

RPMS-ASP (Application Service Provider) Survey Results

Tech Advice: Purging and Archiving Reduce File Sizes, Improve Performance

Tech Advice: Improving Performance by checking your server and workstation settings

An update is available - Version 7.5.30 top

This month we are providing a download update for all EMA-covered customers.  To be able to run this update you must be an EMA subscriber through December of  2006 or beyond, and you must currently be running Version 7.5.13 or higher.

If you believe that you are eligible to install this update, you may want to double check to be sure that you have applied the EMA code you were sent when you last enrolled, and that you have installed the CD sent in August.  From within RPMS, click Help, then About RPMS V7.  The first line shows the version number, which must be Version 7.5.13 or higher.  The last line of the message indicates the last EMA coverage code applied.  The update will not be allowed to run if the EMA Covered Through date is prior to December 1, 2006, and the update will not work correctly if applied to a version older than 7.5.13.

This update contains
The complete details of the contents of the update can be found right here.  To download this update, please visit the Downloads page of our re-designed web site, and click on the link RPMS Version 7 Update.

RPMS-ASP Survey Results  top

Thank you to the many respondents who filled out and faxed back our RPMS-ASP (Application Service Provider) Marketing Survey. If you missed that survey, you can have a look at it right here.  It describes a new model of software and computing services delivery that has gained traction in recent years.

For the survey of current customers we had a 22% response rate. Of those, 64% were not interested at all, 30% were somewhat interested and 6% were very interested.  We also polled former customers, or customers that are running older versions of RPMS.  We had a 5% response rate from that group, but the interest percentages were very similar.

Thanks again for your responses - though the results would seem not to support a marketing or development push in this direction, 6% is actually a reasonably significant number of customers, and we will continue to pursue this as a potential service.

Some of the results also seemed to suggest other ideas, perhaps less dramatic than moving the entire platform.  For example, customers seemed to like the idea of automatic updates and RPMS-maintained backups.  These are also ideas that we will explore.

Tech Advice: Purging and Archiving Reduce File Sizes, Improve Performance top

Did you know that you can improve the performance of RPMS reports by using the Purging and Archiving functions in the Administration system?  To launch the Admin system (Files, Administration) no other users can be logged into RPMS, and you must know the supervisor password.

Purging is the process of taking older detail data and deleting it from the system. To purge, select Utilities, Purge.  Archiving is the process of taking older historical and/or detail data and moving it to a static file where limited management can occur.

Both concepts are explained in more detail in the RPMS Administrator's Guide (Start, Program Files, RPMS, RPMS V7, Tools & Doc) on pp. 3 - 5.

Tech Advice: Improving Performance by checking your workstation and server settings   top

The easiest speed boost we've seen for networks is to carefully and completely review virus control checking software on the server and each workstation.  Often two or more workstations AND the server are set up to constantly check the RPMSData folder.  None of them should check it in real time, though probably one of them should check it nightly.  There are no Com or Exe programs, or scripts or anything like that in the RPMSData folder, nor should there ever be, so it's reasonably safe to run this way. 

We've observed that McAfee really degrades performance. Norton's is better, but should still be tuned to exclude the RPMSData folder. You should NEVER have a single workstation with two virus checking applications running simultaneously.  And you should not have two different computers checking the RPMSData folder at the same time.

Occasionally we have seen workstations that have seriously flawed performance due to a mapped drive being off-line or locked up.  On some of our own machines here at RPMS, if one of the older machines that is mapped (peer-to-peer) is locked up, we can almost immediately feel it as degraded performance, especially when displaying Windows File Open dialog boxes on Windows 2000 machines.  The lesson: Only map to drives and folders that you need, and be sure that they're all available and ready.

If the data is stored on a server and that machine is running other heavy processes or applications, that can degrade performance - though it it actually pretty rare.

Workstations that don't have enough memory can be too slow.  We recommend at least 512K RAM for XP.  All of our XP workstations have 1GB of RAM.

In some cases, where there are four or more users hitting large files - say 1GB or more - or if five or more users are in all the time, even with moderately-sized files - you can improve performance by migrating to a client-server version of RPMS.  We run it here, and are very pleased with the performance.  Even though we typically only have five or six of us in the corporate database at any given time, we have a couple of Reptivity files that are each over 1GB, so felt justified to make the switch. 

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