Featured Article Archives

Eric Shank, Product Manager at Avectra, writes on What's coming in netFORUM Enterprise 2010

What's coming in netFORUM Enterprise 2010
by Eric Shank

We are excited to announce that the release of netFORUM Enterprise 2010 is currently planned for September 2010. We are very excited about the new features planned for this release. Some of the features will include:

• Address Forms Designed Based on Country
• Group Registration Discounts
• Guest Registration
• Send Updated Confirmation to Registrant
• Allow Credits to be Used on eWeb
• Reports from eWeb

Read the full article for the complete list. (more...)

Avneet Bakshi, Senior Report Developer at Avectra, writes on Keys to Successful netFORUM Report Development

Keys to Successful netFORUM Report Development
by Avneet Bakshi

Avectra’s netFORUM product provides a world class platform to capture and track your day to day enterprise data. While the product enables capturing your data in a wide variety of formats and modes, its Reporting Module provides an equally impressive array of options through which you can review and analyze the data that is the heart of your enterprise. Avectra has gone thru through great lengths to anticipate general and specific reporting needs of our clients and hence bundled our product with a multitude of baseline reports that are vertically oriented with every major functional module. Despite that, we leave the door open to be able to create new or tailor an existing report to specific needs of our clients. This article summarizes the key steps involved with creating such reports. (more...)

Doug Brown, Senior Project Manager at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful netFORUM Implementation

Keys to a Successful netFORUM Implementation
by Doug Brown

A successful implementation requires a strong bind between Avectra and the Association/Client. For every Association, the capital, time and resource investment in a new AMS is a significant one. Typically the stakeholders in the implementation include the Board, the management team, the best resources throughout the organization and, most importantly, the members. The stakes are high --- as well as the perceived risks. (more...)

Kumar Thiagarajan, Senior Technical Manager at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful netFORUM SRA

Keys to a Successful netFORUM SRA
by Kumar Thiagarajan

The System Requirements Analysis phase (SRA) is the most critical phase of your project. Its purpose is to obtain a clear and thorough understanding of the business processes and break them down into discrete requirements which are reviewed and agreed upon. You want to get all your requirements and solutions straightened out in this phase as this will determine how smooth the implementation will be. Any changes in this stage will not cost as much compared to changes made during or after implementation. Inadequate attention to Requirements Analysis can result in a critically vulnerable project that does not deliver the functionality it was intended for. These are some of the important steps that you could take to ensure that you use the SRA phase as a strong foundation for your project. (more...)

Edward E. Joynes, Senior System Analyst at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful netFORUM Data Conversion

Keys to a Successful netFORUM Data Conversion
by Edward E. Joynes

After the system requirements analysis (SRA) phase is completed, it comes time to implement the design detailed during the SRA process. In addition to setup, and custom development, Avectra will work with you to transform and load your existing data into netFORUM. This effort is carried out by the Data Conversion team, a section of the Technical Services group that is dedicated to getting your valuable data into your new netFORUM system.

Every organization is different, and accordingly, so too is their data, but there are steps that can be taken to make any data conversion run more smoothly. In this article we will look at the data conversion process and suggest some simple things that can help insure a successful data conversion. (more...)

Sarah Palmatier, Business Analyst at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful netFORUM Setup

Keys to a Successful netFORUM Setup
by Sarah Palmatier

One of the areas that you should plan to invest time into is the setup of your new netFORUM site. Do not make the mistake of minimizing the efforts needed to start the netFORUM product off right! This setup process is important, because it lays the foundation for how your association will use netFORUM for years to come. Beyond the long term impact, though, your system simply won’t work if certain things are not set up properly. One of the biggest keys to a successful go live is to set your site up correctly *prior* to go live. (more...)

Tien T. Le, Customer Support Manager at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful Post-Implementation

Keys to a Successful Post-Implementation
by Tien T. Le

The final stage in a netForum implementation is the transition to Support. You have signed a netForum contract. You have worked through development cycles, cuts of data conversion, and have gone live with the software. After going live you continued to work with Avectra to address lingering issues. Now you have reached the oasis. Your netForum implementation has reached maturity and it’s time to transition to Support. Welcoming you is Avectra’s Enterprise Customer Support department, a team dedicated to excellence, who routinely receives the highest ratings from our clients. Here are some insights on what to expect during your transition. (more...)

Carlos Restrepo, CAE, Manager of Consulting Technical Services at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful Post-Implementation

Keys to a Successful Post-Implementation
by Carlos Restrepo, CAE

During your implementation there is a great deal of focus on your Go-live date. This is the target that implementation teams on both sides work towards achieving. The day arrives and your staff is now using netFORUM Enterprise to process real transactions, search for records, send out membership renewals, etc. Congratulations!! Now what? (more...)

Eric Shank, Senior Technical Manager at Avectra, writes on Keys to a Successful netFORUM Implementation

Keys to a Successful netFORUM Implementation
by Eric Shank

As Avectra has grown, our implementations have grown as well. Project timelines used to average 2-3 months, but in the past year or so, our average has grown to the 6-9 month timeframe, with some lasting in excess of a year. The scopes of our projects have increased as well. We used to measure projects per developer, now we are evaluating developers per project. With this type of increase, the need for greater investment in process and management is magnified. I recently went through one of the largest implementations ever for Avectra and have compiled some thoughts on what made things go smoothly. (more...)

Designed Child Form Menu

Designed Child Form Menus allow you to output Child Forms directly on a netFORUM Form as a "fly out" when a user hovers over a hyperlink. This feature is developed using the netFORUM Toolkit and a Form Extension. The example pictured here shows this feature on the Centralized Order Entry page. The Product Prerequisites that appear when hovering over the hyperlink are based on a Child Form.

This feature uses the Avectra.netForum.Extension.Utility.PaintChildForm method in the Form Extension. The Child Form should generally be used for display purposes only; add/edit/delete/goto functionality is not necessarily supported for child forms displayed in this manner. The Child Form Select SQL in the child form for this functionality can parse values from the object that the form is based on. (more...)

A year ago today, Avectra launched this website to move our knowledgebase in a new direction. Our vision was to have all of our knowledge in one unified place, fully searchable, easily cross-referenced, instantly deployed, open to the whole world, and editable for anyone who wants to improve it.

Now on http://wiki.avectra.com's 3,279 pages, you’ll find training exercises, AUDC presentations, reference documentation, programming code samples, feature articles, database dictionaries, build/release notes, integration specifications, and more, all in one place.

We have big goals for our second year, including:

• With CRM and Events almost done, next we’ll move on to Accounting, Membership, Inventory and the rest of the user documentation.

• With our Toolkit, CMS, Reports and xWeb reference documentation built out, next our technical team wants to expand our .NET API documentation and our Data Model.

• Supplement the core reference documentation with deeper analysis. We don’t just want to tell you how to close a batch, but what happens when you do.

• To encourage more contributions, we are adding community pages for more unstructured FAQ items, tips and tricks, and other insights that might not fit on the more tightly structured main pages.

• All build release notes will be entered here instead of in PDF's.

• As Avectra develops its Sharepoint solutions, we might migrate this site into a Sharepoint website, along with discussion groups, blogs, and more Web 2.0 capabilities.

If you have any other suggestions, please let us know. To the site's 122 contributors, thank you. As we blow out the candle to celebrate our first year, we look forward with hope and excitement to the next year. (more...)

This featured article is the first in a series of in-depth technical analyses of key baseline processes. See Baseline processes series for more.

Membership Status Change Process UML

The Mass Membership Status Change Process is used to change the Member Status of members that have not paid for their renewals. The process provides filter criteria so that a subset of memberships could be updated at one time. The process also provides a report that can be reviewed before running the final update to change the status.

Typically, this process is run after the memberships expire, but before mass termination is run. This allows association to stop the benefits for non-paying members, but not necessarily terminate them. (more...)

More Info button

To access the data, "hover over" (or click) the More Info button, which links a form displaying the additional information e.g. on the Membership child form on the Individual Profile page, the form will have additional information regarding the membership record.

Child Form Preview Form

If you hover over the More Info button of a record that has specific data, you can view additional information such as the termination reason or information about which package the member purchased. (more...)

Be part of the industry's most productive and enjoyable user conference. Attend informative and enlightening sessions about all of Avectra's products and services. Find out how you can benefit from netFORUM's vast array of features and functionality.

At AUDC 2008 you will learn about:

• Significant new functionality available in netFORUM 2.1 (2007.01)
• Customer case studies
• What's new with our growing list of partners
• Looking ahead: Technology platform & framework enhancements

Who should attend? Executives, Staff, and IT personnel

Executives will see how netFORUM enhances the bottom line; Staff will see how they can benefit from netFORUM in their day-to-day membership management tasks; IT personnel will see how they can help their organization benefit from netFORUM's extensible architecture.

Go to the AUDC 2008 website for online registration and to learn more. (more...)

Child Form

On the left is a simple child form showing States that belong to a Country. From a child form, you can add new child records, or edit, delete or go to existing child records, by clicking on the corresponding buttons (see netFORUM 2.0 User Interface).

Though most commonly displayed on a Profile Pages under a Profile Tab, they are used on forms throughout netFORUM to show related records to a parent record. Child forms can also be used for Duplicate check child form and for Correspondence Template Child Form HTML. (more...)

Form with UpdateGridControl

Suppose, for example, that we have a simple data model with a table for a TV Network (the parent) and a one-to-many child table for TV Network Customers. We want to be able to add a new TV Network and multiple TV Network Customers on one page as shown below in the nearby image.

In this scenario, on the parent object (TV Network), we have a data object pointing to the TV Network Customer table; this is a one-to-many data object from the object (TV Network) of the form you want to add an UpdateGridControl, to the object (TV Network Customer) of the form you will design as a Grid Control.

See the Toolkit Training exercise UpdateGridControl for detailed instructions and a case study on how to use this control. (more...)

Form Designer

netFORUM's Form Designer is the user interface to design and manipulate netFORUM Forms.

netFORUM’s Form Designer gives the developer a virtually WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) canvas to design a form. Every input, label, DIV, form extension, image, hyperlink or other item on a Dynamic Form is called a Form Control.

The top portion of the Form Designer is the Design Area. The Design Area is the visual presentation of the form.

The bottom portion of the Form Designer allows the developer to configure each control on the Design Area, and to perform other operations.

From the Form Designer, a developer may manipulate the layout or tab order of form controls, add new controls and extensions, and configure the behavior and attributes of form controls. (more...)

A netFORUM client working with xWeb in PHP has some insights to share. There are some reports that PHP and IIS have problems agreeing on the correct way to work over HTTPS, so occasionally PHP requests over HTTPS will fail with PHP Warning: SoapClient::__construct(): SSL: fatal protocol error. Usually the problem resolves itself within the hour, but each site installation is different and should be thoroughly tested before production use.

When xWeb returns an Object that has results from an aliased table, the results come over as alias.pfx_col_name. Parsing the object xWeb returns into a SimpleXMLObject creates a PHP object with attributes named after the column names, but with an aliased table the period causes issues when retrieving the value. One workaround is to store the name of the column in a varible, and use the variable to retrieve the object value. For example:

print $exhibitor->ExhContact.cst_ind_full_name_dn; // throws error
$exh_cst_ind_full_name_dn = "ExhContact.cst_ind_full_name_dn";
print $exhibitor->$exh_cst_ind_full_name_dn ; //works successfully

Designed Form Menu sample

Designed Form Menus display designed Toolkit Forms that have been designed with netFORUM’s toolkit and Form Designer. This feature is especially useful as static “detail pages” in master/detail scenarios, e.g. if you are on a profile and would like to show additional detail information about the master record without taking away the real estate of the profile form. Additionally, the designed form menus can also contain shortcut hyperlinks or images without even containing any detail information. They are as flexible as designed forms. (more...)