TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #35 - April 2005

Welcome to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Community Web Site Service.

In this issue:

• INTRO: Welcome and Important Announcements
• SALES DEPARTMENT: Ready to Do Some Spring Cleaning?
• WHAT'S NEW: 10 New Updates to Your TOPS Web Site(s)
• UPCOMING EVENTS: Live Chat - What's New!
• FEATURE TEACHER: More About What's New!
• Q & A: How Do I Scan Resumes and Upload to Our Web Site for The Board to Review?
• CONTACT: Contact Information for TOPS Software

TOPS Web Sales: (800) 556-7852 WebSales@topssoft.com
TOPS Web Support (800) 899-5689 WebSupport@topssoft.com

Read this issue and archived issues of the TOPS Home Ezine online at: http://www.topshome.com/topshome/Administrators/

Feedback: insider@topssoft.com

 

SALES DEPARTMENT: Ready to do some Spring Cleaning?

Do you have associations with boxes and boxes of information stored in closets, under desks or a backroom?

A TOPS Interactive Web Site is the perfect repository for long term retention and storage of important community documents, historical photos, past issues of newsletters, vendor contracts and so much more.

What a terrific way to keep community officers and residents informed! Important information can be passed from one board to the next without any knowledge loss. A TOPS Interactive Web Site allows residents to see their 12-month payment history, to see their unit's history of ACC Violations and submitted Work Orders. Just think of the convenience of downloadable documents e.g. Rules & Regulations, Bylaws and Forms. The information is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week via the Internet, reducing calls to the office, not to mention the savings on postage and paper with less snail mail and faxing!

How would you like to clear away those "AP Invoice" folders and tickler files from you desk?

Using your TOPS Interactive Web Site and TOPS 2000(tm) With Online A/P Approval, another great web site feature that’s quickly gaining in popularity, allows you to automate your AP Invoice approval process. Imagine not having to drag all those copies of bills to the board meeting and wait while each one is reviewed! Fully integrated with TOPS 2000™, it’s available to customers with a TOPS Interactive Web Site at NO ADDITIONAL COST!

Simply activate Online A/P Approval using the easy to use Setup Wizard. Setup your users, approval requirements, and dollar amount limits and start automatically uploading invoices from your TOPS 2000(tm) Accounts Payable system to your web site ready for Board Members to login and approve them!

Once approved the invoices get downloaded to TOPS 2000™ ready for you to print checks. Combine Online AP Approval with MICR Check Printing and Digital Signature for MICR Check Printing, now you’ve really streamlined your entire AP process.

Contact TOPS Web Sales at (800) 556-7852 or WebSales@topssoft.com for more details!

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WHAT'S NEW: 10 New Updates to your TOPS web site(s)

• Added a limited feature Search Routine!
• Improved the Name Parsing in TOPS 2000™ to allow Secondary Owner uploads.
• You can now send an email bulletin just to residents that are using a particular Internet Service Provider.
• Added a sort order to the events within a particular day on the calendar.
• Calendar Print now allows printing of calendars up until 2010.
• You can now log transcripts of a Live Chat session to a file so the web site administrator can print or save the transcript. (contact support for more info on this)
• Monthly View of the Events Calendar,individual events are now hyperlinks to the full details of the event.
• Events Calendar/Compact View has been increased the width to allow the date/time to be listed side by side.
• Added the ability for Web Reports Manager to upload to multiple Internet servers per the community configuration.
• Corrected Online Payments upload so that City, State, and Zip pulls data from location of homes under Owner, Control Info.

  If you have any questions about how these enhancements work please contact TOPS Web Support at WebSupport@topssoft.com or (800) 899-5689.
  

UPCOMING EVENTS: Live Chat - What's New!

We will be hosting our next scheduled live chat for TOPS Web Site Administrators on Thursday, May 5th at 2pm EST. The topic will be recent enhancements, then we will open the discussion to answer any questions you may have about new features.

Please let us know that you will be attending so we know how many people to expect. You can email your RSVP to websupport@topssoft.com, or submit it on the site at http://www.topshome.com/admin. You must have a login name and password to access the site and attend the chat, so be sure to visit the web site and request your login info today.

This month's Live Chat took place on April 19, the topic was Online AP Approval. We had a total of 14 attendees. The full trascript of the chat is available online at http://www.topshome.com/Admin/.

We are regularly adding new information to the Administrators Forum, so be sure to check out the Web Site Features section, or the Message Board to talk with other administrators. You will need to request a login. Sign up today at http://www.topshome.com/admin/.

FEATURE TEACHER: More About What's New!

New features & enhancements

This month, TOPS Community Web Site Service has come out with several eagerly anticipated enhancements to the service that will make the web sites work much better for you. The biggest improvements are the site search engine and the new name parsing from TOPS 2000™.

Name Parsiing

While TOPS has only one field for the owner name, the web site sorts via first and last name fields. This presents a major difficulty for the upload utility AI, as it has to attempt to separate the first and last names from the owner name field. This process, called name parsing, has become very sophisticated in TOPS 2000™ over the years as we attempt to accommodate as many combinations as possible. The one problem that we had not yet overcome, however, is the Second Owner field.

TOPS 2000™ has the potential to store 8 sets of data within two fields (Primary Owner First Name and Spouse First Name and their Last Name, plus the Secondary owner's First Name and Spouse First Name and their Last Name). But the web site only has the potential for 4 sets of data (Primary Owner First Name and Last Name, and Spouse/Secondary
owner First Name and Last Name). This meant that we had to program for the lowest common denominator, the fact that a customer using TOPS 2000™ would enter the entire owner/spouse name into the first (Primary Owner) field. This meant that the Secondary owner data would NEVER upload to the web site. Our new change to the system now provides a quasi-solution to this conundrum. If a single name is entered into the Primary owner field, the program will include the data from the secondary owner field on the web site. However, if there are two names entered into the primary owner
field, the secondary owner field will continue to be ignored.

Here is a more visual representation. Previously, the name parsing from TOPS 2000™ would parse spouse names for the web site as follows:

Owner(field in TOPS 2000™: [owner first name] &/and [spouse first name] [last name]

The downside was, they have to have the same last name in order for the spouse to show up. The name parsing has now been modified to accept the following, as well:

Owner: [owner1 FN] [owner1 LN] and [owner2 FN] [owner2 LN]

Owner: [owner1 FN] [owner1 LN] | 2nd Owner: [owner2 FN] [owner2 LN]

This last option means that it will pull the name in the 2nd Owner field as long as there is only one person's name in the Owner field. This will allow 2 owners from the same property to be uploaded to the web site, even if they do not share the same last name.

Search Engine

NEW FEATURE!!! Have you ever wanted to search for a particular topic or word within your web site?

A long sought feature of the web site has been a search engine. The difficulty has been that any search engine would have to take security levels into consideration. Now you can search Announcements, Events Calendar and the Resident Message Board simply by typing in a word or short phrase to find what you want. It’s a fast, easy way to find the topic that you want!

There are a few things to keep in mind when searching, however. First, the search is case-insensitive. This means that searching for "house" is no different from searching for "House" or "HOUSE". Also, it will search the features of the site for the EXACT string of words you specify, not for keywords. So if you tell it to search for "party", it will search the
features of the site for the word "party". However, if you search for "house party", it will not look for pages that contain "house" in one place and "party" in another. It will instead search for instances of "house party" together as you typed them. Searching for long phrases will lower your chances for results as the exact text you type must exist "as-is" in order for a match to be found.

For example; if you search for DOGS you will NOT find any matches that contain only DOG but if you search on DOG you will find matches for all of the following: DOG, DOGS, and DOGWOOD. Because subset matches are performed we do not allow searches with only 1 or 2 letters as this would almost certainly return a very large number of results.

The search function is limited to the Private side of your web site, and it will take in to account the security level of the person logged in when displaying results. For example, a homeowner with security level 50 would not be able to see an announcement stored in a level 25 "Board Only" category, even if that announcement does contain the word they searched for.

Please note, this new Site Search feature will be added to all client menus that have a current "Board Only" section, and will be added just above that section in the resident menu bar. It can also be placed on the resident home page to appear when someone first logs in. Please contact TOPS Web Support (800) 899-5689 or WebSupport@topssoft.com if you want the Search feature moved or disabled. Look for the Search tool to be applied to even more features in the future!

Partial Domain Sends

For those of you who send out a lot of email bulletins, this new feature is for you! We have had a number of customers inform us that on occasion an email bulletin send will fail for an entire domain name, for example all of the addresses @aol.com. You can now send an email bulletin just to residents that are using a particular Internet Service Provider (such as all Bellsouth.net folks or all aol.com folks). This feature allows you to keep trying to send your bulletin to those residents without bugging the rest of your residents with duplicates.

Here's how it works: Go in to the Email Bulletin feature, and check the option labeled "Check here to send eMail Bulletin to everyone in the Address Book with an email address:", and then enter the domain name in the field labeled "But
send only to Email addresses for this domain name:". This field should only contain the information AFTER the @ symbol, so it should only say "aol.com", not "joesmith@aol.com" or "@aol.com".

These new features will greatly enhance your TOPS community web sites. Feel free to contact us at (800) 899-5689 or via email at WebSupport@topssoft.com if you have any questions regarding these new features.

Q & A: How Do I Scan Resumes and Upload to our Web Site for the Board to review?

From Bob Dowle, Dobson Ranch:

Q: I need your help. Our board of directors is accepting resumes in application for the position of Executive Director. They want me to scan in PDF format some 35 resumes that we have received and upload them to the web site. Naturally, they want the web site set up so that it requires a password and a certain level of security to view these resumes. Before I go and spend $500 for Adobe's PDF program, can this be done. And if so, how?

A: Absolutely, and you don't even need to spend the $500!

First of all, you can create a security level on a documents category, so I would recommend creating a new category under documents called"Resumes" (or whatever they want) and give it a security level 25 (I am assuming it is the BoD that wants to see them. If there are others that should see them too, you may need to use a lower security level, such as 35, and change any non-board members that should see the resumes to security level 35 so they can see them.)

Next, scan in the documents, or if you do not have a scanner, look into a program called eFax (www.efax.com) that lets you fax a document to a fax number and it will scan it in and send you an electronic copy in TIFF format.

Next, download a PDF printer driver such as PDF995 (www.pdf995.com) (it is free with sponsor ads, or you can buy it for $9.95 to remove the ads.)

Then, take the resulting scan (either from your scanner or from the eFax) and print the image. When you get a list of printers, choose your PDF printer driver as the printer. This will create the images in PDF format.

Finally, log in to your web site, click Documents/Resumes/Edit Documents in Resumes. Click Add, add the first resume PDF, save it, and then continue to add the rest until you are done.

Q: What a great plan! You saved us a ton of money.

A: Glad you liked it.

This is a great question! If you have a question you would like to ask and you think other administrators would benefit from knowing this information as well, simply send it to us by sending an email to websupport@topssoft.com and we'll post it in the TOPS Home ezine.

 

Did you know that TOPS Software will provide you with a free
community web site  CD demo?  Follow this link to apply for your free demo today!

 ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~ + ~

Here is a list of some of the most common contact data for TOPS Software:

Department	Contact	Email	Phone
Software Sales	Nicole Sezov	sales@topssoft.com	800-760-9966
Web Site Sales	Susan Sanders	websales@topshome.com	800-556-7852
Technical Support	Jeanne Plennert	support@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Web Site Support	Brandon Kelley	websupport@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Accounting	Cande Estrella	billing@topssoft.com	301-869-8144

Designed by TOPS Software, LLC. Copyright© 2005 TOPS Software, LLC, 364-C Christopher Ave, Gaithersburg, MD 2879. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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