TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #39 - August 2005

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

In this issue:

SALES DEPARTMENT: Keeping Your Residents in the Loop
WHAT'S NEW: A Special Note to our Online Payment Clients, and 4 New Updates to TOPS Web Sites.
UPCOMING EVENTS: Live Chat
JUST FOR FUN: The First CIDs in America
NEW AND NOTES: New Name
SUPPORT TIPS: eForms Recipient Assignments
CONTACT: Contact Information for TOPS Software

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

SALES DEPARTMENT

Keeping Your Residents in the loop

It's Budget Time again and we've got some terrific news!!! No price increase for 2006!

On another topic, yet so closely related, states are starting to push (CO even passed) legislation that requires boards to be more transparent in their business dealings, keeping residents informed throughout the year instead of just during the annual meeting. A Community Web Site is the perfect way to meet these requirements!! Board meeting minutes can be posted, budgets disclosed and even copies of contracts can be added to the web site.

If you're with an Association Management Company, contact our Sales Department websales@topssoft.com and we'll customized information packets (including a guided tour of the web site service on CD!) for you to give to every board member. Web Sites allow for technology to handle the simple tasks freeing up a manager's time to handle the real issues related to association management! Partner with TOPS and bring leading edge technology right to your residents' doorsteps!

To learn more about TOPS Interactive Web Sites and how they benefit you, the HOA Officers, and residents
go to www.topshome.com or Contact TOPS Web Sales at (800) 556-7852 or websales@topssoft.com.

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WHAT'S NEW

A Special Note to our Online Payment Clients:

Effective September 1st, 2005, all Credit Card Payments will be at the flat rate of $9.95 per transaction with a limit of $750.00 per payment. This is phenomenal because it is going to allow us to go from having to use telephone confirmations for VISA transactions, to the entire process being able to take place online regardless of whether the owner pays with VISA, Mastercard or Discover. In the past, the rate was $2 plus 3% (with a low cap rate) so all of your clients making payments larger than $265 will be at a financial advantage over the previous rates. Overall, the average charge has been over $300 so we expect this to have a positive affect. The other part of the good news is that this new rate requires no additional forms to be filled out!

In addition to the new rate structure, our programming staff has been hard at work on a new method of communication between the TOPS Data Upload and the online payment servers. This new exchange format is expected to resolve some of the upload issues that our clients have reported.

We've also heard your concerns about faster turn-around times, and are working with our payment processor to decrease the payment turn-around time to 48 hours instead of the current four to five day process. Our initial research indciates that there will probably be some additional paperwork for you to fill out, but nothing too time consuming, and certainly nothing that is going to put your organization at financial risk. It may also require an increase in eCheck (ACH) rates. We hope to be able to offer plan choices so you can decide what's right for your organization. We will announce more on this topic in next month's ezine.

new Updates to your TOPS web site(s):

The Development Team has written some great new functionality to be rolled out. They're busy in final beta testing so the following will become available on your site on September 6th but we wanted you to know of the great things going on.

Statistics Menu - Show Login Statistics - Now allows sorting on all columns and each person's listing is a hyperlink to their user profile page.
Statistics Menu - Show Page Views for Past 30 Days - Now allows viewing of detailed page views for a specific date.

New Additions:

PLEASE NOTE: The following features will NOT be automatically added to your web site(s). Please send an email to websupport@topssoft.com to request that Online Reservations and/or Games be added to your web site(s) in order to take advantage of these great new features.

Online Reservations* - This new feature will allow administrators to set up facilities (such as tennis courts and meeting rooms), create business rules for each one (such as when they can be reserved, how far in advance and how often by the same person) and allow residents to make their reservations. The reservations can be immediately accepted or put into a cue for the reservation manager to approve before confirming. Once the reservation is confirmed, the resident receives (via email) a confirmation they can print out and save as their proof of reservation.
Games - A commonly requested feature is a place on the community web site for kids to have as their own to play games. We've signed an agreement with a third-party games provider to accommodate this request. Your site will have access to 10 to 20 free online games (some very addicting - ask our sales staff, they spent way too many hours testing the functionality!) such as online puzzles, jumbles and much more. The interface is completely seamless, so it looks exactly like the rest of your web site.

*In beta testing, will be released in the next few weeks.

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 - Interactive Web Site

Our next scheduled live chat for TOPS Web Site Administrators on Tuesday, September 22nd at 2pm EST. The topic will be Online Payments and how the recent and upcoming changes will affect your customers.The transcript of chats is available on our Administrator Forum web site under Documents.

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 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.

JUST FOR FUN

The First CIDs in America

While reading a recent article by Peter B. Miller, RS about the community of Rugby Tennessee I began to wonder about the history of Common Interest Developments in America's history.

You see, Rugby was founded in the late 1870's as the utopian dream of an Englishmen, Thomas Hughes and several developers. They created a Common Interest Development, Rugby TN. Their plan was to build a community of approximately 700 households that would share common areas such as ballrooms, dining facilities, community garden plots, recreational facilities, a post office, library, sundry shops and more.

By the mid 1880's, Rugby boasted a population of around 300 with about 70 Victorian buildings. The community had groundskeepers, maintenance personnel, management staff and an elected board of directors (sound familiar?) But by 1896 due to a typhoid epidemic, fire, a broken promise for a railroad spur, disrepair, and lack of planning and funding there were just a few die hard households still clinging to the utopian dream.

Today Rugby is an historic community with new residential development and the founders legacy still at its heart If you would like to learn more about Rugby Tennessee go to their web site ww.HISTORICRUGBY.ORG.

Was Rugby the first? Because until I read the article on Rugby, I thought the first CID was Radburn, New Jersey developed in 1928 but in fact it was only the first official "Community Association." Radburns design was based on the first "Garden City" in the world, Letchworth, Herts England founded by Ebenezer Howard in 1903. Read more about Radburn's history at www.radburn.org/ .

Further research revealed a very interesting web site www.davis-stirling.com/ds/pages/history.htm. The site is titled "The Evolution of Common Interest Developments". The site offers a very interesting theory about the first CID in America. Check out the pictures of the earliest condominium like structures, you might be surprised. You will also find a chronological history describing the earlier forms of community living that served as the foundation for Common Interest Developments today.

Feel free to reprint this article and share these links on your community web site. If you have some great ideas for web site content that you'd like to share, please drop us a line at insider@topssoft.com

NEWS & NOTES

New Name

For years we've been known as TOPS Software to the Association Management industry. But in fact, when the company was originally formed back in 1985, the official corporate name was Property Management Systems, Inc.

Rather than referring to our product as "PMS Software", Our founders came up with the acronym "TOPS - The Optimal Property System", and the name "TOPS Software" was born.

Over the years TOPS Software has earned an excellent reputation as the product of choice in the association management industry. With such strong brand recognition tied to the TOPS name, Property Management Systems, Inc this month officially changed the corporate name to TOPS Software, LLC as part of our long term strategy to further reinforce the branding of new TOPS products.

SUPPORT TIPS

eForms Recipient Assignments

The eForms feature now has a new option that allows the eForm to go to different recipients based on a selection in the form itself. We call this the Recipient Assignment field type, and it can be very useful in having submitted eForms go to the appropriate email address. The Recipient Assignment field type will appear to the user as a dropdown list on the form, and it will send the submitted eForm to a different recipient based on the selected item in that dropdown list.

To Set up Recipient Assignments for an eForm:

Add a field to the eForm with whatever name you choose and select Recipient Assignment for the field type. Do NOT enter anything in the Comments section of that field.
- If you are creating a new eform, continue to add the remaining fields and then click Save, No More Fields Button to go to the Edit Receivers screen.
- If you are editing an existing eForm, save the changes, click Preview this form, click Edit this form, and then click Edit Receviers. Click Add to enter the receivers interface.
You will notice a slight change in the Edit Receivers interface. In addition to the pull down list that lets you select the recipient, there is a field called Drop Down Item. Enter the name of the receiver as you wish it to appear in the drop down list that web site visitors will be choosing from.

For example, if you wish to allow visitors to send an email to the Board President or Treasurer without specifically disclosing their email addresses, you may enter Board President in the Drop Down Item field and select her email address from the menu. Do the same procedure for the treasurer, and when the web site visitor completes the form, they will have a choice of sending the form to the President or the Treasurer.

Keep in mind, in order to have multiple items in that dropdown list that go to the same recipient, you will need to add that recipient for each item.

A popular use for this feature is for a management company's Maintenance Request eForm. Since a normal maintenance request would be directed to the property manager of that community, having multiple communities means having different managers for different communities. Some management companies will have a single maintenance request eForm on their management web site that allows the user to specify the community when submitting the eForm. However, the recipients were always the same, so it often had to be forwarded to the appropriate property manager.

With the Recipient Assignment field type you can direct a submitted eForm to the appropriate person based on a selection in the form. This can save you a lot of forwarding e-mails and make sure that eForms are directed to the correct person.

CONTACTS

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

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TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #39 - August 2005

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!