SmartTrade Blog

What is happening at SmartTrade

SmartTrade Blog

News and views from the SmartTrade crew.

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New features that have been added to the latest release of SmartTrade:

Bulk Emailing:
You can now bulk email reports including invoices, quotes, job letters and client letters.

Google Calendar interface: Schedule jobs and appointments in SmartTrade and have them appear in your Calendar and your employees’ Google Calendars.

* Exclusive to SmartTrade customers *

Given the increase in malicious hacker attacks we decided it was time to offer a full external backup service . Recently one of our customers had their computer hacked locking them completely out of their computer system via a 30 character password that was virtually impossible to break. They then received an e-mail demanding a US,000 for the password. The fact that they had backed up SmartTrade on the same computer meant they couldn’t access their backup to do a restore. We were able to restore their system but not recover their data. This isn’t an isolated instance, we know of other businesses who have suffered the same fate.

Accordingly, we are pleased to announce the release of SmartSafe, our new cloud based backup service for SmartTrade customers. SmartSafe is not just a backup for your SmartTrade data, it is a complete backup solution for your computer system .

smartsafe-logo

The first question customers considering SmartSafe will ask is how much backup storage does my business need – typically 5Gb or 10Gb SmartSafe plans will suffice for most SmartTrade customers to store their SmartTrade database and important business documents, as seen in our pricing plan below the cost is extremely affordable.

Customers who wish to review the adequacy of their current backup solution should give us a call, we will get one of our technicians to look at your existing backup solutions to see if it is giving you the level of protection you need.

Features that SmartSafe offers:

Easy to use Backup & Restore Wizard – the wizard allows you to easily restore data.
Compression - makes transfer of data to the cloud faster and helps to reduce space required for data storage as the data doesn’t require as much bandwidth as for uncompressed data, saves time   and is cheaper for the end user. 
E-Mail Notifications - An e-mail will be generated to tell you if the backup has been successful or failed.
• Scheduling and Real-Time Cloud Backup – you setup a schedule or backup everything automatically. SmartSafe runs as a Windows Service and tracks folders for new or changed files for backing up.
Intelligent Bandwidth Scheduling - you control how much bandwidth SmartSafe is using at any given time – if you’re working, you can tell SmartSafe to use less bandwidth and run in the background. When you’re away from your computer, you can turn the SmartSafe bandwidth usage up to the maximum available.
Data Encryption - data is encrypted with a unique encryption key before being sent to backup to protect it from unauthorized access. This guarantees data protection from unauthorized access during transfer via the Internet and while in storage.
Both Cloud and Local Backup
you can set up a combination of cloud (standard) and/or local backup if you want to send only part of your data to the cloud and keep the rest on your local backup storage.
Fully supported backups – you get full support including assisted recovery and restoration of data.
Web access – you have on-line access to your backup data.
SmartSafe is very reasonably priced:

Gb Storage Price/Month* Price/1Gb/Month
5 $ 10.00 $ 2.00
10  $ 16.00  $ 1.60
20  $ 26.00  $ 1.30
50  $ 50.00  $ 1.00
100  $ 70.00 $ 0.70
>100  POA  
 * Prices exclude GST  

 If you are interested in SmartSafe or if you have any questions please e-mail [email protected] or give us a call.

SmartTrade partners with two worthy charities in the community.

 

 SmartTrade and Habitat for Humanity

h4h-logo 

h4h-volunteer

Habitat for Humanity is an international charity that builds simple decent and affordable housing for the poor. Homes are built using voluntary labour, in partnership with the family that will one day own the home. The family that will own and occupy the home contributes 500 hours of “sweat equity” into building the house. Given many of our customers are trade related, Habitat for Humanity is an excellent fit for SmartTrade.

Ways you can contribute to Habitat

  • Volunteer for one of their builds
  • Sponsor a home build or A Brush with Kindness
  • Donate materials and goods to, and shop at ReStore
  • Be a supporting family for visiting overseas teams
  • Prepare food for event builds
  • Volunteer to build abroad on a Global village trip

If you think you may like to support Habitat for Humanity, please call us and we can put you in contact with them. Otherwise, visit http://www.habitat.org.nz


We have released videos and a Quick Start Guide to SmartTrade Essential and Mobile.

SmartTrade Mobile was built using the same new SOA software platform on which SmartTrade Essential was built. Accordingly, migration to Essential is a prerequisite for Mobile. While we recommend that customers spend a little time getting used to Essential before they take on Mobile, we are happy to oblige if they want to upgrade to both Essential and Mobile in one hit.

SmartTrade Ultimate

As outlined in our previous newsletters the next major milestone in our redevelopment program will be the release SmartTrade Ultimate which will incorporate asset management and project management as a standard features, these having previously been sold as separate add-on modules.

We are targeting having the first release of SmartTrade Ultimate out by 1 February of next year. While this is an extremely challenging target we are already some way down the track as a result of the extra functionality we ended up incorporating into SmartTrade Essential

SmartHost

Earlier this year we were able to dramatically reduce the monthly hosting fee,  from $ 65.00 user/month plus GST  to       $ 35.00 user/month plus GST. 

The new software design of SmartTrade Essential enables another method of logging on remotely via internet connectivity to your local database leading to further cost saving opportunities for our SmartHost service.

Instead of using Remote Desktop (RDP), you can run SmartTrade Essential locally from your computer, laptop or even a tablet provided it’s running on a Windows Operating System.
We are offering the following pricing basis for the SmartHost service.
- $ 35 user/month plus GST

 

2012 has been a watershed year for SmartTrade as we invested heavily in redeveloping our core software, a task that will continue through 2013 as outlined below. We achieved our milestones within a month of the planned date so can justifiably claim to have done pretty well compared to most IT projects. 

Central to our redevelopment philosophy is to ensure we continue to be, arguably, the most affordable job management solution in the market.

Examples of this philosophy at work are:

    • There will be no price increase for customers who migrate to SmartTrade Essential;
    • SmartTrade Ultimate will be priced at an 0 plus GST, a 0 premium to SmartTrade EssentialSmartTrade Ultimate will incorporate a range of functionalities that we currently offer as separate modules individually priced up to 0 plus GST meaning that the price of SmartTrade Ultimate will effectively be a significant price decrease;
    • SmartTrade Mobile, designed to work on any device that can access the internet, is priced significantly below the current pricing for our existing Windows 6.5 application for PDAs;
    • Our customers will increasingly be able to optimise their purchase of SmartTrade applications to achieve the most economical solution for their needs by mixing and matching SmartTrade EssentialUltimateMobileSmartTime, and SmartForms (currently in Beta testing), plus a number of other applications we have in the pipeline;
    • SmartHost is a hosting service we offer customers who prefer not to suffer the overhead of owning and operating their own server. Thanks to the sharper prices we have negotiated with new data storage providers we have this year been able to nearly halve our price we charge for the service from /user/month to /user/month plus GST. The improved performance characteristics of our new products mean we are now able to offer our customers further cost saving opportunities for hosting services.

While our new core products remain client-server based, the base software resides in the user’s device, they are becoming increasingly web centric:

    • SmartTrade’s new core job management products SmartTrade Essential and Ultimate can operate remotely utilising web connectivity meaning they have “cloud” like functionality.

      SmartTrade Essential is a client-server (PC) application that has been developed for Microsoft Windows devices. Any portable Windows device having a connection to the internet can be setup to back to the office based Microsoft Windows device (the server).

      SmartTrade Essential can also be used remotely on an Apple PC, laptop or tablet (the client) provided you also have remote protocol (RDP). We recommend the free version of PocketCloud, a 3rd party RDP software application. The user must install PocketCloud on their Apple devices given we aren’t able to login to their Apple devices to do it for our customers. To assist customers we provide a detailed set of instructions that make it easy for users to install PocketCloud themselves. Please call our support team for assistance if you want to use SmartTrade Essential on an Apple device.

    • SmartTrade Mobile is HTML5 based and will work with any device that can connect to the internet. Accordingly, SmartTrade Mobile will work on Apple and Android devices without the need for any additional software. We have descriptions on our website showing how the above system configurations work.
      Essential diagram66
    • The new SmartTrade Mobile and SmartTime™, our mobile timekeeping application with GPS functionality that was released in May and now has more than 150 users, are both web [HTML5] based; 
    • SmartForms™, our innovative “cloud” based e-form application for mobile devices will be ideal for customers who undertake recurring compliance work. SmartForms eliminates the paper plus we have also integrated SmartTime into SmartForms enabling compliance testing staff to log their time as they start and finish each compliance job. We will shortly commence the final development work targeting a commercial release of SmartForms in early 2013. 
    • Smeedi®, an innovative electronic data interchange (EDI) product developed by Smeedi Ltd, a SmartTrade sister company, is a pure “cloud” application. Smeedi will be included as a standard feature in a future release of SmartTrade Essential as well as in SmartTrade Ultimate when it is released next year.

      EDI, primarily used to automate sending invoices, has typically been too expensive for small and medium enterprises. Smeedi now gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to exchange invoices between supported accounting packages at a significantly lower end-to-end cost than post or even e-mail. The beauty of Smeedi is that if the invoice recipient has a supported accounting package and is a registered Smeedi user the invoice transactional data is automatically imported into the recipient’s accounting package saving on keying costs and errors. Unregistered recipients receive a notification by e-mail allowing them to either view the invoice in the Smeedi “cloud” or they can open up the pdf copy of the invoice they receive with the notification e-mail.

    • Our development pipeline will see fully "cloud" based web versions of SmartTrade Essential, Ultimate and Mobile released in the second half of 2013.