Latest Release

Here at TOTECS over the first half of this year we have been creating out a great amount of functionality into the TOTECS platform, to help your online business meet our new COVID normal world. We have added 1 new feature, 18 improvements and 11 bug fixes to the platform across the 15.00 and 15.01 releases.

In these releases we have focused on security enhancements of payments for orders, to reduce the opportunity of fraudulent payments occurring and impacting your bottom line. We have added support for 3D Secure credit card payments when using Eway's payment gateway, added the ability to send address data to PayPal to allow for seller protection, put in strict limits for consecutive failed credit card payment attempts, as well as enabled Recaptcha to be set for order credit card payment forms. These all help manage the increasing threats of fraudulent credit cards being used.
 

On top of this we have added the ability to send order data to Google Analytics via Google's Tag Manager service. This allows for additional reporting capabilities, particularly useful to gain greater insights into guest users ordering, as well as other sales trends Google Analytics may help identify.

Other improvements we have added include the capability for users to set the sorting of products in their shopping lists, the ability to display customised attribute data for products assigned to make/models, ability to show freight carrier/tracking data in invoices and for administrator users to have the ability to search for products that are missing data.

And there are plenty more improvements in the TOTECS releases of 15.00 and 15.01 that can enhance your business functions when dealing with freight, payments, as well as help your users navigate through your websites.

You can check out all the great changes available by watching the latest release video, or clicking on any of the links below to take you to a specific feature or enhancement.

Many regards from the TOTECS team

                                                                                           
                                                                                              Release Highlights
 

 

See the new limit to the number of failed credit card attempts in a user's session. 
 

 

See the ability to pass order delivery address data to PayPal to help PayPal provide seller protection for orders.

 

 

 

See how Products can now be found when they have no values set in the Product Fields.
 

Wow, what a roller coaster of year it has been so far! Who would have thought a global pandemic would have played out this time last year. We hope your business has been able to survive, adapt, and prosper online through these rough seas.

Here in the TOTECS RnD Labs we've been a little quiet, however there's still been a hive of activity on the TOTECS platform in the background, as we ride through the waves of lock downs here in Victoria. Over the last 7 months we have churned out 3 platform releases, adding 17 improvements and 17 bug fixes across the 14.01, 14.02, and 14.03 releases, as well as continuing to bring new capabilities into the Connector software.

In the TOTECS releases we've created some great feature enhancements available for your websites, helping to give you further flexibility and tools to engage your customer bases online. In the current climate this is of utmost importance, in the socially distancing, mask wearing era, where online is often the best, and sometimes the only way to do business.

You can check out all the great changes available by watching the latest release video, or clicking on any of the links below to take you to details of a specific feature or enhancement.

As we get deep into the second half of the year all of us at the TOTECS team are here to help and support your online business, as well as help you navigate the various threats and opportunities that present themselves in this crazy time in history.

Many regards from the TOTECS team

Release Highlights 

See the new experimental feature that displays a magnifying glass when a user hovers over each product image placeholder within Product Search Results Listing content managed webpage areas.

 

 

Learn how Related Product areas now have the ability to show products based on products assigned to the same active category as the product specified in the web page's URL

It's almost that time of the year, Christmas and 2020 are just around the corner. It's been a big year for the TOTECS team here, seeing lots of online growth across many industries and businesses who have websites on the platform. Through 2019 we've continued to invest heavily into the TOTECS platform, the Connector software, and development of SQUIZZ.com platform, all with the aims of helping your business continue to grow online.

As a christmas present we recommend watching the 13.03 and 14.00 TOTECS release video to see all the great new functionality we added to TOTECS over the last quarter, if you haven't already done so. There's 18 improvements available to take advantage of, links to the different enhancements can be viewed below. 

From all of the TOTECS staff we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 

Release Highlights

View all release highlights from start to finish

 

Learn how the Product Quick Add Form araa can now be used to add products to basket even quicker, especially when using barcode scanners.

 

 

See how the sorting of multiple images assigned to a product can be customised in Product Detail web page areas.

 

 

Learn how the subject of submitted enquiry forms can now be customised when an email notification is sent out.

 

See how the sorting of products can now be customised when displayed in Order Detail and Order Submission web page areas.

 

See how administrator users can now search for locations within the Administration Centre using a range of new filtering options.

 

Learn how new restrictions can be put in place to limit if users can convert quotes to orders, based on quote lines all matching active priced products.

Learn how the email subject can be customised when a user submits an order with the Running Quote payment type and an order submission email notification is sent out.

See how the details of the Sales Representative who submitted an order can be shown or hidden in the order notification email when a non-sales rep user submits an order.

Learn how orders submitted to SmartFreight can now have freight costed based on the total order weight, order volumn, or whichever is higher.

See how additional details of a customer account can be displayed in Basket Selection Web Page areas to help users find the correct customer account to order on behalf of.

Learn how phone data can new be set against customer accounts.

 

Learn how web page templates can be moved between content managed websites, making it easier to migrate and setup new websites.

 

Learn how administrator users can send emails to users directly through the Search Users interface within the Administration Centre interface.

Over the first half of 2019 the TOTECS team is too excited to bring you a wealth of improvements and new functionality into the TOTECS platform, with 2 new features, 14 improvements and 15 bug fixes through the 13.01 release and 13.02 releases.

Included in these releases is the new "2 Factor Authentication" capability for user login. When enabled it allows a user to receive and enter an additional authentication code that is sent to their phone via SMS, before being able to complete login. This ensures that only when the user has their phone on them are they able to login to your website and order, reducing the ability for users to pass credentials around, as well as hinder hackers from being able to login with stolen credentials.

A new data import has been added to the platform that allows Currency Exchange Rates to be imported via the Connector software. This can automate updating the rates when a website has the multi-currency feature turned on. Using the Connector the exchange rates can be obtained from many 3rd party exchange rate websites and banks, allowing for automatic updating of exchange rates at scheduled times. This helps overseas customers see more accurate product pricing in currencies they are familiar with.

Plus there are many other great time-saving improvements in these releases. Watch the first 3 minutes of the release video to get a brief overview of the great new enhancements we've made in the release, as well as watch in-depth detail on all the important improvements. Also feel free to subscribe to the TOTECS youtube channel to stay in the know, or talk to us on the TOTECS forums. 

Many happy regards from the TOTECS team.
 

Release Highlights

See how currency exchange rates can be imported  from external currency exchange rates websites and banks the from the Connector software. Automating multi-currency capabilities for admins.

 

 

Learn how URL routing rules within content managed websites can be set up to redirect a category any of its child categories to the same web page.

Over spring of 2018 the TOTECS team to excited to bring you 1 new feature, 9 improvements and 7 bug fixes into the TOTECS platform through the 13.00 release.

Included in this release is the new Zippay payment method that can be embedded within all content managed websites hosted on the TOTECS platform. This allows businesses to offer an "Order Now Pay Later" payment method to customers, where customers can pay no upfront cost for an order, and instead let Zippay initially pay for the order. Businesses still get paid by Zippay upfront, and customers pay Zippay back over a series of smaller regular payments.

Watch the first 3 minutes of the release video to get a brief overview of the great new enhancements we've made in the release, as well as watch in-depth detail on all the important improvements. Also feel free to subscribe to the TOTECS youtube channel to stay in the know, or talk to us on the TOTECS forums. 

Many happy regards from the TOTECS team.
 

Release Highlights
 

See how values set in Basket Product Fields by users can be seen in Basket Listing and Order Checkout/Submission content managed web page areas.

 

 

Learn how tax-free tax codes can be assigned to order lines when customers have orders delivered to overseas addresses.

Over the middle months of 2018 the TOTECS team has released 2 new features, 22 improvements and 22 bug fixes into the TOTECS platform, offering a wealth of goodies to use in your websites from the 12.05 and 12.06 releases.

Watch the first 3 minutes of the release video to get a brief overview of the great new enhancements we've made, including the new website cloning tool, single sign-on for users, Location Finder filtering, sales rep order confirmation emails, product deals using flags, and much much more. Also feel free to subscribe to the TOTECS youtube channel to stay in the know, or talk to us on the TOTECS forums. 

Many happy regards from the TOTECS team.
 

Release Highlights

See how sales representative users can receive order confirmation notification emails when other users or staff submit orders against customer accounts sales reps are assigned to.

 

 

Learn how taxcode information can be shown with product details on product areas within a content managed website.

We hope you're having a great warm autumn. During this time we have released 2 amazing new features into the TOTECS platform and 11 improvements to help your business thrive online. Check out the release video to see all the goodies in action!

This release adds the ability to show a Location Finder on your website, displaying a Google map where users can search for locations relevant to your business. This allows your customers, staff and other users to search for a list of locations near them such as stores, dealers, suppliers and any other places you can think of. Users can select a location as their default, then proceed through order checkout and have their order shipped to the nominated location, perfect for offering order pick-up delivery options!

If you're a wholesaler then using this feature may allow you to open direct-to-consumer selling, and keep your list of retailers/distributors on your side by including them in the selling and delivery process.

We also added more deal offers to the Product Deals and Vouchers feature based on the total quantity or amount of products users have added to their basket, as well as settings to restrict deals being redeemed to a limited number of orders. This is perfect for offering a deal where new customers get a discount on the first order they submit!

We also added a number of smaller improvements, including a setting that allows products in existing user baskets to be re-priced when they next login, switch baskets, or checkout.

Watch the release video to see all the details and other great improvements added to the platform, also feel free to subscribe to the TOTECS youtube channel to stay in the know, or talk to us on the TOTECS forums.

Many happy regards from the TOTECS team.

See how administrator users can set up product deal offers based on the total amount or quantity of products in a user's basket.

 

 

Learn how administrators can set up product deal offers that limit customers to redeeming a deal for a limited number of orders.

The TOTECS team hope you've had a great restful Easter break!

Back in summer we introduced a number of new features and workflows into the TOTECS platform to deal with quoting. These enhancements can allow your customers, sales reps, and staff to be able to search for and view quotes within your website, based on quote records retrieved from your connected accounting, ERP, CRM and other business systems.

We also added the ability for website users to convert retrieved quotes into sales orders using the existing Order Checkout website process. If your business uses quoting processes a lot, then these new features can help save and make more money by getting customers and staff to more quickly view quotes, and convert quotes into real sales, all without having to log into multiple systems.

Additionally in the 12.03 TOTECS platform release we added new functionality to import make/model data from connected business systems and spreadsheets through the Connector software. This can allow make/model data to be more efficiently be set up, saving staff time and effort, ultimately allowing customers to find and purchase products quicker when make/model searching is available to them.

Watch the release video to see all the details and other great improvements added to the platform, also feel free to subscribe to the TOTECS youtube channel to stay in the know, or talk to us on the TOTECS forums.

Many happy regards from the TOTECS team.

See how users can convert quotes retrieved from connected business systems to sales orders using the Order Checkout process.

 

 

Learn how administrators can search for and view quotes retrieved from connected business systems within the Administration Centre.

The TOTECS team wish you a happy new 2018! This is sure to be another great year filled with even more online trading, crypto currency intrigue, and further interesting technology coming into peoples and households hands. We are very excited with some of the great things we've got planned for the year, and can't wait to release more new features and improvements into the TOTECS platform to help your business.

To go back to the last quarter of 2017 we released versions 12.01 and 12.02 into the TOTECS platform, offering 1 new feature, 23 improvements and 7 bug fixes. Check out the release video below to see all the goodies you can play with in your websites hosted on the platform.

The TOTECS team is proud to present the 12.00 platform release, adding 11 improvements, 1 new feature, and 9 bug fixes to the Ecommerce platform. You can see all the new changes at work by watching the release video.

The changes developed during spring include a number of features to help big businesses and government departments order products quicker and more effectively. This includes additional settings in the Purchaser Manager Approvals feature to be able to limit managers to only approve pending orders within a specified order total range. This is very useful if a business has multiple managers, who each control spending up to a certain limit.

Additionally there is now the ability to assign users directly to multiple accounts. This provides more flexibility for users being able to switch accounts and order across multiple accounts (similar to the Repspace feature). This is very useful if a customer has multiple accounts representing separate departments or locations within their own business. It is also useful for sales reps and other employees viewing account details or creating orders for a limited range of selected accounts.

A number of other improvements have been added to the content managed websites including the ability to show location based stock availability, and dimensions of products in Basket Listing areas. Check out the release video below to see all the changes in action.

The TOTECS team is proud to present the 11.05 platform release, that brings a whopping 18 improvements, 1 new feature, and 2 bug fixes to the Ecommerce platform. You can see an overview of all this goodness at the start of the release video. The changes developed in July include a second Master Website Design, that offers another amazing fully featured, secure, mobile responsive website that can be deployed out of the box for you, at a fraction of the development cost. In the release a number of improvements have been made to the order confirmation email, including the ability to fully customise the look of it, as well as save the order details attachment as a PDF file. There's also the ability to have web pages load up to 10 times faster with a new caching mechanism built into the web page areas. The release also brings the ability to sort products displayed in lists by price, as well as a number of usability improvements to contracts, product quick add, and attribute searches in content managed web sites. Check out the release video below to see all the changes in action.

For over a year the TOTECS team has been tirelessly designing and building an amazing new content managed website for you that is fully featured, based on the latest trends, works in any sized devices, supports B2B and B2C work flows, and can be instantly deployed out of the box. We call these websites "Master Website Design". With the 11.04 TOTECS platform release we can now deploy one of these beautiful looking sites for you at a fraction of the labour, time and cost, compared to if you were building a new website from scratch.

If your website is looking old and outdated, isn't fully secured, or you are still using the older Trade interface on the platform, then a TOTECS master website design can be the quickest and cheapest way to get your website up to the latest standards and features. See the 11.04 platform release video to learn more about how these great new websites look and work.

Additionally a number of other useful improvements and new features have been added to the platform in the 11.04 and 11.03.1 releases, check out the release video below to see all the changes in action.

Since the start of February 2017 the security of the web has shifted up a gear. Web browsers such as Firefox are now getting tough on security and reporting more issues to users when entering data on insecure web pages. There's a good chance other browsers will follow suit. What does this mean for you? If you are running a content managed website on the platform you now need to get every webpage loading over secure connections, and in fact search engines such as Google may rank up your pagerank for doing so. That means having the green lock and HTTPS protocol set in the URL when all of your website's pages load, regardless of if a page is loading sensitive data or not.

For a long time the TOTECS platform has provided security on the most sensitive parts of your website, such as at login, order checkout, and when making credit card payments. This security has been provided through the platform's own secure website domain. There's a problem though, search engines such as Google can't rank these secure pages since they load on separate website domain, and users may question the domain they are being lead to. To solve this it will now require you to get involved in obtaining security certificates for your own website domain. Not sure what a security certificate is? Watch the 11.03 platform release video to learn how web security works, and what we've added to the platform to enable you to get your website fully secured.

We hope your summer has been eventful! At the end of February the TOTECS RnD team deployed the 11.02 release, adding 3 New Features, 13 Improvements and 15 Bug Fixes to the platform. Check out the release video below to find out how these goodies work, and how they can be used in-depth within your websites.

We look forward to talking with you at the TOTECS Seminar on the 22/23rd March 2017 to explore the possibilities that this release, and the previous releases can do for your website and business.

Season greetings to you from everyone at TOTECS! We've hoped that you've had a great online year, full of online sales, website traffic, and in-house efficiencies. To round out the year the RnD labs have deployed release 11.01 into the TOTECS platform at the start of December, giving you some great Xmas presents to play with over the new year. The release contains 2 new features, 13 improvements, and 8 bug fixes.

In a change of format you will now be able to see the latest changes by watching the YouTube video below. This allows you to see in-depth all the details and examples on how to use the new functionality added to the platform, hopefully making it easier for you take advantage of the new and existing features in your own websites.
 

NEW Ultimate Search Engine Optimisation for Products, Categories, News/Blog Items, Makes and Models URLs

In content managed websites we've now added the ability to set simplified URLs for product, category, news/blog item, make and model webpages When the feature is turned on it helps search engines such as Google give these pages higher rank, since these pages may be considered of higher importance. See the 11.01 release video for more details.


NEW Host, Track and Version Control Files Using GIT Repositories
 

NEW Display Volume Discount Product Pricing in Category/Search Listings

On content managed websites there is now the ability to show volume discount prices within category and product search listing webpage areas. This makes it easier for users to see the discounted unit prices when ordering larger quantities of each product, and can be used to entice users to buy more products.
See the 11.01 release video from 38 minutes in for more details.
 

NEW Display Product Attachment Files In Basket/Order Detail Listings, and Email notifications

In content managed websites, the Trade interface, and the order submission notification email there is now the ability to list attachment files with each product ordered. This allows users to see and download files related to the products they are purchasing, such as instructions, warranties, specifications, installation guides or warnings.
See the 11.01 release video from 43 minutes in for more details.
 

IMPROVED Browsers Remembering User Sessions After Browser Close

We've changed the way on how the platform stores user sessions in browsers. Now if a user closes their browser before logging out and opens it again, they will not need to log in again if their session is still valid. Additionally an expiration time has been set against the session cookie which is saved in the session, which ensures that browser's do not remember information about expired sessions.
See the 11.01 release video from 58 minutes in for more details.

IMPROVEMENTS The Other Stuff

As always there's a number of other improvements that went out with the 11.01 platform release, and the 1.07 Connector releases. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 12 weeks and placed into the 11.01 TOTECS platform release and 1.07 Connector release.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-24 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• Category Tree Navigation Menu content managed webpage areas
• Responsive Content Managed Website Master Templates
• Improvements to Purchaser/Manager feature
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• TOTECS documentation centre
• Emarketing enhancements
• Integration with ReadySell Enterprise Resource Planning system

The 11.01 TOTECS release now allows administrator users to easily set the "Image Not Found" placeholder images that appear on content managed websites and within the Trade interface. To do so follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Inventory menu button.
3. Click on the Images settings menu item.
4. Under the Product Image Settings section, next to the Product Not Found Image click on the Choose File button.
5. Locate a PNG image file on your computer that you wish to replace the previous "image not found" image with.
6. Click on the Update button.

The new image file will be uploaded and resized for the different sized product images. Once uploaded you will be able to see the new image appear under the Product Not Found Image setting. Note that some users their browsers may cache/remember the older "Not Found" image, and over time the browsers will load the newer image. Also note that the same set of steps can be used to set the category "Image Not Found" place holder image by modifying the "Category Not Found" image setting.

If you have ideas like to make the platform better, please post them on our wishlist forum.

With winter finally over we hope you kept nice and rugged up. During the chilly months we have worked tirelessly on the 11.00 TOTECS platform release, as well as version 1.06 of the Connector. These releases bring new functionality into the Product Deals and Vouchers feature, a whole new integration into MYOB's AccountRight 2016 software, loads more website traffic statistics, and 30 other tasty changes. Read on to discover the details.

NEW Product Deal Activation and Discounted Freight Deal Offer
 

Based on feedback through the TOTECS forums, we have now added the ability for users to activate deals against products already in their basket. How it works is that when a user turns up to a content managed website, after they've added a few products to basket, then before checkout they can enter a deal voucher or promotion code. Once this code has been activated then any existing products in the basket will be repriced based on the deals matching the entered code. Once a deal code has been activated it will stick to the user's session, then if the user decides to add more products to basket, any activated deals will also apply to the newly added products.
Using this code activation makes it nice and straightforward for your users to redeem deals, and provides a great way to get users into your websites and purchasing more products, perfect for the lead up to Christmas!

New "Discounted Freight" Deal Offer

Additionally we have added a new deal offer which allows discounted freight to be applied against chosen products. This can be used to entice users to buy certain products knowing that the amount of freight they will be paying in an order will be reduced by a given percentage. There are several levers at your disposal to tweak the discounted freight offer, such as limiting the amount of times it can be bought with the same product, the quantity that must be purchased for the discounted freight to become eligible, as well being able to restrict it to certain users. Within the Order Surcharges admin interface we have added several ways that allow admins to customise how the discounted freight deal is applied, allowing it to play nice with any surcharge rules that have been setup in a site already.

To take advantage of the new Product Deals functionality we recommend contacting the TOTECS service team where we can help you work out how to set it up in your site and get going.


NEW Fine Grained Server Traffic Statistics
 

After the last 10.04 release we added the ability to track and report all server requests made to any TOTECS hosted website. In this 11.00 release we have now made available more fine grained statistics that let you easily see the kinds of traffic that are hitting you site on a daily and monthly basis. These additional statistics allow you to find out who is targeting your site, how often they are visiting, and which devices/operating systems they are using. Using these stats can help you make informed decisions on how to tailor your site, boost traffic in targeted areas, and further analyse the impact of your Ecommerce strategy.
Within the Administration Centre, under the statistics menu, in the Project Traffic Statistics interface we have added the following graphs:

Monthly Project Traffic

View the total amount of requests hitting your website for a given month, broken down on a per day basis. The graph shows overall requests, total requests made by detected search engines/crawlers, and the total amount of requests made for content managed webpages. You can paginate through the months, as well as filter the statistics down further based on matching following:

• User's Login ID
• User's Customer Account Code
• Webpage ID/title
• Search Engine/Crawler
• Device Type
• Platform Type

These filters can give you terrific insight down to the micro level on how often certain users are visiting your site, how often a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing visits, or the amount of traffic hitting a given content managed webpage.

Requests By Search Engines/Crawlers

A doughnut graph has been added that shows all the different kinds of search engines and automated crawler software that is hitting your website for a chosen month, and the amount of requests each has made. Surprisingly Google is not the only search engine that visits your webpages, and in fact we've found that several others such as Bing or Baidu can be far more aggressive in frequenting your websites. Additionally we are detecting over 20 different kinds of "bots" or automated software that may also turn up and trawl through your public webpages looking for content. These bots can come from big overseas web players, or can be commissioned from other companies, such as your customers, suppliers, or competitors. Some of these bots are friendly and help increase your search engine optimisation(SEO) by making your webpages easily locatable to users through different search engines. Other Bots however may be foes that are taking your content and uploading to their own websites to compete with. We recommend reviewing this data, and if you think that a bot is not adding value to your site, or making too many requests, we can put blocks in place to lock them out.

Requests By Device Type/Platform Type

2 doughnut graphs have been added that show you the amount of traffic being hit by mobile or desktop devices, as well as the platform that the device is using, such as Windows, Apple iOS, Android, Linux and so on. These statistics can help identify the devices that you should be testing your website on, which can help ensure that you are providing the best possible experience to your users, as well determining where usability improvements can be made.

NEW MYOB AccountRight 2016/Live Integration
 

In the 1.06 Connector release we have developed a whole new integration into MYOB's new AccountRight 2016 software. If you didn't know MYOB completely rewrote its AccountRight software from the ground up, and introduced this new software with its 2013 and later versions of AccountRight, as well as its cloud hosted version called AccountRight Live. MYOB has completely changed how it stores and makes data accessible in AccountRight, which has required us to develop a whole new way to read and write data into it. The good news is that their new AccountRight 2016 software has solved a number of issues that hindered its older versions, such as lock file issues, database connectivity, and compatibility problems with newer versions of Microsoft Windows.
If you are running MYOB AccountRight Premier version 19 or lower then you may be interested in upgrading to the new version, however before you do we would recommend talking with us first, since MYOB's new AccountRight 2016 version does not contain all the functionality in the older versions. Specifically it currently doesn't support the more advanced warehousing features, exporting of component data, and is far more restrictive on the customised data queries that we could previously write accessing its older database.

NEW Flagged Products Trade Interface Popups
 

Within the Trade interface we have added the ability to show popups when users first arrive on the Home page, or the My Basket page. In each popup up to 10 products can display that are assigned to a chosen product flag. This feature can be used to entice users to view and buy selected products that you may have placed on sale, or given extra importance. Within each popup you can set an advertising image to display, as well as use settings to turn on or off the popups at an admin's discretion. 
Since the popups are in-your-face we would recommend only turning them on for short periods of time, since users can tire of them quickly if they repeatedly appear.

NEW Public IP Address Blocking Of Users
 

In the 11.00 platform release we added a new security mechanism that can be turned on to enforce users to login from pre-determined public IP addresses. To give you some background, when you access the internet your computer is assigned to a "public IP address". This IP address is like your mailing address, where it tells the computers serving content (such as webpages, images, audio, etc..) where the data needs to be sent back so that your computer can receive it. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will issue your internet connection a public IP address to make this delivery process possible. ISPs can randomly issue you an IP address that changes frequently (dynamic), or always give you the same IP address (static).

Where this is all relevant is within the TOTECS platform we have now added the ability for you to set public IP addresses against users. When a user logs in a check can be turned on to see if their publicly assigned IP address matches the IP address assigned to the user. If it doesn't match then the user is told that their credentials are incorrect. This additional security mechanism can be used to enforce users to login from only known trusted locations, such as an office or specific place that contains a static public IP address. Using this feature can help ensure that certain customers, employees, admins, or contractors are only accessing your website content from approved locations, and make it difficult for user credentials to be passed around.

IMPROVED Content Managed Webpage Areas

A number of small improvements have been made to content managed web page areas to make it easier for website implementers to build websites. A new setting has been added that can stop paragraph tags being embedded in Free Draw areas. Category Listing areas can now be set to not have list tags embedded within them. New types of Javascript events have been added that allow customised functionality to run when a user adds a product to basket, or paginates through any records. Category codes now allow up to 255 characters, allowing more keywords to be set within SEO optimised category links. Feel free to read the release notes on the forums to get more details about these useful improvements.

IMPROVEMENTS The Other Stuff

As always there's a number of other improvements that went out with the 11.00 platform release, and the 1.06 Connector releases. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 12 weeks and placed into the 11.00 TOTECS platform release and 1.06 Connector release.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-24 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• Category Mega Navigation Menu content managed webpage areas
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Responsive Content Managed Website Master Templates
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Content managed webpage URL SEO improvements
• TOTECS documentation centre
• Emarketing enhancements
• Integration with ReadySell Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Ebay Integration

The 11.00 TOTECS release now provides you with statistics on how many server requests are being made per day on your TOTECS project. Using these statistics you can now find out how often a search engine such as Google is visiting your content managed website(s), and crawling for updated content. To access these statistics follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Statistics menu button.
3. Click on the Project Traffic Statistics menu item.
4. Under the Monthly Project Traffic section click on the Search All Traffic drop down.
5. Choose the Search Engine/Crawler option.
6. In the search textbox appears to the right of the dropdown type in google.
7. Click on the Refresh button. 

All the monthly graphs will update to show statistics on how many times google has visited any of the content managed websites within the project. Using this data will give you idea how often google is crawling your site, and how much searching it is doing to find your publically accessible content. Using the same steps you can find traffic generated by other search engines or crawlers by just changing the text within step 6.

If you have ideas like to make the platform better, please post them on our wishlist forum.

Happy winter time! Over the autumn months the TOTECS RnD team has churned out a bonanza of functionality for you to leverage in your websites. Two TOTECS platform releases have gone out covering 11 new features and 17 improvements. Additionally three Connector releases have gone out spanning 14 new features and 4 improvements. Lets have a look at the key changes.

NEW Server Traffic Statistics
 

If you haven't already noticed from the 3 Emails sent the other week, on the Home page of the Administration Centre we have updated the sales graph to now show statistics on the total amount of traffic your TOTECS projects are generating. This is designed to give you a more accurate measure on how much your websites are working for you.

At the end of May we begun collating statistics of every single request made to the TOTECS servers. To break it down a "server request" is a request by a web browser, or other computer software to obtain a piece of data from your website living on the computers in the "TOTECS cloud". So a server request can be generated by a person loading a web page, adding a product to basket, logging in, or doing all kinds of activity on your website. Additionally server requests can be made by search engines when they crawl each web page of your websites for SEO reasons, as well as by the Connector software each time it is scheduled to import data into your project.

Under the sales and traffic graph we added a few numbers to help you understand if your project is winning. One of key numbers is:

Average Server Requests Per Dollar Earned

This number is a ratio of the amount of traffic generated, divided by the amount of sales. The lower the number, the less work your websites are doing to earn a buck. Ideally you want to get this number as low as possible. What are the ways to do this?

• Make it as quick and easy for users to buy something on your websites. Don't let them get stuck searching around forever. More searching equals more traffic, sometimes good for SEO, bad for userability and server usage. Provide high quality descriptive product data and images to help users find what they want to buy sooner. Use Related Products to further help users find products of interest.
• Provide features that entice more users to complete purchasing and buy more. Deals and Vouchers, Guest Checkout, Contract Pricing, Flagged Products can all help with this.
• Reduce your catalogue to only what is really needed. Having a catalogue of a million categories, and a trillion products is most likely going to use up a lot of resources. Cut down your catalogue to the least number of categories needed, and associate them to the products that are high in value or consistently being purchased. In other words loose the dead product weight.

Countering all this are the search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing) and website crawlers. They love generating traffic. They will go through each and every link on your public websites and scoop up all the data that you make available on a regular basis. You want them doing this to draw in new users to your website. However you don't want them to be the only ones visiting, or consistently searching through content that is irrelevant. If search engines are generating lots of traffic, then they should be bringing in lots of sales (either online or offline) or other correlated value.

Project Traffic Statistics Admin Centre Interface

We have added a new interface to the Administration Centre that can give you a broad gauge of the traffic hitting your website. In the upcoming releases we will be making more fine grain data available within this interface as the statistics pile up. Already you will be able to see the total server requests, the total amount of content managed website traffic, and the number of search engine web page loads (based across the top 12 known search engines).

NEW Invoice Line Reports Content Managed Web page Area
 

In the 10.03 release we added the ability to setup highly customised reports in the Connector, which can produce a list of invoiced or ordered lines retrieved from a connected accounting/ERP/spreadsheet/database system for a given account. This allows reports such as "Top 100 Products Ordered Online and Offline", "All Products Ordered in the Last 3 months", "Products Not Yet Delivered", plus many more to be displayed on content managed websites. These reports can be used to show all the products that were purchased by a customer covering both online and offline methods (such as phone/fax/email). The report area can also match up the invoiced lines to products currently available in the project, allowing customers and salesreps to view and add products to basket directly from the report area itself. The area can be used to provide incentives in bringing across customers who have previously ordered through manual processes.

NEW Salesrep and Contract Content Managed Webpage Areas
 

We have continued on our quest to provide more Trade interface functionality within content managed websites. The 10.03 and 10.04 releases have added new content managed webpage areas to allow sales representative users to view the customer accounts available to them, switch accounts,as well as manage multiple baskets. Additionally new areas have been created to show the contracts assigned to a user's customer account, as well as view all the products assigned to a given contract. These additions allow contract and sales representative functionality to be displayed in highly customised, beautiful website designs and layouts.

NEW Product Groups and Related Products Connector Data Imports
 

In the 10.04 platform release we added a number of new data imports from the new version of the Connector. Now there is the ability to import product group data managed in a connected accounting/ERP/spreadsheet/database system. Additionally there is the ability to import related product data also from a connected system or spreadsheet. This can make life easier for data maintainers to manage product groups and related products data in a single system. To use these new imports version 1.04 or higher of the new Connector will need to be installed. Talk to the TOTECS service team if this interests you.

IMPROVED SEO of Search/Category Listing Web Page Areas

We have added a number of improvements to the Category and Product Search Listing content managed web page areas. Additional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been added to the paginators to allow search engines to more directly find and crawl the pages of products. Additionally we have added more settings and hooks to the areas to limit the amount of page links that show, as well as providing new ways for users to add products to favourites.


NEW Security And Data Routing within the Connector

  A large chunk of work has been done over the Connector's 1.02, 1.03, and 1.04 releases. Additional security has been added to the Connector to make it more secure when pushing data into it. Additionally 9 new data exports have been added allowing new kinds of data to be imported into both the TOTECS and Squizz.com platforms. A great number of these data exports cover the purchasing side of things. This will allow Squizz.com to convert purchase orders from one buyer organisation's system, into sales orders of another seller's organisation's system, automating a number of manual processes. A win win situation for everybody!

Adaptor Data Routing

There is now the ability for the Connector to do data routing between adaptors configured within it. For example if a data request was sent to the Connector to obtain "related product" data from a MYOB AccountRight Premier system, that request could instead be routed out to a spreadsheet file where the related product data was separately managed from. Furthermore the Connector has the ability to route out and obtain data from one or more locations at the same time, then have the data joined together. So for instance a request could be made to obtain half the product records from the Micronet Distribution system, that request could also be routed out to MYOB Retail Manager system to obtain the other half of products. The product data from both sources can then be unioned together and imported back into the TOTECS project as one complete list. 

This data routing allows for lots of unique and varied ways to store and manage data, which is particularly important when business systems don't have the capability of storing certain data. Using the Connector's data routing it can help data maintainers and data specialists reduce the amount of time spent doing data management.  

NEW Sending User Registration Notifications To Squizz.com
 

In November's 10.04 release we added the ability for the TOTECS platform to be able to send notifications to the Squizz.com platform when new users successfully register on your websites. This breaks the cycle of needing to rely upon Email to receive these kinds of notifications. Squizz.com's notifications system can be quickly set up to allow multiple people within an organisation to receive notifications, all without having to manage complex Email systems and inboxes. We are still in the process of sending out invites to the Squizz.com platform, so stay tuned for when your turn comes to sign up.

IMPROVEMENTS The Other Stuff

As always there's a number of other improvements that went out with the 10.03, and 10.04 releases. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 12 weeks and placed into the 10.03, 10.04 releases.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-24 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• Integration with MYOB AccountRight 2016 Accounting system
• Product Deals and Vouchers enhancements.
• Integration with ReadySell Enterprise Resource Planning system
• TOTECS documentation centre
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Emarketing enhancements
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Ebay Integration

The 10.04 TOTECS release adds a small improvement to help administrator users more quickly navigate to the All Areas interface when wanting to see, or modify areas on a content managed webpage. To use the feature follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Websites menu button.
3. Click on the Websites menu item.
4. Expand the web pages tree.
5. Right Click on a web page you wish to view the areas of.
6. Click on the View All Areas menu item in the context menu.

A new browser window will open and directly load the All Areas interface within the Webpage Editor.

Note: This improvement was built into the platform based on feedback made through the forums. If you have ideas like this to make the platform better, please post them on our wishlist forum.

Its a been a few months between drinks in the TOTECS RnD Labs land and we hope your summer has been an amazing and joyous one. Over this time there has been a hive of activity here with 3 platform releases and 2 Connector releases, which has added a number of features and new opportunities available to you. So here we go!

NEW Connector Version 1
 

For over 3 years we have been working overtime in developing our Connector software which allows your Accounting/ERP systems to reliably and seamlessly integrate to the TOTECS platform. All of this has happened under the version 0.x Beta labelling. In the past few months we have made major changes under the hood which warrants a major new version, version 1! As a part of this new version the Connector has been rebranded to the "Squizz.com Connector". This reflects how the Squizz.com platform will be leveraged to make the Connector available to a wider audience of businesses, which will be very important for connecting your suppliers and customer business systems together, and cutting integration costs for everyone. This new version will still work perfectly with the TOTECS platform, and will still be actively maintained by the TOTECS developers. Over time we will be upgrading existing projects to the new Connector.

NEW Generic Adaptor In The Connector
 

In version 1 of our Connector software we have created a new adaptor called the "Generic Adaptor". For those of you who don't know, the Connector has things called "adaptors" which each can connect to a single specific business system (such as a MYOB or Micronet system) to read and write data. However the Generic adaptor is a completely different beast, since it is not designed to connect to any one business system, instead it's designed to connect to a range of different data sources where business data is stored on a computer.

So the Generic adaptor can flexibly read and write data from CSV spreadsheet files, ODBC supported databases (such as Microsoft Access, MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle), Microsoft SQL Server databases, and web services supporting the Ecommerce standards. In simple terms, it opens up a whole world of possibilites for where you can manage and have your business data worked from. This is a big win for data specialists and data maintainers.

Lets take an example, the MYOB AccountRight Premier software does not have any concept of a contract. So instead you can create a spreadsheet file in Excel that contains a list of all the contracts, and in another sheet have a list of all the products, and another sheet have a list of all the accounts assigned to the contract. Using the Connector's Generic adaptor you can now configure it to read in all these contract spreadsheet files, and automatically import it into your TOTECS project, making contracts accessible to your customers on your website. If you delete a contract in its spreadsheet file, the next time the contract data is imported from the Connector, the contract will be deactived and no longer appear in your TOTECS website.

The Generic adaptor opens the door to systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, ReadySell, Jiwa, and many more to integrate into a TOTECS website. The end result, TOTECS has got your back for almost any business system that you decide to work with now, or in the future.


NEW Customer Account Enquiry Webpage Areas
 

We have added new areas to content managed web pages that allows sales order and back order account enquiry data to be displayed that has been retreived from your business systems. This allows highly customised layouts, and styling of back order, as well as sales order data to be shown that is consistent with your branding. This continues on our path in making more Trade interface functionality available within content managed websites.

NEW Sending TOTECS Notifications To Squizz.com
 

In November's 10.02.1 release we added the ability for the TOTECS platform to be able to send notifications to the Squizz.com platform when your users submit orders, enquiries, news/blog items, or news/blog item comments in your website. This breaks the cycle of needing to rely upon Email to receive notifications. Instead within the Squizz.com platform you can receive categorised notifications, easily control who else receives the notifications within your organisation, as well as receive push notifications to your mobile device if you have the Squizz.com Android app installed. The end result, less Email, and you are still kept in the loop.
We are in the process of sending out invites to the Squizz.com platform, so stay tuned for when your turn comes to sign up.

IMPROVED Calculating Freight Unit When Sending Orders To SmartFreight

Continuing on our integration into SmartFreight from late last year, we have now added into the TOTECS platform the abilty for it to calculate the most appropriate freight unit when submitting orders to SmartFreight, and the subsequent freight carrier. This means that if your user's order does not fit within a satchel, then the system can instead choose to put it in a bag, or box, or container, or shipload! You get to define the freight units that your business supports, and the thresholds at which each unit can be used.

If you wish to streamline freight processes in your website and business, Our SmartFreight integration is definitely worth a look.

NEW AND IMPROVED Integration Into TNS Payment Gateway

Towards the end of last year TNS suprised us by advising that they were no longer supporting the older version of their credit card payment gateway that TOTECS has reliably used for the past 6 years. So in record time we developed a completely new integration into their latest, and greatest credit card payment gateway, with minimal disruption, which looks to provide a long term solution for the future. TNS has also been acquired by MasterCard, so for those businesses using their service there is a reason why everything in their system is now branded as such.
 
NEW TOTECS Releases Its Ecommerce Standards To The Industry
 

Over the years we have built into the TOTECS platform and the Connector software a set of standards on how data can been transferred between different business systems, in a software independent way. This means data such as a sales order can be transferred from one accounting system to another Ecommerce system seemlessly in realtime. This seems like a simple task but many software providers in the industry have been focused on speaking their own language, which makes it difficult and time consuming for others to work out how to push and pull data into their software.

So January this year we have released our standards called the "Ecommerce Standards Documents". This has been released as an Open Source project to the wider Ecommerce industry as a way to get different software providers to have their software talk all in the same universal language, without everyone having to double up on doing laborious integration work. The objective is to reduce the time and costs in getting different business systems integrated, which in turn means less costs for businesses, reduced errors, improved efficiencies, and we can all spend more time working on other things that matter. The TOTECS developers here are passionate on taking a leading role in the industry, and getting a set of standards widely employed throughout.

IMPROVEMENTS The Other Stuff

Oh yeah there's a bunch of other improvements that went out with the 10.01.1, 10.01.2, and 10.02 releases. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 13 weeks and placed into the 10.01.1, 10.01.2, 10.02 releases.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-24 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• Integration with ReadySell Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Customer Account Enquiry Invoice Line Reports
• TOTECS documentation centre
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Emarketing enhancements
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Resource Planning system.
• Ebay Integration

The 10.02 TOTECS release brings the ability for administrator users to to make changes to Free Draw areas within content managed web pages and keep the editor open. This helps save a bit of time when constantly changing content on a web page, and needing to review the changes saved. To use the feature follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Websites menu button.
3. Click on the Websites menu item.
4. Expand the web pages tree and click on a web page of choice.
5. In the Web page editor click on the Modify Area button shown for a given Free Draw web page area.
6. In the editor make changes to the content then click the Save And Continue button.

The area's editor will stay open and have saved the changes to area's content to the server. If you reload the web page in a different browser then you can see the updated content. WIth the two browsers open side-by-side you can quickly save a change, then refresh the web page in another browser to verify that it looks as expected.

Note: This improvement was built into the platform based on feedback made through the forums. If you have ideas like this to make the platform better, please post them on our wishlist forum.

Here at TOTECS November is all about our new Order Freight Integration. For a long time now we have dreamed of being able to connect seamlessly to 3rd party freight carriers, and automate the work flow of order data through to shipment. We know time is money, and being able to reduce the labour required to get orders shipped out is highly valuable. The dream has now been realised with our new integration to IFS SmartFreight which allows the automation of a number of work flows. There are 4 aspects to this integration, and several settings are available to customise the feature to your tastes. Let's check it out.

The Background

If you are not already aware of what IFS SmartFreight is, or does, let me give you the elevator pitch. IFS is a company that develops SmartFreight, which is a bunch of software that can be used to automate communication between a business and its selected freight carriers eg. AustPost, TNT, Toll etc.. The IFS SmartFreight software does a number things, but primarily it is used to electronically raise consignment notes in the freight carriers systems, which notifies them of the goods that a business needs to get shipped, and where the shipped goods need to go.

The TOTECS platform looks to leverage IFS SmartFreight's technology by being able to use its service to do the following:

• Obtain accurate freight quotes off the freight carriers to ship an order not yet submitted
• Automatically send freight orders to a business's warehouse that its staff can see through the SmartFreight software
• Optionally automatically send off a consignment note to a chosen freight carrier when an order is submitted online.

To use IFS SmartFreight a business would set up accounts with their selected freight carriers, then also set up an account with IFS Smart Freight's software, configuring it to work with the chosen freight carriers. If I haven't lost you yet, lets see the magic added to the TOTECS platform.

NEW! Send Orders To IFS Smart Freight

The TOTECS platform now has the ability to send orders off to SmartFreight once a user has submitted an order. There are two ways that orders can be sent to IFS SmartFreight's software, these are "Partial Import", and "Full Import".

Partial Import

If a TOTECS project is configured to the "partial import" option then when an order is submitted through the platform it will only be sent to IFS SmartFreight's software, and not automatically forwarded onto any carrier. This is useful when the weights and dimensions of the ordered goods are not known until the warehouse staff have sorted out the order, and know for sure what the numbers are. It also allows the warehouse people, or any management staff to modify the freight order, fix up any errors, and choose the freight carrier to send the consignment note to using the SmartFreight application. Typically the SmartFreight software would be installed on a desktop computer in a warehouse, making it easier for the warehouse staff to see the partial orders, and finalise them.

Full Import

If a TOTECS project is configured to "full import" option then when an order is submitted by a user through the platform it will be sent to IFS SmartFreight's software, and automatically forwarded onto the carrier that a user chose before submitting the order. This provides a fully electronic end-to-end process between the user ordering the goods, and the freight carrier delivering the goods. In order to allow this automation to happen IFS SmartFreight demands that a few things are done:

• All the products ordered contain weights and dimensions, in kilograms, and metres respectively.
• The delivery and sender addresses of the order adhere to rules on where data can be set. Addresses must have street, suburb, state, postcode, and country data set in a particular way.
• A freight carrier has been chosen by the user

If an order was sent using the full import option but failed IFS SmartFreight's checks, then the order would be placed into its software as a partial import, waiting on a person to fix up the issues before it can be sent to a freight carrier.

The full import provides the greatest level of automation but it can require significant data work to get going if a business is selling thousands of products, and does not already have the data required.

NEW! Users Choose The Freight Carrier For An Order

The TOTECS platform now has the ability for users to be able to choose from a list of freight carrier services to deliver their order. If the feature is turned on then the platform can send off a request to IFS SmartFreight to ask for all of the freight carriers that are able to deliver the order. After users have entered their order details, they will be presented with screen showing the returned freight carriers, be able to see the costs to use each of the available carriers, and make an informed decision on who is the chosen carrier to ship the goods. This gives the power to the user to decide who is the fairest carrier of them all.

In order to use this feature the TOTECS project must be set up so that all products have weights and dimensions set, as well as address data adhering to IFS SmartFreight's rules.

NEW! Order Freight Surcharges Automatically Calculated

The TOTECS platform now has the ability for order freight surcharges to be automatically calculated by the freight carrier, based on the carrier chosen by the user in the order detail stage. What this means is that there is no longer necessarily the need to set up complex freight rules in the Order Surcharges admin interface of a project, which could save many hours of a person's life. If the feature is turned on then a request will be sent off through IFS SmartFreight to obtain the pricing of the selected carrier, and the pricing returned will be applied to the order's freight surcharge. This is great since the pricing is coming from the carrier's mouth, so you can worry less about the freight pricing being inaccurate.

If in the event that IFS SmartFreight servers cannot be communicated with then there is also the ability to still continue the ordering process, and have the surcharge rules run to calculate the freight just like previously. This ensures that the user can still submit that valuable order, but if you go down this path then an administrator still needs to configure freight surcharge rules that will act as a backup.

This feature also relies upon all products having dimensions and weights set, as well as correct address data given according to IFS's rules.

NEW! Sending Order Freight Email Notifications

Still don't like IFS, we understand, it isn't the right solution for everyone. But a solution you may like independent of IFS is the ability for administrators to send out Email notifications advising users of the freight status for an order. We have added a number of fields to the order that admins can set themselves after the order has been submitted, these are:

• Consignment Number
• Freight Carrier
• Freight Carrier Service
• Freight Carrier Account Code
• Freight Sent Status

The data in these order fields can then be configured to show to users when they view the order in their history. Additionally Administrators can send out a custom designed and configurable Email that can notify the user who submitted order of any freight updates. This removes the need for admins to waste time opening an Email client such as Outlook and manually create a formatted Email containing the order and freight information. A few clicks in the Administration Centre and the notification is sent, styled to taste, containing the order and freight information that you deem important to show the receiving person.

So Free Lobster For Lunch?

As is the case with all things IT there are costs involved to take advantage of the new features. To get the most out of IFS SmartFreight integration it may require upfront labour to get the product, and address data right, there's also costs to use IFS SmartFreight's software and services, as well as the costs to activate the integrated freight feature in the TOTECS platform. The functionality is not an all or nothing affair, so different aspects can be turned on to taste. The question on whether to use these features comes down to:

• How many orders are you processing through freight carriers?
• How many hours are you manually spending keying order freight data and fixing mistakes?
• How many resources are you investing into shipping that could be doing something else?
• How happy are your customers with your current freight work flows?

After answering those questions come talk to us about a freight solution that could work for your online business using TOTECS by Emailing service@totecs.com, or by asking a question on the forums.
 
IMPROVEMENTS The Other Stuff

Oh yeah there's a bunch of other improvements that went out with the 10.01 release. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 7 weeks and placed into the 10.01 releases.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-12 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• Generic Adaptor within the Connector
• Emarketing enhancements
• TOTECS documentation centre
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Resource Planning system.
• Ebay Integration

The 10.01 TOTECS release brings the ability for administrator users to delete all products assigned to category in only a couple of clicks. To do so follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Inventory menu button.
3. Click on the Category Trees menu item.
4. Expand a category tree and right click on a category of choice.
5. Click on the Delete Products menu item.
6. Click OK in the confirmation dialog.

Any products assigned to the category will now be removed. Please be sure that you want to do these steps beforehand, otherwise you could be permanently deleting category data that will be forever lost.

Note: That you can only delete products from a category that is assigned to a web managed category tree. Don't know what that is? Check out this forum thread to find out the answer.

Spring is here at TOTECS and with it we have made quite a few changes to the platform over the cold wintry months. Over July, August, and September 2 releases to the platform have gone out through the 9.05.5 and 10.00 versions. These releases have added 2 new features, 21 improvements, and 29 bug fixes to the platform. A number of those items have come out of topics raised in the forums, so we highly encourage participation in the forums community to help the platform, and your business grow further.

We've decided to drop sending out the RealTalk newsletter on weeks when this RnD Labs newsletter gets sent out, but never fear there's plenty here to get you thinking. Without further adieu here's the cream of the release crop.

NEW! Product Stock Data Exports Using The Data API

This month brings a new feature that allows product stock data to be exported through the Data API (Application Programming Interface).

What this means is that 3rd parties, such as customers, or other external IT systems can now make requests to obtain stock data in an automated fashion by having their software directly call the API for a TOTECS project. An example is that a customer might buy products off your TOTECS website, then on their own website they may list and onsell these products, as well as show how much product stock is available to their customers. With this new feature they can now modify their website's software to call your TOTECS project to obtain the latest product stock data, and update the stock levels in their system without any person manually needing to key in stock values, a big time saver! This feature is particularly powerful for customers who use "drop shipping" to onsell your products.
 

We have built several security mechanisms into the Data API to make sure that the product stock data export is not abused. Firstly customers will only ever be able to obtain product stock data based on the products they have permission to view, dictated by the inventory permission role assigned to the user who is accessing the API. There are also limits on how often the product stock export can be called, as well as how often new sessions can be created in the API. There are also permissions and settings that dictate if users can use the Data API to export data at all.

A new interface called Data API within the Administration Interface's Data menu has been created, and this interface shows a log of each time product stock data is being exported. This allows administrator users to keep an eye on which users are being used to export data, how many records they are exporting, and where the requests are originating from.

This new Product Stock Data Exporting feature is billed based on usage, and this ensures that if a large amount of traffic is calling the API to export product stock data, that we can add additional servers to the platform to handle the load.


NEW! Clone Emarketing Emedia Emails

We have added a great time saver that allows Administrators users to clone Emedia Emails within The Emedia Messaging interface of the Administration Centre. This makes its easy to Admin users to create a fresh Emedia Emails, that contains all the settings and data based on a previous Emedia Email sent out.

Admin users simply click on a Emedia row, then click the Clone button, and voilà... a new Emedia item will be created that contains all the same settings as the original Emedia, such as From Address, selected user groups, message content etc.. The cloning process will also create a new content managed web page that contains all the data of the original web page associated with the rich-text component of an Emedia Email. This ensures that any changes made to the cloned Emedia do not affect the original Emedia.

NEW! Product, Category, Flag Image Resizing Method

In the 10.00 release a number of improvements have been made to images in the platform. The biggest change is that there is now a new way for the platform to be able to resize product, category, and product flag images when they are uploaded. When any of these images are uploaded the platform will resize the images to different sizes, which allows for optimised downloading and viewing when the end users see the images in their web browser. Previously the platform would always resize images to fit within specified allowed dimensions. This resizing method would scale images up or down until the entire image fit within the allowed dimensions, but this meant that some images would not be exactly sized if they did not have the same "aspect ratio" as the allowed dimensions. Because of this it could cause some content managed webpage layouts to mis-align.
So we have added a new method to resize images, which allow images to be scaled up or down, as well as cropped so that the resized image's aspect ratio exactly matches the allowed dimensions. This makes for pixel perfect sized images, and that guarantees content managed webpage layouts are always consistent by having all images sized the same.

Lets take an example here's an image that has an aspect ratio of 2:1, where its width is twice the size of its height. In this case the image is 200 pixels in width, and 100 pixels in height.
 

Scaling Resize Method
In the old way this image would scaled down to fit within the allowed dimensions eg. for a product image the small size could be set at 100px width by 100px height. So in this case the original image would be scaled down to fit within the bounds, and because of this it would be resized to a 100px by 50px image to preserve the 2:1 aspect ratio and ensure that no image data is lost. The consequence is that the image does not take up all of the available space.

Scaling And Cropping Resize Method
In the new way images are scaled then cropped to completely fill the bounds. In this case the image does not need any further scaling down, instead only the sides of it need to be cut off to have it fit exactly within 100 pixel by 100 pixel dimensions and completely fill it.

The consequence of this new cropping method means that parts of an uploaded image may be cut off, such as the sides to make its aspect ratio match. Settings have been created to allow administrators to control which sides of an image will be cut off when cropping needs to occur. For example if you have a water mark in the top left of all your product images, then you would configure the project so that only the right hand side, or bottom side of the images are cut off. To take advantage of this new image resizing method, read the release documentation to find out where the settings are located and how to use them.


NEW! Shopping List Products Import Form Content Managed Web Page Area

In the TOTECS 9.05.5 release we added a new content managed web page area that allows users to add all products in their basket into a new, or existing shopping list. This functionality provides the same functionality as in the Trade interface, and makes it easy for users to store a list of products, that they can import back to their basket at a later date for purchasing.

LAST CHANCE TO GET FREE TRADING TOKENS! Squizz.com Early Adopters Program

This is the last opportunity for TOTECS customers to sign up to the early adopters program at Squizz.com and get $200 worth of free trading tokens when the new platform officially launches. If you like free things then Email service@totecs.com to be added to the program. The Squizz.com platform is actually up and running, however it's currently going through internal testing. When the doors are officially opened the early adopters who have signed up will receive a personal invite to register before anyone else, and get ahead of the game.
 
IN DEVELOPMENT Integrated Freight with IFS SmartFreight

The development for the integration between IFS SmartFreight and the TOTECS platform is currently underway. it didn't quite make the 10.00 release, so now it has been scheduled into the 10.01 release. There is still time to have your say about the development of the feature, so if this freight integration interests you, please comment on your interest at the forums, or Email service@totecs.com.

Had Enough Yet?

There's a whole bunch of changes that we haven't even talked about in the 9.05.5 and 10.00 TOTECS release. Visit the Administration Centre or the forums to review the complete list of Release Notes. If you wish to be a part of the process to get a piece of functionality into the platform, please get in contact with us or visit the forum's wishlist topic. As always, until next time happy online trading :) Here's a wrap up of the new features and improvements developed over the last 10 weeks and placed into the 9.05.5 and 10.00 releases.
 

Listed below are the features that we look to work on over the next 3-12 months.
Please Note: Development is dependent on funding, demand and scheduling.

• IFS SmartFreight integration
• Generic Adaptor within the Connector
• Emarketing enhancements
• TOTECS documentation centre
• News/Blogging Search content managed web page areas
• Integration with Jiwa Enterprise Resource Planning system
• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Resource Planning system.
• Ebay Integration

The 10.00 TOTECS release brings the ability to clone Emedia Emails within the Emedia Messaging interface of the Administration Centre To do so follow these steps:

1. Login to the Administration Centre.
2. Click on the Marketing menu button.
3. Click on the Emedia Messaging menu item.
4. In the Emedia Items table click on the table row of one Emedia item that you wish to clone.
5. Click on the Clone button.

A new Emedia item will be added as the top row of the table that will contain a copy of all the settings and data from the original Emedia.

Note: It is recommended to create new Emedia items each time you send out a new version of an Emedia Email. This ensures that there is a historic reference of the old Emedia, and if there are links to the web version of the Email rich-text page, that the link still goes to the original Email, not an updated version.