North America

Toronto, Canada – October 1st & 2nd

First we’ll be running a Managing Projects with Merlin Training in association with TechPal in Toronto Canada. More details and bookings are available on the TechPal website.

United Kingdom

London – October 9th&10th

After that we’re coming back home to the UK to run our next London training. There’s been lots of interest in this one, so make sure you book asap. This course will also feature a q&a session by Project Wizards CEO, Frank Blome.

Merlin mixer – London – (TBC)

If you use Merlin why not join us for some drinks? Lgo and Project Wizards CEO Frank Blome will be welcoming Merlin users new and old to have a chat about project management and what they love about Merlin.

Europe

Amsterdam, Netherlands – October 29th&30th
Stockholm, Sweden -  November 5th&6th
Berlin, Germany – November 12th&13th

At the end of October and beginning of November we will then be travelling across Europe to three cities to hold our first Lgo Merlin European Tour. More details will be available soon from our training page and the Project Wizards website.

It’s quite a neat little tool, but it wasn’t without a few little snags.

Firstly, there was a risk of duplicate numbers when using it on offline databases. Billings Pro and Daylite databases are stored locally and synch with a server every few minutes. If two users create projects between synchs, the project numbers may get duplicated. Not very much of a problem if you’ve just got one or two users, but the more users the bigger the risk.

Some companies were happy to live with this, some were concerned and found it non workable. So we scratched our heads, had a think and came up with a solution. When you apply the project numberer, Daylite or Billings Pro performs a synch, updates the project number and then performs another synch. The process is extended by a few seconds, but it really reduces the risks of duplications to practically nothing.

Next problem. It works with Daylite 3 and Billings Pro – what about Daylite 4?

It works with Daylite 4 – and we think we are one of the first Daylite experts in the world to come up with a custom tool for the new version of Daylite.

Our Project Numbering Tool working With Daylite 4

What about iPhone and iPad?

If you spend a lot of time on Daylite Touch creating projects, do you then have to apply project numbers to them all when you get to the office? Well you did, but now we’ve found a solution to that problem. The tool automatically scans for new projects every thirty minutes – if it finds a project without a number it will automatically assign one!

Finally, at the moment, with Daylite 4 there is no working link to Billings Pro. You have to enter all the projects manually in both Daylite and Billings Pro. Quite time consuming. In Daylite 3 you have to select each project and send it to Billings Pro. Well this does it automatically! When it finds a new project it will automatically send it to Billings Pro – from Daylite 3 and 4!

We keep being given challenges and can’t help coming up with cool answers!

If you are interested in any of these tools for Daylite (3 or 4) or Billings Pro, then speak to us today!

Open Applications -> Utilities -> Apple Script editor

Then go to Apple Script editor menu -> Preferences
Check Show script menu in Menu bar
Uncheck show computer scripts

The menu items appears

Choose Open Scripts Folder-> Open Users Scripts Folder
Create a folder called Billings Pro

Save the script there – this way you never need leave Biliings Pro to run the script.

How when you want to use a Billings Pro tool just click on the icon that looks like an unfurled scroll on the right hand side of the menu bar, select Billings Pro and your tool will be there!

You run the script, it takes the slips (say they total £1000), and then adds an expense slip of £50 that you can then invoice. Your invoice now matches what Billings Pro says and there’s no confusion about how much clients should have paid. We’ll be doing a full case study on this later, so keep an eye out for it.

It would be difficult though – wouldn’t it? You’d have to look up the next number whenever you create the project, right? Wrong! We have a tool to do this for you. We store a completed project in Billings Pro and use an extra field to store a number. You then just run a script. The script creates a new project and uses the number in the extra field in the name. It then automatically updates that number to the next one. It’s so quick and easy!

We can also do this for multiple numbers – say you want a letter in front of the number to differentiate between types of work, or perhaps different numbers for different types of projects (1xxxx for job type A, 2xxxx for job type B, etc.) We also have a version of this script that works for Daylite.

If you’re interested in this tool or have an idea for one, then get in touch with us and we can help!

We designed a script that when run would automatically import a CSV file. At the touch of a button 9 months work becomes 5 seconds! Saving time means you can work on more important things and make more money.

Keep an eye out for a full case study on this and more custom scripts for Billings Pro.

Our Managing Projects with Merlin course is running in London on May 2nd-3rd 2012. The course runs over two days and is designed to get you working in Merlin more confidently and efficiently. By the end of the course you will be able to take a project through from planning to completion,  using the tools in Merlin to track time, money and deliverables of the project.

Topics covered will include:

• Introduction to project management with Merlin
• Merlin’s interface
• Work breakdown and brainstorming
• Dependencies
• Project structures
• Resources and utilisation
• Financing and budgets
• Reporting
• Collaborative working.

This course is great for anyone who is new to Merlin or anyone who has been using it for a while but wants to really get to grips with how powerful it is for managing projects. More information on the course and booking details are available here.

We are of course still running our popular in house training courses. For more information on these give us a call on 0203 390 5549.

We have a client who has offices around the world. We visited their UK office in December and imported all their data through the ‘Now Contact’ importer that uses this Source Input ID to link contacts and organisations – all good so far…

Today, we went to add their European offices data to the database. We needed to merge two Now Contact databases into one Daylite database. We used the the built in importer again, giving us a total of around 100,000 contacts.

However, when we arrived at the clients’ office to deliver a training session, we checked the data with the client and… OH DEAR! Schoolboy error!
Data from the other offices and separate Now Contact files used the same Source Input IDs as the UK database – so all the data was mixed and things were linked to the wrong place!  People in Paris had London phone numbers and addresses, wrong roles, etc. In short, it was a mess!

Luckily, we have backups and can work to put the data right but, if you are about to do this – please STOP! Make sure the unique identifiers in the Source Input ID are different or else you could have a completely mixed up database too. And if you don’t keep backups, it could be a total disaster!

(This won’t only happen when you have offices in different countries – this could happen when any two databases are being merged)

Solution: We’ve created a script to erase Import ID before so we can import the other files without problems.

If you think you could have trouble, contact us, and we can give you advice, or our script tool.

This our first blog post, marks the launch of MerlinDaylite Link 1.3 a free updated to our tool that allows you to share data between Merlin, the best Mac project management software, and Daylite the best Mac business manager. More details can be found here.

We’re a little behind on getting our new site ready, but we will continue to press on and we’ll be updating the site more over the next few weeks, sharing some great custom tools we’ve built!

G.