LgoKnowledge Ltd

Public Merlin Training – May 2012

Gareth — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:51:51 +0000

We are pleased to announce our new public Merlin training schedule. We have set a date for May and are currently looking at dates for June and July. Dates available at http://www.lgo.co.uk/merlin/trainingcourses.

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.

Schoolboy errors and a solution

Gareth — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:29:59 +0000

Daylite has some really powerful importing tools. One feature is a field called ‘Source Input ID’ that can be used to link objects together, such as linking a contact to an organisation. This acts as a unique identifier so, for example, will automatically link Mr John Smith with Smith’s Business Ltd. Without this, you’d have to link objects in the database together manually, which could be very time consuming and impractical.

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.

MerlinDaylite Link Updated

Gareth — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:43:33 +0000

We’ve been crazy busy over the last few months, it feels like we have 1001 projects on the go at the same time!

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!