Technical Support Providers

Small businesses that offer tech support will turn out better results than a big tech support company offering global support.  Having worked in tech support and worked with providers of various sizes, I have come to the opinion that small departments offer more meaningful support, better customer service and have superior knowledge.

When working with the large tech support providers the first person you work with has limited support experience and lacks knowledge of your system.  To get a representative with some experience and knowledge it usually takes 3 or 4 escalations before you get to a person who can assist you to a resolution.  If you have a specific question about specialized software, forget about it, a large tech support firm might not even know what you are talking about let alone be able to legitimately troubleshoot your issue.

With a small business support provider chances are the first Support Technician you talk to has worked with many different platforms and will have years of experience working with client systems and troubleshooting.  They will have seen the issue before (because they have run into it before with their own test environment).  More than likely the engineer you are working with works in a small room with 5 other support engineers with various backgrounds and areas of expertise to help troubleshoot and resolve the issue.  The support engineers with the small firm will have more invested in your experience with their assistance and take pride in their efforts.

Jeff Martin
ImageSource, Inc.  

Database Lookups Made Easy

Database lookups are easy with ILINX® Content Store.  Recently I configured a few and thought I would share some of the features.  I am assuming that you are somewhat familiar with database lookups in general, so this is not a step-by-step but just to point out some cool features.

Here is the application that we need a lookup for and we are going to base it off the SSN field.  We will need to click edit on the field and enable/configure the lookup

Fill in all the information to make the connection.  A couple of cool features are that you can choose to use the .NET driver (which is more current technology) or the normal OLE DB driver.  Also, the port used to connect is configurable.

And it doesn’t JUST do SQL…there are lots of options

Choose the table, view or stored procedure you want to use.  Then, edit the SQL query to map the fields and test.  Here you can also configure when the lookup occurs.  By default, there is a look ahead feature.  That means that after a certain number of characters entered, in this case 4, the database lookup returns up to 10 of the relevant possible matches on the criteria that has been entered.  The max of 10 is configurable as well by changed the SELECT TOP 10 in the SQL query.  The lower the number, the faster you can select a lookup.  Keep in mind however that for every character typed after the 4^th one to narrow down the results, the query has to re-execute so use your best judgment on how many characters should be typed before doing the lookup.  You can also set the check box to lookup on tab out.

So our lookup  is configured, but when we test the query we have a problem.  It seems that the Date field in ILINX is a ‘Date’ field, and the field in the database is text.  How can we solve this and still maintain the data integrity of our ILINX system?

This is where a custom SQL Query comes in handy.  Using the CAST() feature in SQL, we can make that string into a date!

We run our test again and we return results.  Click Finish and your database lookup for the Capture tab is done!

Mike Peterson
Support Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.