Training/Support

Viva la Planning Board

Sean McHugh — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:37:00 GMT

So I’ve been strangely silent on the planning board as of late. I wanted to hold off on my ground-breaking, revolutionary and epic blog post on all that is the planning board until I had a chance to see what you guys were doing with it.

So how are our customers using the planning board? Probably in more ways than I can easily fit into a book let alone a humble blog post but let me put some generalizations out there just to give you an idea.

First we have the planners, these are the guys who jump into the planning board when they need to work on many items all at once and make certain that the work they are managing in OnTime is evenly distributed. More often than not these guys are Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners or Team Leads. Planners open up the planning board, group by user to and use the group headers to make certain that their team all has a good amount of work assigned to them so that nobody is caught with nothing to do, then they’ll quickly switch gears to make certain that their entire unplanned backlog isn’t high-priority work. Planners love the planning board in OnTime because it makes it easy to work with many items quickly, organize them into groups and quickly visualize what's going on.

Other OnTime users use the planning board for their meetings, because of the way we designed it, the planning board is very handy for Scrum meetings, planning meetings or just getting together with your dev team to hash out what your time estimates should look like. Since the planning board is easily filtered and uses a color coded and easy to read “Card” analogy it looks great in a group environment and lets you make changes to a project or specific work as quickly as the conversation moves.

We’ve also seen users accessing the planning board just to make a quick update to all of their items in one place; these are usually developers who work on many items all at the same time. They’ll log into OnTime, launch the planning board and quickly move the items they touched that day to the next workflow step or add a couple worklogs to the things on their plate then get right back to doing what they do best (which is the actual work of making your own great software or designing an awesome product for your customers).

The interesting thing (from my perspective anyways) was that some people actually started doing EVERYTHING in the planning board, literally the planning board completely replaced the UI in OnTime for these folks. We knew the planning board was pretty revolutionary when we made it but we’ve found that for many of our customers that we literally changed the way that project management is done.

One last thing that I want to mention, the planning board isn’t just for Windows Users, it runs just as well in your browser regardless of what platform you’re on. Not related to the point of this post, I just think that it's pretty cool.

Keep an eye for OnTime V10

Sean McHugh — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:21:00 GMT

Okay, so I’m not going to name names here but somebody let the cat out of the bag yesterday that OnTime’s V10 Beta will be hitting the streets in February. That being said, you’re probably going to want to know the instant OnTime Beta is released, so that you can start playing with the new toy all the cool kids will be using. Luckily, I’m here to point you to the best places to keep an eye on for that.

Twitter: You’ve probably heard of twitter already so I may not be rocking your world with this one, but following Axosoft on twitter is a great way to get up to the minute news on what we’re doing, especially if you’ve got a twitter client running in the background like I tend to.

The Forums: We have some fairly active forums here at Axosoft, it’s where the community gathers but it’s also where we post FAQ articles and announce new releases for OnTime. You can bet that even if the forums aren’t first place we update when we actually announce a new release of OnTime then it will likely be the second in fairly short order. On the off chance that you don’t want to devote a tab in your browser to refreshing the forums every 5 minutes, you can actually use the RSS feed for the announcements forum and you can also enable your account on our community site to site to send you an email when a new topic is posted in the announcements forum. Just log into the community site, go to the Announcements forum, scroll to the bottom and click on “More Options”, the rest should be explained by the screenshot below.

Our Newsletter: We do indeed have a newsletter that will tell you when V10 hits beta and any subsequent phases of release but it will also deliver directly to your inbox an untold wealth of information that is good to know such as specials or coupons, handy tutorial videos or links to witty and useful blog entries that may prove to be the highlight of your day.

Signing up for the newsletter is easy, just scroll to the bottom of any page on Axosoft.com (like the one in that link there) and scroll down to the bottom. In the footer on the right you’ll see a handy little dialog for signing up.

The User Dashboard, it's pretty awesome.

Sean McHugh — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:21:00 GMT

On the off chance that you haven’t seen it, used it and loved it, I thought I’d take a moment to point out a really cool feature in OnTime that doesn’t always get the spotlight it deserves.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you, the User Dashboard.

You’ll note in the screenshot above that the user dashboard allows you to view all of your items in one central view, that’s right; Defects, Features, Tasks and Incidents all living together in harmony in one list. Since we’ve got all these items in one place though, it seems a shame to just let it go at that.

The user dashboard also lets you run a report off of all the items it’s currently showing in its grid which make multi-item-type reports pretty simple to run and build.

The user dashboard also can refresh itself based on a timer, want to see the data refreshed from the database every 5 minutes? Done.

Last but certainly not least, I can also edit items directly from the user dashboard, notice the edit buttons up top? Yeah, you can edit items directly from the user dashboard.

Last thing I’m going to say about the user dashboard in this post is that it’s been around since OnTime 2007 and it’s available in Express, Professional and Enterprise so we’re not talking about anything you’ll need to upgrade for or something in a future release. You already have the user dashboard if you’ve got OnTime installed, it’s high time you start using it!

If you want to know more about the User Dashboard (specifically how to launch and use it) check out THIS video we made way back in July of 2008.

It's all there in the Hosted Dashboard.

Sean McHugh — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:28:00 GMT

I’ve said an awful lot about OnTime Now (our hosted OnTime service) but I noticed that I had left something important out: the hosted dashboard. The hosted dashboard is where you go to get information about your instance of OnTime and also configure some of the server side settings.

So what can I do with the hosted dashboard?

Force OnTime Web, Customer Portal and the SDK to only use SSL.
Toggle the OnTime Services on and off.
Find information about :

Hosting costs
When your next payment is due
How many user licenses you have
How many customer portal licenses you have
Your backup schedule
The URL for any of the OnTime components you need to get to.

So getting to your hosted dashboard is pretty easy, from the Axosoft Website, click on the “My Account” button in the top right hand corner.

From there you’ll log into the Axosoft Store (your hosted OnTime Now instance is linked to your store login) and click on “My Account” again. At this point you should be at a screen that shows you any license keys or hosted accounts tied to your login. In the screenshot below you can see two OnTime Now instances and a free single user key that I signed up for a while ago.

From this screen, hit the “Settings” button for your hosted account and you’ll be taken to the dashboard.

Add the Windows Client to your shiney new OnTime Now account.

Sean McHugh — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:01:00 GMT

I don’t typically do special requests for the Training/Support blog, unless of course I am asked to do so (Tip: If you have an idea for a blog post, post it on the FORUMS).

Specifically, we’re going to talk about using the OnTime Windows client with your OnTimeNow hosted account.

Step 1: Have a hosted account
This part isn’t hard, HERE is how you sign up.

Step 2: Download and Install the Windows Client
This part isn’t difficult either, download the installer above, make certain you have .net framework 2.0 or higher installed on your Windows machine and run the installer

Step 3: Point OnTime Windows to your hosted account
When OnTime Windows loads for the first time it will ask you where the SQL Server is, it will look like the screenshot below.

Switch to the Remote Connection Tab at the top of this dialog and choose the “Connect to OnTime Remote Server” radial button.
Fill out the OnTime Remote Server URL and Security Token GUID for your OnTimeNow Remote Server instance. If you don’t know this right away, login to your account on Axosoft.com and click on settings for your hosted account, this will take you to your Hosted Dashboard. The Hosted Dashboard will tell you the URL and Security GUID for the remote server as well as a host of other information about your OnTimeNow hosted account.

Everything above takes about 5 minutes, most of which is spent watching the Windows Installer do its thing. Since we’re hosting the Remote Server for OnTime, setup and administration of the webserver is all taken care of.

*Licensing for the Remote Server is a little different . See HERE for more details or contact Sales@Axosoft.com for more information

It's come to my attention that not everybody is keeping regular backups...

Sean McHugh — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:10:00 GMT

You may have read my soon to be internet famous post “SQL, OnTime and why Database Administrators are cool” but there was a piece of that post that I wanted to cover a little bit more in-depth. Specifically, I’d like to talk about backing up your database. You see, very often having a good backup is key to recovering from something horrible like hardware failure but it can also make your life easier if someone that's not you does something less than intelligent like deleting the OnTime database (don't laugh, I've seen it done before).

So let’s talk about when you should backup your database, my rule of thumb is to create a manual backup whenever I’m going to make ANY change to a production database outside of normal use. This means that while I’m obviously not going to make a backup after every change to my database, if I’m doing something that’s not part of normal use (for instance, upgrading OnTime) I make a backup. I also make a backup anytime I modify a production OnTime Database outside of the application directly through SQL (which I can’t support by the way). In short, if it’s something big that requires my phenomenal cosmic admin powers to do, I make a backup just in case I break something (not that you or I would ever do such a thing).

It’s also a good idea to backup your database at regular intervals, a weekly backup wouldn’t be a bad idea, a nightly backup might be better, nightly backups with hourly log file backups kept offsite would be downright peachy. One thing is for certain, you’ll never catch me telling you what your backup schedule should look like, but you might hear me mention that you should at least have scheduled backups.

In most cases, scheduling SQL backups will be pretty simple but here’s some good reading to get you started:

http://whiteknighttechnology.com/cs/blogs/brian_knight/archive/2006/08/13/215.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191239.aspx

One last note: test your backups, the only thing worse than not having backups when you need them is having backups that don’t work when you need them to.

OnTime Now: Seriously, this is almost too easy.

Sean McHugh — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:37:00 GMT

So we here at Axosoft have been talking an awful lot about OnTime Now recently, and with good reason, it’s pretty cool. There is one thing about OnTime Now that we haven’t really talked enough about I think, and that’s how ridiculously simple it is to set up and get going. This is of particular interest to me (in support) as OnTime Now reduces your administrative headache since we do a lot of the heavy lifting for you (we host the SQL Server Database, IIS Web Server and OnTime Services).

So let’s talk about setting up a hosted instance of OnTime:

1st things first, you need to get to Axosoft.com, specifically HERE on Axosoft.com. So from Here you’ll see this page:

Click on Continue and you’ll see the speed test page, Click Bandwidth Test to see which Datacenter is fastest for you.

*As a side note, this page is probably my favorite things about OnTime Now. These tests are based off of real world data to and from the machine you’re testing from. If you have a distributed time, you’ll probably want them to see this page as well so you have all the info you’ll need to make an informed decision.

Here’s a screenshot of my results:

So from this, it looks like both California and Arizona will work well, keep in mind if you have a distributed team to keep all of your users in mind.

That’s actually as complicated as it gets, but for the sake of finishing what I start, I’ll click the “Select” button next to California and either create a new account on Axosoft.com for myself or use one that I already have.

And that’s it, I’ll get an email giving me all the rest of my info about my OnTime Now instance bust since I already know the address and my username/password I can get started right way.

IMAPing an email address to multiple email accounts

Sean McHugh — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:35:00 GMT

So I was in my gmail account the other night making myself a filter and while I was doing this I said to myself “Self, it seems a waste to let all this logic go to waste, where else can I use this?”

“Obviously in OnTime, you can probably squeeze a whole blog post out of this if you play your cards right.” I replied as I often do when I ask myself questions. Ignoring the strange looks from the people around me (no doubt as a result of my brief conversation) I set about testing things. Before I walk you through getting this set up; check out the caveats below.

It’s important to keep in mind that my example will be in gmail, you may be able to create this logic on your Exchange or other email server, since we don’t support your email server we won’t be able to walk you through creating the filter.
You’ll need OnTime 9.1 or higher to do this since we’re going to be using IMAP.

As I mentioned in the second bullet point, we’re going to be using IMAP email accounts for this and that means we need to create some labels in gmail (probably folders on whatever email server you use). For the purposes of demonstration I’m going to create an Incidents label and a Tasks label.

Next thing I’ll do is create some filters to automatically filter these items and label the accordingly, for my purposes I’m going to create some tags for my filters to recognize. Try to use something here that won’t be used elsewhere as this might cause some confusion later on.

Do some emailing with these tags to your email address, just to make certain that everything is being filtered the way you expect it to. If you need to, turn on IMAP support for your email account (or have your mail server admin do this for you) and let’s start talking OnTime.

Now normally I’d walk you through creating the email account, but we’ve already COVERED that so I’ll spare you the mundane details and just cover what we’re going to be doing differently.

Once your new email account is set up to talk to the server and is using the IMAP protocol, click on the IMAP Settings tab and click the Refresh Folders button, look in the drop down and among others, you’ll see your two labels (or folders). The folder listed here will be where this email account looks for emails, so for now I’ll choose Tasks and go about configuring the rest of this email account to talk to Tasks. Once I’m done I’ll go about creating a second email account in OnTime to talk to the same email address but a different IMAP folder, the second email account in OnTime will work with Incidents.

Okay, everything is set up! Pat yourself on the back and reward yourself by going home early right? Not so fast, you still have to test everything to make certain it behaves how you want. Create some manual test emails and be certain your email server is filtering correctly and that OnTime is importing the emails correctly.
Once that’s done, update all of your email templates for each item so that your [Task] and [Incident] tags are in place. For manually created emails in OnTime you’ll need to remember to place this tag in place manually. Once that’s done, test again and call it a day!

Custom Reports!!! (Part 4)

Sean McHugh — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:51:00 GMT

Now we come to the final bit that needs to be in place for a custom report, scripting. Scripting in OnTime’s report designer is actually pretty simple provided you have some basic knowledge with .net framework and it gives you that extra bit of leverage you need to make your reports exactly what you need them to be.

With scripting, I can do things like creating dynamic grouping options, change attributes of items in the report, create calculated fields that I can drop into my report, parse html tags in large text fields and a host of other things. To get started I’ll click on the script editor icon of my custom report in the reports designer.

Once you’re in here it’s good to be familiar with some concepts about the reports themselves, the first place to look is going to be the section of the OnTime Window’s User Guide called “Active Reports Concepts” but you probably read over that when I posted the previous blog, now you’ll want to check out the Scripting Section immediately below it.

After reading the docs, the best way to get a feel for how to implement your own scripting is to make a copy of one of the built in reports and dig into it, very often you can repurpose that code to fit your needs.

Beyond reading the docs and digging through the built in reports I also recommend stopping by the forums and asking any questions you may have. Because it involves custom code, support can’t provide specific help for custom reports scripting but we do try to be as helpful as we can on the forums.

So I’ve got my scripting written, the next thing I’ll want to do is preview my report to make certain everything looks alright and I’m not seeing any errors, if all is good, save your report and you’re good to go.

If you liked the liked the recent posts on reporting but you’d like to see it in one large document, I’ve got your back.

Read this series as a PDF.
Read this series as one page.

Custom Reports!!! (Part 3)

Sean McHugh — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:17:00 GMT

So now that we know what data is going to be in our report we’ll want to know how it’s going to be presented to our end users in its report, this is where the reports designer comes into play.

A report in OnTime is broken up into different sections, these sections allow you to segment the data in your report, you can create a header and footer for the entire report, each page of the report or a group of rows returned. There will also be a section for the actual detail of each row returned. The OnTime Window’s user’s guide explains this a little bit better so allow me to copy/paste.

A report section contains a group of controls that are processed and printed at the same time as a single unit. ActiveReports defines the following section types:

Report Header: A report can have one report header section that prints at the beginning of the report. This section generally is used to print a report title, a summary table, a chart or any information that needs only to appear once at the report's start.
Report Footer: A report can have one report footer section that prints at the end of the report. This section is used to print a summary of the report, grand totals or any information that needs to print once at the report's end.
Page Header: A report can have one page header section that prints at the top of each page. It is the first section that prints on the page except when the page contains a report header section. The page header section is used to print column headers, page numbers, a page title or any information that needs to appear at the top of each page in the report.

Note: Bound controls in the PageHeader or PageFooter are not supported. The data in such controls may not be in synch with the data displayed in other sections on the page.

Page Footer: A report can have one page footer section that prints at the bottom of each page. It is used to print page totals, page numbers or any other information that needs to appear at the bottom of each page.
Group Header/Footer: A report can consist of single or multiple nested groups, with each group having its own header and footer sections. The header section is inserted and printed immediately before the detail section. The footer section is inserted and printed immediately after the detail section.
Detail: A report has one detail section. The detail section is the body of the report and one instance of the section is created for each record in the report.

Some of the above information was created by Data Dynamics. The original work can be found here.

When you’re creating a report from scratch you’ll have three sections to work with, a page header, a detail section and page footer, you can right click on the area of your reports designer to drop in another section. Most of these are self-explanatory just by name but grouping requires a little bit of configuring to use correctly. Groups are pretty simple so long as you are using the same group criteria every time in this report, simply highlight the group header and change the DataField property to whichever field you want to group by. If you need to do something dynamic with grouping in your report things get a bit more complicated and you’ll want to read through the section in the User’s Guide about grouping data in a report (It’s under Reports>Scripting>Grouping Data).

Now that your report is structured correctly you’ll want to drop your data fields in place so you can start designing things. Things are pretty intuitive from here, just grab a field from the tree menu of your report and drag them into place in the designer. Fields from your query will be listed under Fields>Bound in the tree menu of the reports designer. Bound fields are the columns of data that are returned by your data set (which we covered last in the previous post).

Once you get everything in place you’ve got a report.

Next week we’ll talk a little about background scripting that we can build into these reports and some of the things that you can do with that.

Custom Reports!!! (Part 2)

Sean McHugh — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:34:00 GMT

So the most important part of any report is going to be the data you are reporting on and the good news is that most of the reports in OnTime do the heavy lifting for you, just make sure that all of the data is in your grid and you’re good to go. This also works for most custom reports as well since a defect report uses the same stored procedure to pull data for the built-in defect reports as it does for custom defect reports it knows how to pass parameters to sort and filter correctly.

Things get a little bit more complicated when you need a more complex dataset however, for instance if I wanted to join in some history about my item, like how many times it’s been pulled out of its fixed state for additional work. In this case you’ll need to venture outside of the normal report types that build your dataset for you and step into the strange world of Other Reports.

Okay so maybe that was a bit melodramatic, Other Reports aren’t so different than any other type of report, they just let you build a report off of your own query, which means you can join your own tables, sort and group, perform math functions and all kinds of good stuff. Be warned however, with great power comes great responsibility, you’ll want some familiarity with SQL if you want to build these kinds of reports.

This is a good point to stop and talk about Axosoft’s stance on supporting custom reports built off of custom queries. We’re always glad to point you to the right place in the database and we know it like the back of our hand, but we won’t be able to write SQL queries for you.

So getting back to the subject at hand, let’s build a report off of our own query. First things first we’ll write a query and the best place to do that in my opinion is in management studio:

Once your query is built, be sure to run it to make sure there aren’t any errors and it’s returning the information you want, copy it to your clipboard and jump into OnTime. Inside OnTime click on Reports>Manage Reports and click on Other Reports and then create a new report. Before the reports designer will open allow you to do anything else it will ask you to input your SQL query. Go ahead and paste from your clipboard and hit OK.

Each column returned by your query will now be a field that you can drop onto your report with the reports designer which we’ll cover in the next post.

Custom Reports!!! (Part 1)

Sean McHugh — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:13:00 GMT

Reporting is a topic that gets a good amount of talk time by our customers for good reason, getting information out of OnTime is often just as important as getting it in there in the first place (depending on what you do with it). This isn’t a subject I’m going to be able to cover in one blog post though so I’ll be cranking things up a notch and posting twice a week until I’ve had my say on the subject. I do hope you’ll bear with me as this will still take me a couple weeks to knock out (in your time, this whole thing took me a few hours to write).

Since the built in reports are built in to OnTime we don’t get too many questions about those so I’ll be focusing primarily on custom reports.

Custom reports can be broken up into three distinct sections that you’ll want work on before moving onto the next.

Building your dataset: This is really only important if you’re going to be creating reports from scratch under Other Reports but it also affords you a ton of flexibility. Creating any other kind of report in OnTime will automatically allow you to build your report off of the dataset provided by that report type; this will let you use grid filtering instead of targeting your data through shortcuts or separate reports. You’ll need some familiarity with SQL in order to get the most out of this section.
Designing your report: This is the fun part, once we have our dataset built we can start laying fields on our report and putting our data together in a logical manner. When I cover this section we’ll talk about some key Active Reports concepts and talk about how to segment and group your data so that it makes sense in your report.
Scripting: The reporting engine that OnTime uses allows you perform some scripting in the background, this makes our reports crazy powerful but just like building your dataset it requires you to bring some skills to the party if you really want to squeeze your reports for all they’re worth.

Before we get started with the above three sections (in their own subsequent posts) I want to throw out some resources for you to peruse.

http://community.axosoft.com/blogs/fearthebug/archive/2008/03/18/fear-the-bug-episode-17-reporting-shortcuts.aspx

http://community.axosoft.com/blogs/fearthebug/archive/2008/03/11/fear-the-bug-episode-16-reporting-basics.aspx

And you’ll also want to take a peek in the OnTime Windows User Guide at the reporting section, there’s some goodness in there.

That's it for this week, expect to see me back early on next week when I talk about how to build OnTime reports with specific data.

Digging in deep: Creating a service dependancy for OnTime's Services

Sean McHugh — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:38:00 GMT

We’re going to take a look at adding a service dependency for the OnTime services here shortly but before that I want to make my disclaimer: We’re going to be making some changes in the windows registry. If that isn’t something you’re comfortable doing or if you don’t know what the possible consequences of breaking your registry, please stop here as Axosoft Support cannot help you recover from this. In short, backup your registry before making changes to it.

Now I’m not going to write an article about adding registry keys for fun, there’s an actual reason you would want to do this if you have your OnTime Services and OnTime’s SQL Server installed on the same box.

So what’s the problem? Glad you asked, you see when your server machine is rebooted all the services will begin to start up all at once including the OnTime and SQL services. Now, the OnTime Email Services are tiny and start up right away, so they almost immediately begin trying to establish their connection to your SQL Server. But, the SQL Server services are huge, and sometimes take multiple minutes to boot up and begin running. In this scenario, I've seen cases where the OnTime Email Services simply stop checking after some enormous failed attempts threshold is reached- the 'timing' is simply off, so the OnTime Services never start up as expected. It's rare, but I've seen it happen, and I have some solutions.

The easy solution: Uninstall the OnTime Email Services from the SQL Server machine, and install them on an equally accessible web server somewhere in your Environment. This eliminates the timing issue which can occur when all the services are booting up.
The less easy solution: Create a dependency between the OnTime Services and the SQL Services so that the OnTime Services will not start up until the SQL Services are completely up and running.

We’re going to cover the second less easy solution today.

To start out with, we need to dig into the registry. Go to the start menu in Windows and choose run, type in “regedit” and click OK. Just to reiterate now that we’re in the Registry Editor, you can really break Windows from here and I can’t help you recover so be careful; here be dragons.

Our first stop in the registry editor is to find the service we want OnTime’s services to depend on, services are listed under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Services” and find the main service for SQL. In my case this is “MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS” but this might be different for you depending on which version of SQL you are running. Once we have the name of our service we’re ready to create the key in our OnTime.

Your OnTime Services will be in the same list as all the other services and will be named something like “OnTimeAlertService9.1” or similar depending on whether this is the Alert, Email or EmailQueue Service and obviously the version of OnTime you are running. Highlight one of the OnTime Services and right click in the window on the right hand side of the Registry editor to create a new Multi-String Value.

Name this new value “DependOnService” and then right click on it and click Modify, this will let you enter in the name of the service we want our OnTime services to depend on, in my case “MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS”

There you go, reboot the machine to make sure everything worked and you’re good to go. Just to reiterate, you probably don’t need to do this unless you have a problem with the OnTime Services not starting after a reboot and you don’t have another server to move the services to.

A little bit about Email

Sean McHugh — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:39:00 GMT

I get enough questions regarding email and how it works that I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to throw some basic info up here. I’m not going to go into much detail on email in OnTime (although I will a little) but for that subject you’ll want to check out the video tutorials I link at the bottom of this post.

So let’s define some things first:

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): Sending email through OnTime means that you’ll be interacting with an SMTP server, this server’s whole job is to send email, it doesn’t touch the task of receiving it (we’ll cover that server shortly). In order for OnTime (or for that matter any email client) to send email through an SMTP Server it initializes a conversation with the server, this conversation is usually pretty structured (dictated by the SMTP Protocol) and both sides (the client and the server) depend on the other saying the right things in the right order. If everything goes well (if it doesn’t OnTime records where things go south so you can troubleshoot) the SMTP Server takes over and hopefully your email is sent.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol v.3) and IMAP (Internet Messaging Access Protocol): Inbound email (email that comes from outside of OnTime) is handled by one of two protocols, IMAP (Available in 9.1 and higher) and POP3. Both the POP3 and IMAP servers handle only the tasks of giving you emails, not the task of sending them (That’s what SMTP does). Email clients (including OnTime) will talk to these servers through (you guessed it) a very structured conversation dictated by their particular protocol, these conversations are very dependent on both sides saying the right thing at the right time (once again, if the server says something unexpected, OnTime records it so you can figure out what’s going on). If there aren’t any errors, the POP3 or IMAP server will feed your email client (OnTime) the email and OnTime will then start processing it. Once OnTime is done parsing your email, it will commit any data changes to the OnTime database and tell the POP3 or IMAP server to mark the messages it just fed OnTime as either read or deleted.

And now to answer some questions:

So if they both do that same thing, what is the difference between IMAP and POP3?

Good question, the biggest difference is that with POP3 and IMAP is that POP3 was originally designed with the intention to give you your email and not worry about those messages anymore whereas IMAP prefers to keep all of your mail on the server itself. This is simplifying things a bit, but if you want the nitty gritty check out THIS page.

So what’s the difference in OnTime?

Another good question, the answer is almost nothing, when using IMAP, you’ll see another tab called IMAP Settings that will ask you what folder to look for emails in (you’ll use the “Refresh folders” button to get a list of folders) and an option to leave email messages marked as unread after OnTime reads them. But otherwise you’ll need to know all the same information; speaking of which…

So what do I need to know about my email server in order for OnTime to work with email?

For SMTP:

At a bare minimum, you’ll want to know the hostname/IP address for your SMTP server and the port that is listening for SMTP. Chances are your SMTP will be locked down a little bit more than that so you’ll also need to know if your SMTP server uses SSL for encryption and if your SMTP server requires authentication (username and password). Bottom line; if you’re not the email administrator for your company, you’ll want to at least show them what you’re trying to do so they can give you all the information you need and inform you of any other settings that may be specific to your SMTP server (such as rules governing how your server relays emails).

For POP3:

Just like SMTP you’ll need to know the hostname/IP address for your POP3 server, but unlike SMTP your username and password are now mandatory. You’ll also want to know if your POP3 server uses SSL for encryption and which port the server is listening on for POP3. The last bit of info we need is the actual email address associated with the username we are using (it’s uncommon that you’ll know the username but not the email address so this shouldn’t be an issue).

For IMAP:

This one’s easy, everything that we just covered for POP3 is still needed but you’ll also need to know which IMAP folder to look for new emails in, you’ll do this under that IMAP Settings tab we covered earlier.

There’s an awful lot that I simplified to a great degree. If you want to know more about how email works HERE is a good place to start.

Here's some tutorial videos that we have in place to help get you started with email in OnTime:

Fear the Bug, Episode 11: Configuring E-mail

Fear the Bug, Episode 31: E-mail Tab

Fear the Bug, Episode 43: E-mail Templates

Fear the Bug, Episode 55: Notifications and Alerts

Fear the Bug, Episode 74: OnTime Services

SQL, OnTime and why Database Administrators are cool

Sean McHugh — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:45:00 GMT

I was digging through the forums last week and came upon an interesting post (You can see the whole thread HERE). The conversation that followed is actually pretty interesting and brings up an important point so I thought I’d make a post on the blog and share some links that will be helpful if you’ve recently found yourself in charge of a SQL database for the first time.

We’re specifically talking about Log File maintenance and its effects on performance and backups in that post I linked above. In THIS Faq article I wrote I talk about shrinking the log file when it gets out of hand but I don’t talk about why it gets that way and how to prevent it from happening again. Believe it or not, I did that on purpose.

OnTime is a SQL based application, meaning it uses a SQL database to store all of its data and settings, but it doesn’t manage the database for you and your DBA (Database Administrator) wouldn’t like it if it did. The fact of the matter is that Relational Database Management Systems (like SQL Server) are complex beasts and offer a DBA a lot of tools for setting things up exactly the way he wants. This means that your DBA will set things up in a manner that makes sense for your company and he doesn’t want us interfering with the defaults he so lovingly set on your SQL Server. This also means that while I’d love to educate every OnTime customer about SQL Server maintenance and administration, the SQL Server is not OnTime and in most situations falls outside the scope of what we can support.

But that doesn’t really help if you’ve just installed OnTime and found yourself in charge of a SQL Server or database for the first time, or if you’ve inherited a SQL Server and aren’t sure where to start. Good news, there are a ton of resources on the internet for you to turn to. Here are a couple things you’ll want to start thinking about right away:

Most importantly; how am I going to back up this thing? As an Administrator (and not just a SQL Admin), you probably want to start thinking about things that can go wrong and how you’re going to fix them. Most importantly; how am I going to back up this thing? We do offer a TOOL in OnTime for making database backups before major changes but for regular backups you’re probably going to want to automate something in SQL to do that for you. Here’s a LINK from Microsoft that you’ll want to read if you don’t already have something in place and are looking for a bit of direction.
What kind of maintenance does my database need? I like to say that owning a SQL server is an awful lot like owning a fish tank. By and large the biggest pain in the neck is going to be getting it set up the right way and after that it can get by with a small amount of attention, just make sure your fish aren’t floating up at the top. That being said here’s a great BLOG that talks about (among a host of other subjects) database maintenance.
What about performance? It’s a fact; if OnTime’s database is having a hard time keeping up with demand then your end-users are going to feel it. We’ve got three videos that cover performance in OnTime HERE, HERE and HERE. If you feel pretty confident that it’s your SQL Server holding you back it’s time to do some troubleshooting. Here’s a link that will get you started for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 (both of those links are whitepapers from SQLSkills).
Where are my best resources to learn more about SQL Server? Knowing more about SQL Server is a good thing, and not just in the context of OnTime. My two favorite sites on this subject are SQLSkills and good old MSDN.

What are your favorite SQL resources? If you’re a fairly new SQL Admin, let me know if you found this post helpful, if you’re not so new to SQL Server, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. I’ll be waiting in the comments.

Is This Thing On?

Sean McHugh — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:23:00 GMT

One of our bigger goals for this blog is to cultivate some feedback from our customer base, you already know that if you’d like to see a new feature in OnTime that you can create a Feature Request and if you need help you can email us at Support@Axosoft.com, submit a Support Request, contact us via PureChat if we’re available, post on the Forums, or call us (1.800.653.0024) but you may not know about our brand new Support and Training surveys. Tom, our lead support engineer, expertly forged these surveys in fires stolen from the center of the earth itself and they are indeed a sight to behold. If you’ve had a chance to interact with us here in support recently, feel free to take a moment for the Support Survey and let us know how awesome we are; likewise if you’ve spent some time in training in the past couple of weeks, let us know how we’re doing with the Training Survey.

Feedback is big here in support, mostly because we’re always looking for ways to improve, looking for new and easier ways for you to get the information you need, easier ways for you to get in touch with us and just general information on how we’re doing; so after you’re done spending some time with the surveys, join us in the comments and let us know what you think about support and training here at Axosoft.

Cool Stuff in 9.1 – Comment Fields

Sean McHugh — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:06:00 GMT

If you’re not already running OnTime 9.1 then you probably haven’t had a chance to deal with comments outside of the Project Wiki, so it is entirely possible that you don’t know how cool these fields are. It’s pretty easy to make a comment field, just make a custom comment field, make it visible in your field templates and you’re good to go. Since the release of 9.1 we’ve seen some interesting uses for these fields by a few of our customers so I thought I’d share some of the more common ones here.

The first way to use comments is pretty straight-forward, just make them visible and editable in your customer portal for Features or Defects and BAM instant discussion in the comments on the importance of supporting the gopher protocol in the next version of your application.

You might also want to use comment fields internally for items in a workflow step where you want all the large text fields to be read-only. A good example of this would be a bug with a description and some replication procedures. You may want these two large text fields to become read-only after the item was initially reported so that your users don’t go back and change data retroactively, this would be a good situation to enable comments since each comment is separate your users will not be able to remove data from this field* only add new data**.

The last way to use comments addresses a feature request that we’ve seen in previous versions of OnTime which is to add automatic stamping to large text fields. The problem with this is that large text fields are entirely editable by design and while corresponding through large text fields works well it’s not its original purpose, comment fields on the other hand are amazing for correspondence since they automatically create a time/date and user stamp above each comment but they make each comment visible without the need to allow users/customers access to change the actual data* **.

One thing to keep in mind is that comments are more similar to the emails tab in each item rather than large text fields in terms of how they are stored, this means that they won’t be available for export, so it’s still a good idea to build and update a description and set of notes for each item if you export heavily.

*Provided they don’t have rights to delete comments.

**Customers and Users can still delete their own comments, but they won't be able to change them; this is to address the "oops" factor of posting a comment with misspellings or other mistakes.

Axosoft University Training

Sean McHugh — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:43:00 GMT

We should chat about Axosoft University here for a bit. You’ve probably guessed that we offer training here at Axosoft if not from direct interaction then through the fact that this is the Training/Support blog, but you may not have a great idea of what that training is. Never fear! I’m here to lay it all out for you.

First things first, we have a page on the website devoted to the course list, you can find it HERE. This page links to descriptions for all of the courses, provides a calendar for when the classes are (and when they’re not) and also has a link to Training@Axosoft.com which you can use to sign up for classes.

So what are these classes? They’re all about an hour long and they cover subjects that you should know about if you’re going to be the OnTime guy at your company, things like setting up email, configuring workflow, creating custom fields and much more. If you’re new to OnTime but happen to be the administrator for it (it happens every now and then) you’ll want to take at least the 100 level courses as they cover end-user basics (OT-101: End-User Essentials) and general administrator knowledge (OT-102: Administrative Best Practices), these classes are free for right now and they’re certainly worth the time. If you’re whole company is new to OnTime, you’ll want to email Training@Axosoft.com or Sales@Axosoft.com to find out about taking the full course load, it’s distributed through the week and is usually included in the maintenance you probably purchased with OnTime (depending on the maintenance you purchased, you may have unlimited training or training for the first month of maintenance, check with your sales contact and they’ll let you know).

All the classes are actually taught by a live trainer and we try to make time to field questions either during or after the classes so if you need any elaboration on any particular subject we’re glad to help.

So get to class before I mark you tardy!

Cool Stuff in 9.1 - Canned Responses

Sean McHugh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:19:00 GMT

In case you hadn't heard, 9.1 just got released and the support half of my brain is especially excited about it. You see in 9.1 we've got this cool feature called Canned Responses (I'm also a big fan of comment fields but that's another post).

Canned responses are really only exciting when you've typed something like "The XML Activation code you've requested has been sent to you in another email and should arrive momentarily" more times than any sane person should. Suffice to say it's a bit of a time saver if you find yourself answering the same types of questions several times day. It really hits its stride however by allowing you to string multiple canned responses together to make a customized and comprehensive response very quickly. Several strung together canned responses might look like:

Hi Customer,

If this only seems to be affecting one user, go ahead and reset their user settings, to do that follow the steps below.

To reset the user settings, follow these steps:

1) Make sure that the User is logged out of OnTime completely- even from viewing the error message.
2) Then log into OnTime using your OnTime Admin account, or any other account which has access to the "Tools>Manage>Users" options. This can be done from any computer which has OnTime installed.
3) Once logged in, go to "Tools>Manage>User" and single-select the user account which is experiencing the problem. Then click the toolbar button labeled "Reset user settings to default".
4) Once you've reset your User's settings, they can try logging into OnTime once again with the account.
In most cases this will fix their settings permanently, and the User should be able to launch and login to OnTime without any error. If that doesn't resolve the issue, go ahead and shrink your SQL logfile.

While troubleshooting earlier I noticed that your logfile is fairly large for an OnTime database, I would recommend shrinking that down as well.

You can shrink it down to 500mb without causing any problems in the database. You or your DBA can run a SQL script to truncate the log file down to 500mb.

Here's the script to run against your log file:

DBCC SHRINKFILE(<db log file name>,<size in MB>)

BACKUP LOG <db name> WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

DBCC SHRINKFILE(<db log file name>,<size in MB>)

For example:

DBCC SHRINKFILE(SqueetDB_log, 500)

BACKUP LOG SqueetDB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

DBCC SHRINKFILE(SqueetDB_log, 500)

Also, you or your DBA should alter your SQL db autogrowth settings in order to avoid this re-occurring in the future.

If you're still having problems after that you can give us a call at 1.800.653.0024 x3 anytime between 6AM-6PM (GMT-07:00) Monday through Friday so we can take a closer look.

Regards,
Sean McHugh
Axosoft Support
Click HERE to take our support survey.

Everything in blue above is a canned response, I obviously did some editing of these responses so that they fit the context properly but that response took me less than a minute to put together, I was able to convey a large amount of information and my customer has a means of contacting me directly if he needs further help. These responses also mean that specific policies are detailed in the same manner every time. Most importantly, canned responses let your support team get back to important things, like writing blog posts. In all seriousness, if your support team answers a lot of items through OnTime or email, tell them about this feature and they'll be like kids on Christmas.

Getting started with these canned responses couldn't be simpler, just click on Tools>Canned Responses and start adding them. Canned responses can be specific to item types (or not) and they be either public or private, you'll find the privilege for creating public canned responses under Security Roles>Global Privileges>Administration>Manage Public Canned Responses. We've got a podcast that covers how to use canned responses that you can find HERE. Feel free to drop me a note in the comments letting me know what you think about this new feature.

There's all kinds of other cool stuff in 9.1 but I think I'll probably save that for other posts. If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, download it from HERE and feel free to contact us in SUPPORT if you have any questions.

First Post!

Sean McHugh — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:45:00 GMT

Hello and welcome to the Axosoft Support and Training blog! If you haven’t had a chance to meet us yet, we’re the ones in charge of making sure you know how to use all the features in OnTime and we’re also here to help you if you ever have any questions.

My name is Sean and I’ll be your humble host for the time being, I’m both a support engineer and trainer here at Axosoft, but this blog isn’t about me, this blog is about our community here on Axosoft.com. We’d like this space to be mostly about teaching you how to get the most out of OnTime in new and innovative ways. I’d also like to use these posts to tell you about cool new features we're baking into upcoming releases. Lastly, we’re looking to see some feedback from you folks, both in the comments below and on the forums. I’ll be periodically opening threads in the forums for different discussions and I’d be downright flattered to see you there.