Sexy In The Night

User Accounts Added and Columns Formatted

Added user accounts and passwords to Top20 report.

Turned out to be quite straight forward.

Added a user database and some methods to check password.

Made numbers more readable by using a helper to format with commas.

See SVN, updated today.

User Accounts for Propmansheet

OK, I have given myself one day to implement user accounts on Propman sheet.

The issue is that it is working better than I could have dreamed of.

The Surveyors are using it, after receiving very little training and they are finding it easy and useful.

If only everything in life was this simple.

However, the new challenge is to make it secure.

It runs on the BRCS intranet so non-BRCS people cannot access it.

It just needs to be able to restricted, to those in the BRCS who need to know.

This is to ensure that the surveyors can make comments and decisions privately.

Adding user accounts seems simple but I don't really understand it.

I'm going to have to just implement it the best I can on a test system and then fire-fight it to get it working.

Starting New Propmansheet Project

Using Propmansheet to build a stand-alone application that will allow are solicitors to read, interpret and summarise property leases and then input that information into a spreadsheet that automatically formats as a Propman keynotes import file.

They could then periodically email those files to BRCS so that Propman could can be updated with summarised interpreted lease data.

Own Server At Last

Two things to report:

1. Propmansheet has now moved off my machine on to its own server in the BRCS data room.
2. I have started work on the security module - should be finished end of next week

The BRCS server is on the intranet but is sealed off from the general internet.

New Server: Moving Propmansheet Off my PC

Due to get a new server today. Since this project started I've been hosting Ruby on Rails and the database on my personal work PC. This has meant that I have to leave it on so that others can access the data.

Hopefully, from today everything moves to a sever in our data room next to the Propman server.

The Propmansheet application is not RAM or CPU greedy. It can easily run on your pc while you do other work.

However, it is more convenient for it to run on a dedicated server.

Next Steps for Propmansheet

1. Implement password protection for Top20 report. This is necessary as it is only accessable on British Red Cross intranet but only want authorised property professionals to see information.

2. Write more reports in Crystal Report writer.

3. Write Excel reports for it using MySQL ODBC driver ( http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/3.51.html ) to link into Promansheet database.

4. Ensure all users have access to Crystal Report Writer.