Happy New Year!
For many of our clients, 2010 was a year of
booming business. For those of you who
provide outreach services in your
communities, "booming" is probably
not how you would like your
business to be, as it means that many of
your neighbors were hard hit by an economy
that hasn't recovered as quickly as we would
like, and needed help making ends meet. We
hope that OutReach Community Assistance
Database has helped you manage your services
and record-keeping, and we hope that it will
be especially useful to you as you close out
your books on 2010.
As we look forward to 2011, we wish all our
clients a better year ahead. If you had a
great year in 2010 - wonderful! We hope that
this year brings even greater prosperity for
you, along with good health and much
happiness. For ourselves, our fervent
prayer is for better health for each member
of our families. Our ability to serve you
was greatly diminished in 2010 due to a
series of health problems, great and small:
(Continued from our e-mail newsletter...)
- Lynnette's father had a stroke and was
hospitalized.
- Tim's mother had lung cancer which
required the removal of half her left lung.
(By the way, she never smoked a day in her
life.)
- Lynnette's father was diagnosed with
colon cancer and underwent
extensive surgery which put him in intensive
care for 9 days, followed by another week in
the hospital, and a few weeks in a nursing
home for rehab. He's home and doing well
now, all things considered.
- Our 95 LB Black Lab crashed into
Lynnette and broke two bones in her left
leg, which required surgical repair. She
was in the hospital for a week, then in
rehab for a week, and continues with
physical therapy twice a week.
- Lynnette's sister was hospitalized with
a heart scare, but is doing fine now.
- Tim suffered a severe dog bite in the
leg as he walked one afternoon. We were
quite the pair when we went to the emergency
care center - Tim with a leg that was
bleeding profusely, and Lynnette still in a
walking boot.
Talk
about the walking wounded!
- Lynnette's brother-in-law fell while
walking the dog and broke his arm;
fortunately, it required no surgery - just a
cast and a few weeks to heal.
- Lynnette's brother collapsed and was
hospitalized for two weeks. He still doesn't
have a diagnosis and must go to the oncology
center every week to receive an IV with iron
to help build his blood back to normal
levels, and ironically, to have blood drawn
for more tests. It seems to be a process of
elimination, ruling out one disease after
another, until eventually, a diagnosis can
be made.
- Tim's mother fell while walking her dog,
and broke her wrist, which required surgical
repair. She also fractured a vertebra in her
neck and must wear a neck brace for several
weeks.
As you can imagine, we spent a lot of time
away from the office tending to our own
injuries and being with our families during
each of these medical issues. We
are very hopeful that 2011 will bring
renewed health for everyone, so we can all
get back to providing better service to you,
our clients.
OutReach Update
Shortly before she broke her leg, Lynnette
had started beta testing an update to
OutReach Community Assistance Database.
We had expected to release Version 1.6 in
early Fall
of 2010, but our personal and family health
problems made that impossible. But
we're getting back to the testing with a
renewed sense of urgency this month, and
barring any further unforeseen
complications, we hope to release the update
no later than the end of January. Version
1.6 includes some features that our clients
have requested, including:
(Continued from our e-mail newsletter...)
- Enhanced export options
- New option to enter all zeroes in the
Social Security field without triggering a
duplicate record warning
- New report - Grocery Log (with Family
Breakdown)
- New options for Demographics report and
Geographic Summary report to include family
members in the totals
There are other enhancements and bug fixes as
well - these are just the highlights.
Please remember - if you would like to see new
features, or if you have experienced any bugs,
please let us know so we can add them to our
list for future updates.
OutReach Price Change
Beginning February 1, 2011, the retail price
of OutReach will be $89.95. However, to
show our thanks to our existing clients, we
will offer you the opportunity to buy
additional licenses at the current price of
$69.95 through the end of the first quarter,
IE March 31, 2011. If you plan to add more
OutReach licenses in the near future, please
contact us and we will give you a coupon
code so you can make the purchase at the
"old" price.
New Software Products
We have developed a new database application for
owners of livestock, tentatively called
myBarnyard. This new
program will keep track of animals, their
breeding, offspring, production (milk, eggs,
etc), results in the show ring, and much
more. We have several small
farmers/ranchers lined up to test this
product for us, so OutReach clients can rest
assured that myBarnyard won't
slow Lynnette's progress on beta testing for
Version 1.6.
(Continued from our e-mail newsletter...)
We are also
working on a winemaker's database
application, to allow home brewers and
boutique wineries to keep track of every
step of the process, along with the
resulting inventory.
Another
product in the works is a "professional"
version of OutReach that will allow our
clients to do significant customization -
adding fields to the database, modifying the
views, and editing existing reports or
creating new ones in Crystal Reports. This
version will be especially useful to
outreach agencies who have "power users"
or database specialists on staff, or
volunteers with the skills and dedication to
use these features. We'll provide more
information about this in future
newsletters, or if you have specific
questions or "wish list" requests, please
contact us.