CMAssistant 7 is coming summer 2010...
We can't make any absolute promises,* but here are 10 key improvements that we expect will make it into CMAssistant 7.
- ☑ The user interface has been significantly streamlined. This is the most dramatic change to the look of the porgram since, well, since ever. It's possible now to spend 90% of your time in the same area of the database, looking at a list of deliveries - except that you can switch from viewing a drop's history to view an entire route or a different route or an entire issue, all with a single click of a button (or a single tap on the keyboard!). Actually, CMAssistant 7's new look involves several dozen significant improvements in the way the database works. Most of them are easy to appreciate first hand but hard to explain briefly, so I'm leaving this kind of general. You can get a taste of the new UI by clicking here.
- ☐ CUSTOM REPORTS! 'Nuff said for right now - but this is a biggie.
- ☑ The new Waste Watcher runs immediately after you create a new issue and quickly identifies your worst performing drops. Read that sentence again. That's right. You create your new issue, and CMAssistant immediately brings up the drops that are most urgently in need of review and adjustment.
- ☐ Turn entire routes off - and then bring 'em back to life later on. This requires no set-up and doesn't generate dummy deliveries that stay in your circulation system as non-printing deliveries. No, you turn the route off, the deliveries don't get carried forward next issue. Later, you can go back to a route from six months ago and resurrect it with a button click. (Some limitations to this feature should be obvious: It brings back to life only deliveries for drops that are still active.)
- ☑ Drop amounts that have changed since the previous issue are highlighted: green shading means the drop has gone up, yellow means it's gone down. You can now scroll through a list of 3000 deliveries and see at a glance what percentage of your circulation system has changed, what sort of changes predominate, and where the changes are. And best of all, you don't have to do ANYTHING except look at the computer screen.
- ☐ Creating new drops is now a one-screen process. (Yay!)
- ☑ You can now update sequence numbers for a run date's entire delivery set - all fifty routes - with a single button click. (Yay yay yay!)
- ☑ Ability to mark custom found sets for quick retrieval.
- ☑ Improvements to CMAssistant's payments-due feature for carriers.
- ☑ Life has been improved for both our single-publication licensees and our multi-publication licensees. Single-pub users in particular will be happy to know that in version 7 they won't be asked any more which publication they're trying to deliver.
- ☐ It will be possible to send email to support directly from within CMAssistant. It has been possible to WRITE an email from within CMAssistant in the past but now you can actually write AND SEND the message without leaving CMAssistant. While looking at a list of deliveries, you can get instant circ totals for routes right on screen. And much more.
I lied. I said just 10 but gave you 11. But really, that's it for now. Don't beg me for more, please. I don't want to talk about stuff like, oh, being able to reassign a whole bunch of drops to a different rack at one time, or being able to move a whole bunch of deliveries to a new route all at once, or a new Finds menu with more canned finds than ever before, or the ability to save your own finds or...okay, I'll stop there.
*Why no promises? Until CMAssistant 7 is actually released we can't be absolutely sure what features will be there for sure. Many of the improvements mentioned above are already finished (some are even available in CMAssistant 6.5). We expect to have others finished soon. But occasionally a change requires more work than we anticipated and it's possible that something we really wanted in 7.0 might not get finished until a little later.
