GL Wand 3.0 released!

We released 3.0 quietly on the internet yesterday.

Our first two downloaders almost immediatley requesting quotes. It felt like a good start...but it is how you finsih that is much more important.

We did have one person (Sarah our sales rep in the USA) have difficulty with the installation processes. Norton anti virus was objecting to the installer...we think we have fixed it.

We are hoping that the new release together with the improved online help, documenation, install process etc will allow prospects to quickly see the enourmous value that Excel based reporting with GL Wand can add.

Check out these sections on the online help.

• Quickstart guide
• New Features in version 3.0

We plan to send out a news letter / email to old downloaders advising them of this major release.

10 February 2006 - GL Wand breakfast event - Johannesburg Country Club

Yesterday we mailed out the invitations to our GL Wand breakfast event planned for 10 February 2006 at the Johannesburg Country Club. We have had 20 rsvp's already... Cut off for RSVP is 31 January 2006.

GL Wand 3.0 - Demo server is on Internet

Yesterday we took our demo server to a server farm. This server will allow downloaders of version 3.0 to connect directly to a 11i Vision instance on an Oracle server to evaluate GL Wand before trying it on their own instance. The server farm provider is www.storm.co.za but the intermediatries were from www.redi.co.za. I must say the guys from Redi (red-eye) were pretty helpful.

Our server looks cosy at the server farm and performance testing from my office showed major improvements. The server farm as a 2mbs burstable connection.

Our standard performance test case of 800 cells / 10 000 gl balances was refreshing in 15 seconds on my 384kb adsl connection with summary checking disabled...else 21 seconds...we still need to have our partners in Australia and USA test the latency effect from those locations.

We not ready to publish the URL/3.0 cause we are still applying finishing touches to 3.0 including more testing and new user guides.

The picture is of Shaun...saying final goodbyes to the server at the farm.
Not a pic I am too proud of...think my P910i lense needs a clean.

GL Wand 3.0 performance testing

After a very new year short break...the team is focussed on a release date somewhere early in January 2006.

We have had some of our partners in Australia and USA login to our vision instance in South Africa to test the Wide Area Network Performance...the results so far are promising.

Our test cases involve refreshing a gl wand worksheet with 800 cells representing about 10 000 gl balances. In all cases the refresh time was less than a minute with the fastest time recorded was 33 seconds. This is exponentially quicker than the current 2.58 version which still uses ODBC and SQL Net.

We are currently procuring a new server on which to host the default vision instance to allow downloaders to login over the internet. The server will be located at a server farm in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Depending on workload and performance we may need other online instances around the world to cope with the trial users....only time will tell.

Regards
Michele