We’ve gotten together with our friends from Autotask to put together a webinar about how solution providers and MSPs of all sizes can automate their IT services fulfillment and increase margins.

Panelists include: Don Anderson, Knowledge Manager from OnForce; Brian Sherman, Director of Industry Alliance from Autotask; and Steve Noel, Senior Engineer from Autotask. All OnForce buyers and pros are invited to this one-hour event.

Date: Wedneday, July 16th
Time: 1pm - 2pm ET
Registration: Join us for this discussion of best practices and proven methods to reduce overhead, improve response times and scale your services business.

It’s a great time to be an IT service provider, but there are many questions you face each day such as: How do I expand my geographic reach effectively without adding personnel? Or…How can I improve my customer service levels without additional overhead? Join Autotask and OnForce for answers to these questions and a discussion on automation and outsource management.

This one-hour event will cover:
-Market and technology trends for IT outsourcing
-Automating mission-critical IT processes, including billing, managed services, time entry, SLA management, and lead generation
-Best practices for growing geographic coverage, accessing specialized skill sets, or backing up your bench of W-2 techs with contract IT service pros
-How easy it is to use the Autotask and OnForce combination - Yes, they can be integrated, with powerful results.

Register today

Didn’t have time to participate in the Microsoft/HP webinar? Participate but want a refresher on the basics of Microsoft certifications?

The webinar is now accessible through the provider Online Office (it’s the first link under “what’s new”)

Many, many thanks to all that participated - and a round of special thanks to our colleagues at Microsoft and HP who spend a great deal of time and energy helping us put this together.

Six or eight guys working late, yelling at each other, sweating… for a whole month. And, visibly, there’s not much difference to the OnForce platform. OK, so maybe the part about yelling and sweating was a lie, but, believe it or not, we’ve gotten a lot done in 3.4 — behind the scenes.

You may notice some snappier performance; we’ve reorganized some of our key data to be more responsive and scalable. Our new hierarchical menu is also faster and smarter; the old one was adding a few unseemly milliseconds to page loads, so we ditched it.

It’s a little jealousy-inducing to see the guy who sits behind you at work signing copies of his book after giving a talk at a major nerd conference. Scott’s presentation, ”Consuming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2”, was a success. Attendees asked a number of questions, and the collective OnForce ego swelled as a swarm of admirers and interested PHP tinkerers overtook Scott as he came off the stage.

My own take on the presentation was: I can’t believe how easy it is to make desktop applications with PHP-GTK. Scott pointed to a number of reasons why the desktop might be a better environment than the web for some applications, notably the fact that a desktop application doesn’t come with all the “distractions of the web”. I see his point! Especially when a task is repetitive, doing that task in a web browser environment inevitably leads to Friendster or a web mail inbox. A desktop application provides a little extra “focus” for your workers. Plus, since all of the GUI elements on the desktop are standardized, you can actually build more functionality in less time with PHP-GTK. You can view the slides of Scott’s presentation and learn a lot more about PHP-GTK at “Scott’s blog”:1.

[1]http://crisscott.com/2006/11/02/zendcon-06/

Hello. I am Scott, one of the developers here at OnForce. I am part of the team that keeps the system running and implements all of the new features. Unfortunately for my social life, even in my spare time I like to write different applications. One that I wrote recently is a desktop application in PHP-GTK 2 that implements the OnForce web services API.

After a few hours of coding, I was able to create a desktop application that lets me put together a batch of work orders while I am offline and send them when I get connected again. Also, when I am online, I can pull down work order data, close work orders, increase the spend limit, and get and add notes. And what’s best is that it is all organized in a way that makes it easier for me to focus on one task or piece of data at a time.

!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/5.jpg!

I like the idea of taking something that is normally web based and putting it on the user’s desktop. This way things can be made a little more intuitive and comfortable for the user because the application isn’t constrained by the web browser any more. Not having to connect to a server to change the current interface or display different data allows the application to organize things differently and break data down into more manageable chunks.

Why did I choose to write the application is PHP-GTK 2? Well, for starters I love the ease and quickness of developing with PHP-GTK 2 (I love it so much that I “wrote a book on it”:1). The simplest PHP-GTK 2 application is only four lines long, compared to 14 lines with Java Swing. PHP-GTK 2 also has a lot of built in features, things that I don’t have to write a single line of code for. For example, sorting and searching the batch of work orders yet to be uploaded is automatically built into the application. I don’t have to write any sorting methods or handle any requests to search the list. PHP-GTK 2 handles all of that for me.

If you’d like to see what the application looks like (or want to give it a try) “you can find it”:2 on the OnForce Developer’s site. I’d be interested to see what other tools you guys can create using the OnForce API. Who knows, maybe your new AJAX enabled way to organize work order data or your Java application to streamline the importing of work orders may just spark some imagination here at OnForce and inspire the next version of our system. Check out the “OnForce Developer’s site”:3 for more information on working with the OnForce API.

_Please be aware that this is not an OnForce supported application. I wrote and provide support for it. If you have questions about it, please don’t call OnForce. Instead, send an email to scott at crisscott.com._

[1]http://amazon.com/gp/product/1590596137
[2]http://developer.onforce.com/api/41
[3]http://developer.onforce.com