[ic] A couple quick questions about your product...

[Dan B]

Jason,

At 01:23 AM 2/1/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>would work. Here are the questions the big man upstairs has given me to
>answer.                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You're on speaking terms with GOD!?

>a)      Do you provide with a PC program that will rate shipments? If so, 
>please
>describe if there is any charge for this service.

Yes, shipments are rated:  1 = bad, 10 = very good.  Sorry, I didn't 
understand your question.

>b)      Describe your company's Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities
>and give examples of how your EDI system is used by other shippers.

Wow.  People still use EDI?  I thought that's what XML and Java were 
supposed to get rid of.  :-)  Just kidding.  Interchange doesn't come with 
any de-facto standard EDI translator.  It is written in Perl, and has an 
XML translator (if that helps -- we're year 2001 here, buddy).

But there are tons of products/services out there that will take your 
database data (which is what Interchange stores it in) and will output it 
to any EDI format you want.  There is a lot of great open source software 
in this area, check out http://www.americancoders.com/OpenBusinessObjects/ 
especially.

Perl:  Procedure Extraction and Reporting Language.  It's perfect for 
writing an EDI translator, it only took me 8 hours to whip up a trans.pl 
that translated EDI -> database.  For a current project, I'm just trading 
raw database dumps (this time, the other end gets stuck with all the 
translation work - ha!).

>c)      Describe your shipment tracking and proof of delivery 
>capabilities. Can
>Nokia obtain verbal, faxed and written proof of delivery.

Hmm.  Shipment tracking is not exactly built into the demo, but it can be 
easily done by interfacing with the fedex.com sites and giving a customer 
links to access it.  Verbal, faxed, and written proof of delivery are 
handled by the delivery service, are they not?  Or do you mean: will the 
confirmation be directly written to your customer records database?  I've 
been thinking about implementing that, myself, sometime soon.

I hope that helps.  You'll find that if Interchange doesn't fit your needs 
out of the box, it can stretch to any size.  (Mike made it Any Size Fits 
All (TM)).

Speaking of trademarks, I had a funny happen today:  Customer was working 
on getting some things trademarked, and was doing some research when he 
said: "Boy, that 'TM' company sure owns a lot of stuff!".  He laughed when 
I told him that stood for tradmark and said, "Oh!  So that's what that 
means!".  He has two degrees, one is a masters.


Dan Browning, Cyclone Computer Systems, danb@cyclonecomputers.com