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Fairport News

Historical FTI news articles and PRESS RELEASES
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September - October 2005

IN THIS ISSUE

» Welcome
» Rogers Ramblings
» Changes in NSW & QLD
» PAM News
» PocketPAM News
» PAM Hosted Services
» Pin.Point News
» PAM AusVit News
» Grape Forecaster
» Dealer News
    » FarmTek Australia
    » Agbis
» In Closing

Firstly, apologies for the belated delivery of the September newsletter. The world at Fairport these past months has been extremely hectic and finding some spare time to put the newsletter together has been harder than usual. So please excuse us for calling it the September – October Newsletter.

The Fairport team welcomes all our new clients. It is a privilege to have you on board and we hope you will enjoy the relationship with us. Please remember, we are always happy to get feedback from our clients, old and new. We are well aware that without that feedback we would never have made it this far (17.5 years). So, if you have something that we should know about our service or products, please don’t hesitate to tell us.

We get the feeling that the season has been quite kind to most of our clients since June. Certainly here in Western Australia things are looking quite good after a dry-ish spell during July.

As you will read, there have been some significant movements in the staff area since the June newsletter.

Early in July we welcomed Vincent Ball to the Fairport team. Vincent and his family live in Adelaide and as a side-line they operate a commercial vineyard in the McLaren Vale area. Vincent’s official title is Marketing Manager – Viticulture and Horticulture products and his background of over 20 years in the information technology industry, a graduate diploma in viticulture and a year as the main PAM AusVit salesman for Serve-Ag make him a perfect fit for this role.

Soon after Vincent joined us, we had a change of staffing in the position of office administrator and accounts officer in our Perth office. We farewell Nicki and welcome Pushpa Singh. Pushpa has had 18 years experience in business administration in India after graduating from Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. Pushpa has settled in quickly and has the place running smoothly.

In mid-July we welcomed Mathieu Kempe, a software developer on a working holiday from France. Mathieu has been developing a special web site for a consortium of AHA Viticulture and the GWRDC (Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation). Fairport had been approached by the consortium to build the special purpose interactive web based software and due to our existing heavy workload we sought a new recruit and were very fortunate in finding Mathieu. It has been great fun having Mathieu around the office. This contract is now drawing to a close, so we will soon bid Mathieu farewell.

As we mentioned in the June newsletter, Fairport was fortunate to have won the contract to supply farm management software to Landcorp Farming Limited in New Zealand. This very large farming business has set out on a very ambitious path of implementing a fully integrated farm management, financial budgeting and financial management system. They will also be using PAM’s individual animal records system as they roll out electronic tags across their 110 farms over the next 3 years or so. The size of Fairport’s role in this process has driven the need for us to employ two new developers: Michael Barker and Andy Robinson. Both of them are now in full swing and have fitted in well.
The Landcorp contract has given rise to multiple trips from Perth to Wellington over the past few months and we expect more trips before the job is completed.

At the end of November we will bid farewell to Paul Olsen who has been very ably performing the role of senior technical support manager for four years here at our South Perth office. He has also been responsible for the ongoing development of the PocketPC versions of our Pocket PAM suite of software.

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While we will miss Paul’s presence in our office, we will not be losing him completely. Paul and his family are moving to northern New South Wales to start up a new business called “Ag-IT”. Ag-IT will be taking over the Fairport distribution (sales, support and training) for the Queensland and northern NSW territory from Agbis. As most of you in those areas will know, Matt Meehan has taken on full time work with the Rabobank. Agbis are to remain as sub-dealers to Ag-IT early in 2006, but in the meantime it’s business as usual for Agbis … See the Agbis section of this newsletter for the full dealer list.

With Paul’s four years of front line action in our office his product knowledge is second to none. He will be starting up Ag-IT early in 2006 and looks forward to supporting all our clients in those areas.

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Since June, four more of Australia’s leading agribusinesses have installed our PAM Enterprise system. Interest in this system continues to grow.

The development of the PAM Enterprise system commenced in October 2003. Over recent months we have developed a set of software tools to migrate standard PAM (and PAM Multiclient) data sets to the PAM Enterprise system to save clients having to re-enter data.

One of the significant advantages of the PAM Enterprise system is its ability to enable multiple farm or multiple business unit corporations to view across-the-whole- enterprise reports while restricting farm managers to viewing and entering data for their one farm. One of our clients has farming operations across Australia as well as in New Zealand and the USA. They are housing their data in Melbourne and their farm managers will be using internet services to enter data at the farm office computer. Another PAM Enterprise client has farming operations in north and south Western Australia as well as northern Queensland. Another has operations in northern WA, southern NSW and in Queensland, while another has operations in northern NSW, Queensland and South Africa.

With five programmers now working on the PAM software suite, you can expect many new features in the near future. The features added over the past include:
Inventory: Stock On Hand Report by Batch Number: You can now filter the report by selected locations.

Inventory: Stock On Hand Report by Batch Number: You can specify a "Summary" report option which will display the total quantities for each Item only.

Configuration: Horticulture and Viticulture Users Only: Irrigation Configuration: You can now specify a new "Emitter" mode option via the "Customise your PAM program". This new option will allow you to specify the default output values for your emitters and use that to calculate total water used.

Inventory: Inventory of Consumables: A new "Stock Take" menu option has been added to the Data Entry menu and the Inventory of Consumables / Tools menu. This facility allows you to enter Observed / Actual Stock On Hand levels against PAM's calculated values for Inventory Items with a Batch Number. PAM will create Adjustment records in the Inventory system to update Items to the new Stock On Hand value. If a stock Item's Stock On Hand value becomes zero or less, then PAM will mark this record as "Totally Consumed" and exclude it from display in Data Entry Batch Number pick lists.

Reports: Paddockwise Reports : Manual Tasks and Machinery Operation's Reports : Grouped by Paddock / Crop / Variety : Now displays any jobs which were unassigned to a Crop.

Reports: Chemical Spray Plan Report: Now shows Cropped Areas to be sprayed.

Wool: Wool weight allocations for Mob : When calculating the amount of Wool per Mob from the Total Greasy kg for a Lot, PAM was not accurately calculating based on the contributing Mobs to Bales for the Lot under some circumstances.

Data Entry: Chemical Spraying Weather Details : Start/Stop times : When you specify a Chemical Spray Weather detail record, either via the Edit or Convert buttons, PAM will automatically change the Job Date to match the Start/Stop times you enter.

Inventory: Inventory of Consumables: You can now specify a Price per Package when adding/editing a Transfer Location record.

Individual Animal Records: Fixed problem where sometimes male animals in a mob do not appear for selection when creating a "mating" transaction.

Budgets: Copying Actuals and Budget records to a Budget: You can now specify an amount to advance the job timings by.

Data Entry: When converting a Budgeted Harvest Delivery activity to Actual harvest record, the Average Yield Column is no longer displayed as it was not appropriate.

Coming Soon
The editing of past sales, moves, purchases and all other records in Livestock. This long-awaited functionality will soon be ready for release. In due course this will also mean you can have multiple PocketPAM Livestock systems on one farm. Another long awaited feature.
Lots more functionality is being added to PAM in the next few months. Stay tuned by keeping an eye on the Fairport web pages under Support / Product additions and enhancements.

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Since November 2004 we have been working on the PocketPAM synchronizing system that will add a lot more robustness to the synchronizing process. To help the process of trouble shooting any data transfer issues we have built in many more “safety nets” and log files. This system is now ready for release and when you upgrade you will see a completely new look.

What’s New?

You can select one, all or several programs to synchronize at the one time.
Pocket PC users will experience much faster synchronization
You will not be able to accidentally create duplicate records by sending data to PAM more than once. If a data transfer fails for any reason, it won’t write any data to PAM.
The new system will give much more feedback and information so you will know what’s happening during synchronization.
Complete log files are kept to make trouble shooting easier.
The data files that are transferred to and from the handheld are kept on your computer for a period of time and can be re-submitted

In order to keep abreast of the developments with our PAM Enterprise system, the new Pocket PAM Utilities system is capable of synchronizing to PAM Enterprise servers in remote locations. It is also capable of synchronizing to a remote PAM server using background internet services. This technology means farmers can interface with PAM located anywhere in the world. The extra robustness built into the data transfer processes have especially needed to be built to cater for circumstances like internet disconnections.

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While we have been hosting PAM over the internet for two corporate clients for well over a year, we are now able to offer this as a service to family farming or smaller farming companies.

We recently signed up our first PAM Hosted Services client… a racehorse stud farming operation in Victoria.

How does it work? –
If you have already been using PAM, we would obtain your latest backup file and restore it into our special PAM server (computer) in our office.
Then, we would send you a web address (Something like http://xxx.fairport.com.au) and your login name (like, ScottFarming) and password (like, scott234).
You’ll download a small file to your computer (this small file operates in the background to make the whole process work).
You start your Internet Explorer program, got to the address given, type in your login name and password … and click on the PAM icon.
PAM starts and you use it as normal.

What can this mean for you?
You can share the use of PAM with other members of your farming operation (family or company staff members), wherever they are.
You can log in to your PAM data from any internet connection. Anywhere.
No more backing up – your data will get backed up automatically every night.
If you are a PAM Data Merging user there’ll be no more emailing data. No more data merging hassles.
Your PAM software is always up to date. That’s part of the service.
The new Pocket PAM data transfer system can upload Pocket PAM data to the remote PAM system.
You can have two or more (lots more) people viewing or entering data into your PAM system simultaneously.
Your hardware doesn’t need to be upgraded to run PAM. With the hosted PAM system, you only see images of the PAM screen on your computer. All the processing work is done by the remote server. The speed and performance of PAM is excellent – Our server has a 3 GHz processor, 2 Gigabytes of memory.
If you are a new PAM client (that is, there is no data to install on the PAM server), we can have you running in no time at all! The only small hold up is a need to download a small file to your computer. This file is used to make the process work.
If you are an existing PAM user, we need your backed up data and we could have you up and running inside an hour.

What do you need?
You’ll need a reasonable internet connection. We have found that the hosted PAM system works well over a 56 K modem connection.

What if your connection drops out?
PAM does not crash. It actually keeps running! So, if you reconnect, you’ll see PAM exactly as it was when you left it.

For PAM Hosted Services pricing or any other questions, please call us on 1800 500 195 (for new customers and Fairport Club members) or 08 93675814.

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Yes… that’s right, Pin.Point news!
For several years we have been asked by Pin.Point users if we could migrate their data to PAM.

Several months ago Fairport acquired the Pin.Point software business and the rights to use the Pin.Point name. We became aware that progress on Pin.Point had either ceased or slowed down substantially. We made enquiries and were able to negotiate an agreeable deal to acquire the business.

The main Pin.Point software engineer (David Wynne) has been developing a data transfer system for us over the past two months and at some point during the next month, we hope to be in a position to offer a smooth transition path for Pin.Point clients to move to PAM. We are already aware of several people waiting for this opportunity. If you know any Pin.point clients, please feel free to pass this news on to them. We welcome their contact.

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With all the versions of the PAM suite of software we have an amazingly broad range of clients who are using the software to help their businesses in so many ways. The diversity of people and businesses means we are constantly stimulated to add more enhancements and new functions – so we will be rolling out general extensions to the PAM AusVit product just as soon as we can get our very busy programmers to implement all the ideas and requests. Already in the pipeline are new features in the Spray Diary function.

We recently received an update to the CRCV Australian Viticulture Chemical database which is available to all PAM AusVit users. To take advantage of the update, users can effortlessly obtain the update by simply connecting to the internet, starting PAM AusVit, and asking for the update.
The best way to do this is to:
Click the AusVit icon (it’s the one that looks like a bunch of grapes)
Select ‘Chemical Database’
Click ‘Tools’
Select ‘Check for Updates from Fairport’s website’
...the rest is automatic

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With the start of the new growing season, and the continuing insistence by wineries for improved delivery forecasts, our new Grape Forecaster software is a hot ticket.

By guiding users to collect statistically verified sampling data from their vineyards right through the growing season, and making it easy to produce crop forecasts from all the data, the Grape Forecaster tool is a real advantage for many grape growers.

We have included in the package the ability for people who used the old spreadsheet Crop Forecasting methodology to import their old records. And also included is support for Palm and PocketPC users to collect their data directly in the field and then synchronize back in the office – a great time-saver.

For sales or training enquiries on the Viticulture & Horticulture products, contact Vincent Ball on 0412 392 919 or Vincent@fairport.com.au

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FarmTek Australia VIC
I have recently returned home after attending the Henty and Paskerville Field Days. As always it is great to catch up with so many clients and have a chance to get some excellent feedback. It also gives me a chance to get a feel for where and when I can schedule some training sessions.

Henty (NSW) was extremely busy while Paskerville (SA) a little quieter. We moved to a new location at Paskerville this year. Perhaps we were a bit harder to find than usual. We’ll advertise earlier next time so you can find us! Thanks to Craig Humphris for helping out and also to Vincent Ball.

We are still scheduling training sessions for the next few months. To date I have the following events booked
October Training :
Riverplains Precision Ag Day – Yarrawonga,
PAM Training at Wagga Wagga and
Lockhart NSW
Paul Olsen from Fairport will be in Moree NSW around the 21st or 22nd of October and is available for a training day. Please call me or Fairport if you are interested.

The training request is still on-line at www.farmtek.com.au so to get a day scheduled in your area, Please go to our site and fill out the request form.

TASMANIA has now become part of my FarmTek distribution, support and training area. I am very keen to spend sometime there later in the year. I will be sending our further details to all our clients in Tasmania a little later via email. If you don’t have email and are interested some PAM training in your area, please give me a call.

I look forward to meeting with you soon. All the best for the oncoming hay and harvest.

Regards, Joanne Richardson
Farmtek Australia

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Agbis NSW & QLD

Our Agents throughout New South Wales and Queensland can assist with any PAM queries or problems – listed below are there contact details:

Orana Region Communications is located in Dubbo, NSW
Brett McCarthy can be contacted on 0418 840 000 Email orcomms@bigpond.com
James Niemeyer can be contacted on 0428 856 555 Email nims@aapt.net.au
John and Lisa Minogue are located at Barmedman in Southern NSW
John and Lisa can be contacted on 02 6976 3023 or 0428 763 023
Email: office@agandgeneralconsulting.com.au
Dorothy Barton and her team at Leading Edge in Griffith, NSW
Dorothy can be contacted on 02 6964 1611 Email:
admin@clickstartit.com.au
Andrew Rice of Ivey ATP is located in Parkes, NSW
Andrew can be contacted on 02 6845 1611 Email:
andrew@iveyatp.com
Sarah Hall located in Toowoomba QLD
Sarah can be contacted on
0417 620 611
Email: sarah@agbis.com
Graham Spackman, Ed Windley and Kylie Borchardt of Spackman Mackay Consulting P/L, located in Emerald, QLD
They can be contacted on – Office: 07 4982 0958
Graham Spackman – 0407 156 306
Ed Windley – 0418 820 958 Email: spackman@tpg.com.au
Lucy House located in Rockhampton, QLD
Lucy can be contacted on 0428 876 364 Email: lucy@agbis.com
Mick Alexander located in Yeppon, QLD
Mick can be contacted on 0438 395 255 Email: malexander@rcs.au.com
Tony Crowley located in far North Queensland at Walkerston.
Tony can be contacted on 0409 475 317 Email: tcrowley@mcs.net.au

And of course Matt Meehan can be contacted on 0407 729 936 or 02 6772 9200 or our visit Website www.agbis.com.au

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The Fairport Team wishes all our clients well for the spring months
Until December 2005 …
Farewell from Roger Wiese and the Fairport Team