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Fairport News

Historical FTI news articles and PRESS RELEASES
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DECEMBER 2007

IN THIS ISSUE

» Welcome
» Roger's Ramblings
» Staff Matters
» Recent Changes
» Pasture Watch News
» Dealer News
    » Booth Technology
    » FarmTek Australia
    » AgIT
» Fairport Club / Software Support News
» In Closing

Season’s Greetings from all of us at Fairport. We hope you all have a happy and peaceful Christmas and that 2008 solves all your problems however large or small they might be.
Once again the Fairport team welcomes all our new clients who have joined us since September. Please remember, we are always happy to get feedback from our clients, old and new. So, if you have something that we should know about our service or products, please don’t hesitate to tell us.

What a hectic year 2007 has been here! It will be good to have a few days off at the end of this week. There have been plenty of highlights for us this year despite the drought doing its best to keep a lid on things.

The ongoing software development work we have been doing for our corporate clients has dominated daily life in the Fairport office – at least for the development team and me. Colin has been extremely busy as well with customer service and dealing with PAM Enterprise enquiries from Honduras, India, Jamaica, Philippines, Ghana, Commonwealth of Dominica and such interesting places… He has been continuing to wear out a path between here and the east of Australia, Adelaide in particular, to visit clients and prospects but managed to get as far as Canberra on his last trip. I had a trip to Brisbane and the Gold Coast a few weeks back, catching up with our friends at AAco and Sundown Pastoral who are both in the process of implementing PAM Enterprise for their large cattle operations.

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Since our last newsletter we’ve lost Darren after a six year stint. I think we finally wore him out! For the past two years Darren has been reworking the entire livestock and individual animals sections of PAM. This has been a huge undertaking and we hope all of you who upgrade to PAM 6 and of course our PAM Enterprise clients, will appreciate his efforts. Some of the features Darren has been responsible for can be read on our web site at: www.fairport.com.au/changes/changes.asp

Our main telephone support and Pasture Watch expert, Ed, has taken off for six months leave and may or may not come back. Colin and I have been missing Ed and have begun to appreciate how much he was doing around the place! We have had to skill up on the technologies around supporting Pasture Watch and take on the general telephone support role since he left.

Meanwhile we have employed Allison Coleman. Allison’s title (for now!) is Customer Services and Public Relations Manager. She will be working on upgrading our software help content, manuals, web site, quarterly newsletter, training materials … for a start. We also hope she will be able to take on some of the support role and whatever else Colin and I are struggling to find time to do. Allison has a masters of electronic marketing and information management on top of experience in business and education, so she brings a range of skills to the team.

The developer team has been joined for the past few months by Steve Bliss from Adelaide. Steve has over 20 years software development experience and has been adding functionality to PAM in several areas.

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Here in WA (and probably all over Australia) the biggest problem facing all businesses is the “skills shortage”. It has been excellent having Mikhail Beloshapkin from Russia here working for us. As Mentioned before, Mikhail has a doctorate in the world of mapping software and mathematics. He has been working overtime enhancing our mapping and precision farming systems. The John Deere interface is substantially finished and already “out there” working in PAM 6 and catering for old and new John Deere equipment. He has added much more – including support for all AgLeader and Case – New Holland harvesting equipment. There will more coming very soon, like the ability for PAM+FarmStar and FarmStar Lite users to export their lists of Farms and Paddocks to their onboard devices to make the importing of the data from the onboard devices more streamlined.

Other recent changes and things to look out for have included the rewriting of the coordinate and geographical datum systems to give greater accuracy and to allow for the rapid adding of other world-wide coordinate systems as required.

Two new export options have been added to the “Export” menu: Export to MapInfo and also Export to Google Earth. Google Earth is free mapping software that you can download from Google. No doubt many of you have already done this. Next time you run PAM try exporting your farm maps to Google Earth. In Google Earth, use File / Open and locate your PAM export file … open it and watch Google “fly” to your farm! It’s a great way to impress your city cousins. Email them your farm map in a KLM file attachment and they can import it into Google Earth.

If you have livestock mobs showing on your farm map, have a look out for the new display options on the File/Tools menu in mapping. You can display your mob codes as “hints” … which will pop up when you move your mouse over the mob symbol. This is a nice way to reduce the clutter on your map.

Exporting a SHP file now creates a file called PAM Export.AXL. If you ever need to send your farm maps to another party who is running ArcView or Arc Explorer, the new PAM Export.AXL file will export your polygon colours and other features.

A series of mapping enhancements is in the pipeline and will be released in the first half of 2008. These will include:

• FarmStar: Streamlining the Variable Rate user interface and the ability to link VRT jobs to Paddock Activities in the Add Wizard.
• FarmStar: Support or enhanced support of several new precision farming onboard systems... like KEE (Topcon) and Trimble.
• FarmStar: Adding in some additional data imaging (gridding) techniques like Kriging.
• FarmStar: The implementation of a data manipulation and imaging system to interrelate data of different types to arrive at paddock management zones for VRT projects and other purposes.
• General: Much improved handling of the importing of SHP (ESRI – ArcView) shape files – in particular the efficient storing and re-displaying of object attribute data. In other words, the displaying of things like fence types, asset (pumps, bores, dams, sheds) details. Etc.

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There has been quite a bit of action in the Eastern States with PastureWatch over the last few months with an increase in the enquiry level from both Graziers and Consultants.

We have had one consultant in Victoria set up with his first group of 4 Farmers and has been very happy with the information he now has at his finger tips. Another group of Farmers are going to be added in the New Year until the consultant has approximately 20 of his clients on PastureWatch.

We have also recently setup a server version of PastureWatch for a large Grazing Company in Northern NSW. This allows all managers to view the data from their own computers with the data being stored on the central server.

Colin has also had discussions with one of the large organisations that will be including PastureWatch and Pastures from Space into their training courses about pasture utilisation and management. More details will be released once the courses have been finalised.

A few minor enhancements have been made to the software. The most significant being the ability to filter Farms in the Browse Dataset screen which will be very helpful when users have more than one Farm.

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Booth Technology - WA

Need PAM training…?

Booth Technology runs PAM Training Seminars at our Perth Office during the last week of every month. The next series will be the week of 28th January – 1st February.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our PAM Clients for their continued support during 2007. Have an enjoyable Christmas and we wish you all the very best for 2008.

Our Office will be closed from 24th December to the 1st January.

For further assistance please call Booth Technology on (08) 9383 4443

Ben Coman – 0414 408 458
Email: sales@boothtech.com.au

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FarmTek Australia VIC - SA - TAS

Just completed 2 days training at Launceston, Wagga and Deniliquin. Thank you everybody who attended.

Our Bendigo course was cancelled; it was the wrong time for everybody with harvests starting a little earlier.

I will be re-running the Bendigo course in early February as well as scheduling PAM QA and PAM Mapping courses at Swan Hill. I will send out details early in the New Year.

With the new FarmBis, I have to have all enrolment forms completed prior to me being able to register for funding. So if you are planning to attend, please register early.

I am planning to take 2 weeks holidays in January and at times will be out of mobile phone range. I’m hoping to visit Lord Howe Island just off the NSW coast. So, please contact Fairport if you have any support issues during this time.

Thank you everybody for your support during 2007, looking forward to a busy 2008.

Best wishes to all.

Joanne Richardson
FarmTek Australia
Ph 1300 553 446
Email: Joanne@farmtek.com.au

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AgIT - NSW & QLD

PAM TRAINING: NSW & QLD

FarmBis subsidy is now available in NSW (group training only). We will be making our way down the Newell Highway in mid January carrying out PAM training.

If you are in QLD and need some training please take advantage of the fact that there is still one-on-one training available with the FarmBis subsidy; this ends at the end of March and we will only be able to provide group training from then on in.

You may have noticed that we have missed a few months with the PAM help notes and have been asked quite a few times ‘what has happened to them?’ We have been waiting for PAM v6 before starting them again. Now that PAM v6 is available, you will again find helpful hints and tips coming through on your email starting in January, or you can always download them here: www.agit.com.au/support.

We will be sending out an email early in the new year to let you know all about the new version of the PAM software and how it will benefit you.

AG IT will be on light staff for the Christmas/New Year period but we will still be available. So if you need support, please leave a message or email us and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

All the best for 2008 and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Paul Olsen
Ag IT
2-8 Serengetti Drive
MUNRUBEN QLD 4125
Ph/Fax: (07) 3802 1458
Mobile: 0419 727 086
Sales & Support: 1800 658 998
email: paul@agit.com.au

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As you know, Fairport Club membership entitles you to software upgrades and telephone support via the Fairport toll free number (1800 500 195).

Please note that the office will only be staffed on a part-time basis from December 21st – January 6th. Registration requests received by fax or email will be dealt with as quickly as possible. The telephones, including the 1800 support number, will also only be manned on a part-time basis over this holiday period. Please leave a message or send us an email to receive support. This includes providing any unlock codes.

The office will be back to full strength on Monday the 7th of January. Please see the dealer news for distributor holiday hours for local support.

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The Fairport Team wishes all our clients and business partners and associates well for the months ahead and we wish you all a very safe and prosperous New Year.

Aussie 12 Days of Christmas
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve possums playing,
Eleven snakes a-sliding,
Ten lizards leaping,
Nine wombats working,
Eight koalas climbing,
Seven emus running,
Six brolgas dancing,
Five kan-ga-roos,
Four great galahs,
Three parakeets,
Two cockatoos,
And a kookaburra in a gum tree.

... Until MARCH 2008!

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