So you got the release...now what? By Melissa Frenyea, Manager of Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing Twice a year, CommSoft harvests a crop of program enhancements, bundles them together into a quality-assured whole and presents them for your consumption in the form of a software release. Bob Kolar, CommSoft’s Manager of Client Services, announces the general availability via email. In Bob’s email, he attaches a letter in which he summarizes some release highlights and provides a handful of reminders about the various links you should be using, documents you should be reading and processes you should be following to get the release into your production environment. Once you receive the general availability announcement and Bob’s letter, you have all the ingredients you need to begin the upgrade. But then what? Is there a dependable upgrade recipe you can follow? Welcome to our Special Release Edition of the newsletter where we share all the tips and tricks we have on how to install a successful release upgrade. Belly up! And read on.

Steps for a Successful Release Upgrade

1. Go to the Community Forum. www.commsoft.net/forums/ Why? Because that’s where everything you need for your upgrading planning pleasure is found.

2. Subscribe to the Threads for the Release Notes, Upgrade Instructions and Release Notes Spreadsheets. And then download them (if you want a local copy).

Why? Taking a moment to subscribe to these threads guarantees that you will be notified of any updates to these documents. Updates are occasionally made based on input or feedback. It only take a few seconds to subscribe to the thread. Do it!

You’ll thank me for it. Not sure how to subscribe to thread? It’s as easy as 1-2-3.

Summer 2015

In This Issue:

Tips and Tricks from Kali

Meet the Sales Team

Release Upgrades Explained!

In the Field…

And more!

THE WATER COOLER Communication Software Consultants Tri-Annual Newsletter

facebook.com/commsoft

@CommSoft518

(Continued on page 14)

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If you receive the following message when bumping a service order to history: “Unpaid Deposits Exist on Order” Do NOT proceed with bumping the order to history. Select the Inquiry button within the service order and

verify the customer has paid the required Deposit/Advanced Payment(s).

If the payment has been received but is still showing unprocessed – proceed with bumping the service order.

If the payment has NOT been received – enter the required payment into a payment batch and then proceed with bumping the service order.

What will happen if I bump a service order to history that has an unpaid Deposit and/or Advanced Payment? Deposits and/or Advanced Payments may not be refunded to the account appropriately based upon your configuration.

Before cancelling a service order always check for paid Deposits/Advanced payments. If the customer has paid a Deposit/Advanced Payment, be sure to follow your internal business procedures to ensure the

customer receives a proper refund. Contact Application Support for questions or tips on configuration!

We are proud to announce the latest companies who have earned CommSoft’s prestigious Enterprise Certification. As a reminder, the primary goal of this program is to provide a framework of operational best practices that will enable CommSoft customers to maintain a high level of excellence as iCommVergence continues to grow and evolve. In so doing, all customers will get the most out of iCommV. CommSoft Enterprise Certification is a completely voluntary program open to all customers with active support agreements. So, drum roll please...the following companies have earned their Enterprise Certification status in 2015:

Valley Telecom – Willcox, AZ GVTC – San Antonio, TX Arvig – Perham, MN Innovative – St. Thomas, VI Twin Lakes – Gainesboro, TN To find out more about our Enterprise Certification program, please contact Joe Keegan!

SUPPORT TIPS & TRICKS—Deposits and Advanced Payments By Kali Aber and Jamel Burgos, Client Support Analysts

2015 (so far) Enterprise Certified Companies By Joe Keegan, Account Manager

TEAM SUPPORT

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3 Training TEAM TRAINING

My husband and I recently applied for electric service for our recreational lot on Lake Houston in the City of Houston in the great state of Texas. Because electricity is deregulated in our area, we had many choices for an electric provider. We agreed on a provider, applied for electricity and then waited. And waited. Many weeks we waited, with no phone calls or correspondence from the provider. We launched a counterattack and began calling them weekly demanding updates. But instead of updates we heard a lot of stories about how it was the City of Houston’s fault due to permitting, or the facility owner’s fault

due to various other reasons. At one point we were told that on one of their computer screens it showed a meter had been set, but on another screen it said it hadn’t. Um… what does that mean? Can I plug in my blender now or not? After six weeks of frustration with the provider, we fired them and started all over with a new provider. Oh, my! What a difference! Although the new provider had to deal with the same issues that the previous provider had to deal with, we received many calls, emails and letters that provided us with timely updates. Every time movement was made towards finally getting us power, we were informed about it. We were even given direct numbers to call so that we wouldn’t have to repeat our story all over again every time we contacted them. It took another 30 days to finally get our meter set, but the difference in our customer satisfaction between the two companies was immense. I realize that sometimes things are out of the control of

utility companies, but it’s how you manage the customer experience that counts. Keeping customers informed throughout the process is a very important element in providing excellent customer care, so I ’m totally jazzed about one of the big focus areas on this year’s Product Roadmap - Unified Communications. The goal of this initiative is to provide you with an easy-to-manage means to keep your customers informed via emails, text messages and phone calls. If an order gets bumped to Engineering, let the customer know. Technician is on the way? Let the customer know. A new service is available in their area? Let the customer know. Are you doing everything in your power to keep your customers in the loop? Need an unbiased analysis of your existing processes? Give us a call! We can evaluate your existing processes, recommend best practices improvements and get you ready to really capitalize on Unified Communications. Stay tuned for our upcoming announcements about Unified Communications...what it is and what it will do for your company!

At Your Service! Communication is Key By Paula Robbins, CommSoft Training Consultant / Customer Service Guru / Fishing Addict

At Your Service!

The “At Your Service” column focuses on

Customer Service in the telecommunications industry and how to

utilize CommSoft products to provide

award-winning service for your customers.

4

4 TEAM SALES Meet the Sales Team...

As you may have noticed we had a bit of a transition within our CommSoft Sales team this year. First off Rick Bartlett, who has been with CommSoft for 8 years as a Sales Director took on the challenge of heading up the sales team as our Vice President of Sales. Rick was very excited to build a new sales team that is made up of industry experts and just all around good folks. “We have put together a very talented and industry specific sales team that is committed to bringing solutions and opportunities to our customers through expert representation of our products and services.” Says Rick of his new team. “My main goals as VP of Sales will be to promote a high level of sales professionalism among my team and reinforce CommSoft’s philosophy of integrity and “customer first” values.” So who are these sales professionals? Joe Leaskey and Alan Christner joined the team in April and not only bring the experience and background to help take our sales team to the next level, but also the drive and desire to make a big impact at CommSoft even beyond sales. So lots of changes in our sales team but as they say, change brings opportunity. Rick has also had some major changes at home over the past couple of years with the arrival of his daughter Cadence. So let’s meet our new sales directors…Joe and Alan!

Joe Leaskey – Sales Director

Joe’s been in the Telecom industry for over 30 years and has held positions in Operations, Engineering, Account Management and Sales with companies such as Satellite Business Systems, MCI, Concert (BT), Eftia OSS and consulted for Danet GmbH (Deutsche Telekom) on hosted and managed service solutions before joining CommSoft. He loves the fast pace of change and evolution of the technologies in this industry but you have to keep up with it all! But why CommSoft? Joe said he was drawn to CommSoft because of our company focus. “The focus on the smaller rural telephone companies, which grew out of necessity when the large service providers wouldn’t spend the dollars to expand into the rural areas. They are more creative with the services they offer and more in tune with their

customers.” Joe said. But Joe isn’t all work…he loves fly fishing, hunting, antiques and golf when he can fit it in. And he is very proud of the fact that he is a veteran of the USAF, Commander of American Legion Post 407 in Hammondsport N.Y. and a Life Member and Trustee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Bath, NY. That’s pretty cool Joe!

Alan Christner – Sales Director

Alan started his career in telecom right after the divesture with Sprint (When you could hear a pin drop) then to a national paging company (back before texting, and pay phones were actually popular) then to a Softswitch manufacturer and on to a west coast unified communications provider where dogs and surf boards were a common sight at the office. (Not unlike CommSoft of course…okay maybe not) When asked what he finds so exciting about our industry he said “This ever changing environment of Telecom proves to be a fun history trail. Broadband for instance, used to be dial-up and 9600 baud was fast. I actually unplugged an ATM machine at a rest stop on the NYS thruway to connect to my e-mail. And now with a glass strand to my doorstep with Gig speeds its almost common place. Also who would have thought that putting content on the cloud was normal. I still look up when I go outside to make sure that a server isn ’t going to fall on me.” Let’s hope not Alan! But why Commsoft, well…”I have grown with this industry of the Tier2/3 service providers for the last 25 years of my career.”

By Laura Knussman, Manager of Marketing and Product Management

Rick and daughter Cadence

(Continued on Page 10)

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5 Training TEAM PRODUCT

We all know CommBI is a powerful tool (and it looks pretty slick too!) but did you know that with a little creativity you can make it even more essential to your business?! In this article we walk through recently adopted techniques used by Hotwire Communications, EATEL Communications, Matanuska Telephone Association, and Illinois Valley Cellular.

Hotwire has recently begun to use CommBI on multiple fronts. First, they have modified CommBI to send automated regular emails providing details on every aspect of work performed by dispatched technicians for the previous day, week, or month. Information includes the quantity of work performed and the quality of work performed. The quality is measured in terms of repeat tickets on the same service. This email is sent to the company president and several directors. Second, Hotwire has added attributes to their customer and revenue information that is relative to their specific business structure. Each service and customer is tagged with the region, vertical, and regional manager. This allows the creation of very powerful high level dashboards that report on important measures across their specific organization structure.

EATEL has taken a methodical approach to CommBI adoption. They validated every customer and service stored in CommBI to ensure they have maximum confidence in its information. With confidence established, their marketing department moved into an aggressive reporting project. This project involved breaking down every service and feature by both revenue and unit count. They establish a budget for each of these line items for every month of the year. Their IT staff also created a charge code mapping structure that also provides the format of the resulting report. CommBI runs on a regular basis and counts the customers and totals the revenue using configured classifications. The result is an automated monthly spreadsheet that provides their marketing department with exact information on every service and product that they sell, including total counts, adds, drops, net and churn percentage. All values are checked against the budget targets provided by marketing.

Matanuska Telephone Association established a simple but powerful approach for tracking the effectiveness of their new online customer portal. The myMTA portal allows customers to add, change, and disconnect services. Launching the myMTA project resulted in many questions being asked. First, how many online orders are being submitted? Creating a simple dashboard provided counts, summaries and trends to track myMTA adoption. The second question was more complex. Are customers more likely to drop or downgrade service online because there is no CSR to intercede and talk a customer out of the change? Another dashboard was created to show the amount of charges added versus the amount of charges removed.

Illinois Valley Cellular is a wireless provider. Wireless providers have fast and lightweight promotion activities. They may launch a promotion in their stores at 9 AM and they need to see the results of that promotion before noon. For example, imagine the launch of the iPhone 6. They cannot wait until the next day for CommBI to tell them how many phones have been sold and how many new service plans have been activated. The CommBI team created new real-time sales data sets that samples POS Inventory transactions throughout the day, allowing the COO to understand exactly what sales are being made throughout the day as well as for the past several days. All these values are summarized by plan, phone model, phone manufacturer, sales person, and sales location.

Pretty amazing stuff right? Come see the “Managing the Customer Experience with CommBI” panel during this year’s 26th Annual Users’ Conference in Boulder to learn about more CommBI success stories and implementation challenges.

Customers Use CommBI in Even More Interesting, Creative, and Powerful Ways! By Chris Reitter, Senior Consultant and Product Lead—CommBi

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6 TEAM PRODUCT Can We Talk? By Joe Keegan, Account Manager

Yes, we probably can. CommSoft’s VTC is a powerful tool that can communicate with any number of devices. Are you duplicating the same data is separate sys-tems? Why not have them talk to maintain your data integrity. Some devices that we’ve connected to recently include: Adtran AOE Alcatel PCRF, SDM Arris DAC6000 Arris EAM (VOD) Broadworks Calix (Bseries, C7, E5, E7, etc.) Cisco DNCS ETI HITS

IBBS BBX Incognito BCC Innovative System APMax Integra5 (VOD) InterOp (many Wireless applications) MetaSwitch Minerva Mediaroom Tekelec T7000

Help Guide the Future of CommSoft's Financials and Inventory Products!

In June we announced our exciting new customer group! As a part of our continuous improvements to our Product Management processes, we're establishing a CommSoft Financials & Inventory Product Customer Group. Similar to the existing iCommVergence and CommForce Customer Groups, the Financials & Inventory Customer Group will meet via conference call on a regular basis to share best practices, provide feedback and direction on roadmap items and provide an on-going forum for networking with like-minded peers in the CommSoft Financials & Inventory Community. To get things kicked off, Product Manager Lourae Fitzgerald will be your hostess for the first couple of calls. Lourae will facilitate

discussion on current roadmap items and help "recruit" a chairperson from the group members to take the lead on a go-forward basis. We're excited to create this on-going forum for our Financials & Inventory community! If you'd like to be a part of the action, contact Lourae Fitzgerald (lourae.fitzgerald@commsoft.net) and sign up today! Thank you to those of you who have already joined the group! We’ll be in touch soon to set up the first meeting!

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Documentation enhancements are headed your way with the release of 9.2. You will now notice changes to the Release Notes spreadsheet formats, as well as the Data Dictionary User Guide. Below is a list of what you can expect to see in v9.2:

Data Dictionary User Guide Changes

With 9.1.01, we introduced Relational Diagrams to our existing Data Dictionary User Guide. The new Relational Diagrams section contains annotated screenshots that explain the fields/files from which various data is retrieved for display in iCommV. We’re continuing this momentum with the following changes in 9.2:

With the release of 9.2, the Data Dictionary User Guide will include file descriptions. This is a staged effort, so we will be adding more file descriptions in each documentation set release.

We’ve added a new, commonly-used file icon to the Data Dictionary User Guide.

Release Notes Spreadsheet Changes

The release notes spreadsheets have become a popular tool for managing UAT. Based on customer feedback, we ’ve made the following changes to meet your process needs:

Added a column to indicate if the item was flagged as a “Key Functionality” item Added a column to indicate if the item is a “New” enhancement Added columns indicate if the item had been flagged with any one of the 5 module-specific icons:

Capital Credits Trouble Tickets VTC

Added the Bug-Cosmetic designation to the Bug/Mod column. This identifies minor changes such as the correction of on-screen spelling errors or error message corrections. If an issue is listed as Bug-Cosmetic, the entire row is in italics. This makes it easy for you to identify issues that require little if any UAT.

Added the Testing Results (Pass, Fail, N/A) column. This column helps you track your UAT efforts. Added a Pre-requisite (Y/N) column. This alerts clients that the bug/mod has a proviso, such as; you can only use this

functionality if you are configured to use Curbstone or this issue only affected clients configured for rebill functionality. A “Y” in this column is really a flag to you that you should cross-reference the “Note” section of the release note to make sure the release note applies to the current configuration.

Note: This Release Notes Spreadsheet is not published until the week after the release notes.

For those of you who haven’t used the Release Note spreadsheet yet, it was first released with v8.9.01, and is highly utilized by many customers to help organize their release User Acceptance Testing effort, as well as provide an audit trail for the UAT.

CommSoft utilizes a Documentation Focus Group consisting of CommSoft customers, who provide insight into their release processes in order that we can better support those processes documentation-wise. We appreciate their feedback and hope these improvements provide each of you with the continued support you might want during your release efforts!

Product Documentation...Keeps Getting Better All the Time!

Training TEAM PRODUCT By Tracy Perry, Sales Support

The “Commonly Used File” Icon

Wireline Wireless

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Ellijay Telephone Company, in Ellijay, GA has been utilizing a full suite of CommSoft products, including iCommVergence,

CommNextion, CommForce, CommView, VTC and Financials. Awarded ‘Client of the Year’ at our annual user group in 2014, they have

become one of CommSoft’s premiere customers. At the beginning of 2015, they decided to add to their suite of products by

implementing CommSoft’s Inventory module.

Their goal in implementing the Inventory module was to get a tighter control over parts coming

into and going out of the warehouse. They want to be able to track a part from purchasing to

receiving; to the technician’s truck, and through to installation at the customer site. They are also

interested in using reorder point processing to ensure the proper quantities are on hand and in

getting information on how long parts have been sitting in the warehouse, which allows them to

keep stuff moving. They are using CommForce for workforce management, and as part of the

implementation of Inventory, they will be utilizing CommForce’s interface with Inventory –

allowing the technicians to select the parts used during the install and relieving them from Inventory

with the touch of a button.

The implementation began with the Business Process Analysis

(BPA) in late February, with a target of live use in early

December – ahead of the holiday season. Ellijay has been

diligently working on configuration and user acceptance testing

with a goal of completing this phase of the project by mid-

August. So far, they are right on schedule thanks to the hard

work and dedication of the project team.

If you read the Water Cooler on a regular basis, you may be

aware that Ellijay likes to write poems. They wrote a poem in

honor of my visit to Ellijay to kick off Project Team Training. Just

prior to my trip, they also sang ‘She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the

Mountain’ during our weekly status meeting.

Anyone who has been to Georgia knows that Georgians are

known for their southern hospitality, bless their hearts! Ellijay Telephone Company is no exception to the rule. It is always a pleasure to

visit their location. And of course, who can visit Georgia without drinking a big glass of sweet tea?

Implementation Spotlight….Ellijay Telephone Company Inventory Implementation By Lourae Fitzgerald, Financials and Inventory Product Guru

TEAM CUSTOMERS

Lourae and Ellijay’s poet Gwendolyn McArthur

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9 Training TEAM CUSTOMERS It’s All in the Details and Automation By Russ Hoek, Director of Dispatch/Support, Ellijay Telephone

I’ve said many times that change is the only thing constant in the business we’re all in. Ellijay Telephone has had its share of keeping up with change over the years. Remember the old days of paper schematic sheets for plant records? Remember manually adding every POTS line in the switch? Remember adding all those 2nd lines when dial up internet 1st came out? If you’re newer to the business you don’t know what you missed. One area of automation that was difficult to embrace for most employees at Ellijay was doing away with paper service orders and trouble tickets. For Ellijay this transition was made when we converted to iCommV and CommForce several years ago. This has proven to build more efficiencies than originally predicted. When summertime storms hit and the trouble index goes through the roof, we can sort all the tickets with a click of a button. We can also just call the technician and tell him to find a hot spot and “F9” to receive the new ticket(s). No more lengthy phone calls giving all the information over the phone. No more boxes of paper to shred or dig back through to find that one important note. A recent project that Ellijay completed was a new partnership between two different power companies that provide POTS (from our switch) over their fiber. With fully automating as much as we could up front this made for a smooth transition. For one of the conversions all of the customers were loaded into the new iCommV site ahead of time. VTC was then used to install each line via a new unique service order type. This allowed the conversion to be completed by a newly trained end user. On the scheduled port date a service order was created, bumped to VTC and then cleared through. A unique charge code was also put on each order so we could run a report and track the progress weekly. A tremendous amount of team effort from many different departments was put into this project on the front end. As time goes on the profit margins in this business will continue to be challenged. We must continue to look at what opportunities are available. Many times it may take new processes instead of people. It’s more and more critical to have detailed plans and automation to accompany the change we face. About Ellijay: Ellijay Telephone Company (ETC) is located in Ellijay, Georgia, the historic county seat of Gilmer County, the Apple Capital of Georgia and an Appalachian Trail Community. ETC has been a CommSoft customer since 2009 and Enterprise Certified since 2014

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Happy Anniversary! CommSoft Team Anniversaries

TEAM COMMSOFT

Lisa Prince 1 year

David Smith 5 years Jamel Burgos 6 years

Sherrie Folger 6 years Ryan Sevier 6 years

Melissa Graziadei 7 years

Vijay Oruganti 7 years Paula Robbins 7 years

David Strand 10 years Jeff Tompkins 10 years

Pat Kennedy 12 years

Roger Kumler 13 years Kristen Scheffer 13 years

says Alan “There are very few companies that thrive in this space and the people here at CommSoft make this a great environment to continue my success within this industry.” And when Alan isn’t in the office working with our customers he loves to travel, sail (though he doesn’t get to do it enough!) and golf (just for fun). And though you can’t tell from looking at him “I love food (lots of it) and normally not the “Good for you” kind. “Can I have another donut please?”” So if you need any of our sales team, feel free to reach out to them! They will be very glad to chat with you about the industry, your needs, or what kind of tackle you like to use…

Meet the Sales Team (Continued from Page 4)

Jacylyn Whitney 13 years

Hari Kondreddy 15 years Bob Kolar 16 years

Maryellen DesForge 17 years Tracy Perry 17 years

Mark Wedge 17 years

Craig Engle 18 years Laura Knussman 18 years

Andrea Rutkowski 19 years John Ganther 23 years

Larry Davis 30 years

Jim Jackson 30 years

Logic Communications has gone live on iCommV, VTC and CommBI! That’s right folks, our friends on the island of Bermuda are the latest and greatest telecommunication company to join your esteemed CommSoft Users’ Community. Logic’s cutover to live use was a play in two acts. Act I took place from June 30-July 3. This included the migration of data from the legacy Infranet platform into iCommV and the beginning of live system use for Logic users that had previously used the Infranet platform. Act II took place from July 15-17 and included the migration of data from their legacy Platypus platform and the beginning of live system use for previous Platypus users. Yep, you read that correctly, they did not one but two cutovers from two entirely different systems within two weeks of each other! Even more impressive is how smoothly everything went. The Logic and CommSoft project teams worked extremely

well together, devised a well-crafted cutover plan and executed it expertly. Please join us in congratulating Logic on this great accomplishment and welcoming them to the CommSoft Club!

Logic Communications Goes LIVE!

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11 Training TEAM COMMSOFT CommSoft Takes the Challenge!

On Thursday, May 21, 2015, more than 10,000 runners and walkers from 500-plus organizations participated in the largest annual road race in downtown Albany, NY: The CDPHP® Workforce Team Challenge. CommSoft was no exception. Although the start continues to be a challenge every year with record number attendance, everyone found favorable weather conditions with cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 60s! Out of the 30+ years that Albany, NY, has been holding this community event, we

are proud to say this was CommSoft’s 18th year in a row as a participant! It was another great time shared by all, and special kudos to the following members of Team Commsoft—Joe Keegan, Steve McKenna, Bob Kolar, Hari Kondreddy, Vijay Oruganti, Tracy Perry, Jamel Burgos, Angela Mallard, Kali Aber, and Lourae Fitzgerald—who rocked the course!

Team CommSoft: (l to r) Kali Aber, Joe Keegan, Jamel Burgos, Steve McKenna, Lourae Fitzgerald, Tracy Perry, Angela Mallard, Hari Kondreddy. (not pictured: Bob Kolar and VIjay Oruganti) Mr. Keegan Goes to Washington...

On February 27th 2015 Capitol Hill had a very special guest testifying about an important subject…rural drinking water. Who was that guest? None other than CommSoft’s very own Joe Keegan! As you may or may not know, Joe is the Mayor of the Village of Castleton-on-Hudson….a lovely little village a few miles south of Albany on the banks of the Hudson River. So when the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the U.S. House of Representatives (fit that on a business card!) asked Joe to come and share his knowledge about the Safe Drinking Water Act he put his water samples in a brief case

and hightailed it to “the hill”.

He gave some really insightful testimony on the state of the drinking water infrastructure in his area (which is probably very similar in other rural areas) including providing some really gross pictures. You can actually find his entire testimony here if you are really interested in the state of drinking water in Castleton, NY: http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/

files/documents/Testimony-Keegan-EE-Drinking-Water-Systems-2015-2-27.pdf

But we are very proud of Joe and his efforts to better the area he lives (and serves) and we don’t know how he finds the time to do so with all the great work he does for CommSoft! They should throw him a tickertape parade in Castleton, or at least mention him at the next Firehouse pancake breakfast.

“You Can’t Handle The Truth!” says Mayor Keegan

Mmm...water just tastes better when it goes through a pipe like this!

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12 TEAM COMMSOFT CommSoft Counterpart:

Military Edition We present to you a bit about two CommSoft employees who share something in common

other than just working at CommSoft .

The Questions!

Where were you born and raised?

Dream job when you were little?

What’s your idea of a perfect meal?

What’s your favorite song?

Favorite Sports Team?

What part of the military are you from?

Where were you stationed?

Pistol or Rifle?

Best Military Experience?

Thank you to Melanie and Angela for your service!

Born in Girard PA, but mostly raised in Ashtabula Ohio

A Nurse

When there is both steak and ice cream.

Almost anything Pink Floyd

Ohio State University football and the Browns

I am still in the Army Reserves (I just hit 20 years recently). I am currently the supervisor for human resources in my unit and have held different titles over the years.

I’ve been mobilized to Ft. Leonardwood MO, and Camp Atterbury IN.

I prefer pistols, but shoot my rifle yearly

When I was a younger Soldier, I used to compete in the Army’s Soldier of the year competitions, and win. I won Division Soldier of the year twice, and competed in the 1st Army competition and lost both years.

Born – West Covina, CA; raised – Mound, MN

Olympian & sports broadcaster

Sitting seaside in Italy with some great Italian food

Time by Pink Floyd

Minnesota Vikings (diehard fan and I die hard every year!)

Branch: U.S. Army; Rank - Specialist; MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) – 46R - Broadcast Journalist

Ft. Dix, NJ (Basic); Ft. Ben Harrison, IN (AIT); Ft. Bragg, NC (22nd MPAD); Naples, Italy (AFN Europe) and Ft. Stewart, GA

M16

Meeting my husband in the military; covering the G7 Summit in 1994 while stationed in Italy; hanging out of a helicopter filming a joint mili-tary exercise; maxing my Physical Training test with a 300 score

Programmer Analyst Client Support Supervisor

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13 Training TEAM EVENTS

We are proud to announce that registration is now open for CommSoft’s 26th Annual Users’ Conference! This year we will focus on The Customer Experi-ence and how to engage and retain your customers while differentiating your-self from the competition. We’ve got three exciting days of information-filled product and industry sessions, along with lots of time for networking. As al-ways, we’ll have some fun activities going on in the evenings as well. So mark your calendars and we’ll see you in the Fall!

WHERE: Hotel Boulderado 2115 Thirteenth Street Boulder, CO WHEN: September 28th through October 1st 2015 WHAT: Product Training, Industry Info, Peer-to-Peer Networking

How to Register!

Standard Registration: $500.00 You may register online or by using the form included in our Conference Brochure.

Important Links

Our conference brochure: http://www.commsoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2015-UG-Brochure-Final.pdf Conference Registration Link: https://registration.sitesolutionsworldwide.com/synergy/v_1_/home/?id=960 Instructions on how to register for the conference: http://www.commsoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/How-to-Register-

for-the-26th-Annual-Users-Conference.pdf

You can also find these links on our website and the forum! We have had an overwhelming response so far and are very excited to see you all in September!

See you in Boulder!

Ft. Dix, NJ (Basic); Ft. Ben Harrison, IN (AIT); Ft.

the G7 Summit in 1994 while stationed in Italy;

tary exercise; maxing my Physical Training test

Look What’s Coming! CommForce Remote Portal

Our CommForce Development Team has been working diligently in conjuction with our partners at Arvig Communications to create a powerful hub for your field personnel! The CommForce Remote Portal allows resources in the field to access their assignments, make updates, and close their assignments…all from out in the field. Technicians are never out of touch and will have their daily appointments available to them at all times. And since the portal is device independent, it can be accessed from any device necessary including tablets, phones, and personal computers. So stay tuned for more information

about this powerful new addition to our CommForce suite. The CommForce Portal on a Tablet

14

14 SPECIAL RELEASE EDITION!

3. Review the Release Notes Spreadsheet and identify the items that will impact your company. Why? The Release Notes Spreadsheet boils everything in the Release Notes down into an easy-to-digest summary which enables you to understand the relative scope of the release as it pertains to your company. This spreadsheet is a great place to begin your re-lease upgrade planning.

Tip: Be sure to consider all products that you use when you plan for your upgrade. Some products such as iCommV, CommNextion and Financials & Inventory should be kept in synch at the same release level. So when you hunker down and begin to review release notes, think holistically and keep your entire suite of products in mind.

4. Now that you have an idea of the impact, get your team together and go over the release content together. Why? A team approach to release upgrade planning is the single best step you can take. Form a small team and work together to create your testing and training plans. A team approach ensures better communication and promotes company-wide involvement. Things to do during your meeting: Review the high-level overview of the release using the spreadsheet. Review the Best Practices and Key Functionality items

and determine which of these you will be turning on as a part of the upgrade. Dig into the impact for each functional area using the release notes. How much setup is required? What kind of training will be

needed? Make sure each business area is aware of the impact for their team. “Impact” is measured in terms of process changes, docu-

mentation changes, who needs to be trained/informed and what kind of training/communication is needed. 5. Coordinate timing for the upgrade of your Test environment. Be sure to do the following:

Decide on the best time to refresh the test environment. “Refreshing” the test environment means copying the data (aka “taking a snapshot”) from your Production environment into the Test environment. In order to perform a meaningful regression test, it is recommended that you perform the refresh just prior to running a billing in production. This will allow you to use that same data set in Test to verify the results of regression testing as it pertains to billing and flat file. This is an essential key to success in the upgrade process.

Tip: When you plan to refresh your Test environment, be sure to consider all the databases that integrate with that envi-ronment. For example, if you use CommForce or Financials & Inventory, be sure to take a snapshot of those Production data-bases at the same time you take a snapshot of your iCommV Production database and refresh all 3 Test environments at the same time. This will ensure everything works together nicely.

Go to the Community Forum, download the Upgrade Instructions and read them thoroughly. You will follow these instructions to the letter when you upgrade the test environment and again when you upgrade your production environment. If there’s any-thing in the instructions that’s not clear, contact support and we’ll walk through them with you. That way when the time comes to upgrade, you’re ready to roll.

6. Contact CommSoft Support and let us know when you plan to upgrade your test environment. Why? When you contact Support and communicate your plans for upgrading, four essential things will happen:

(Continued from the front page)

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15 Training SPECIAL RELEASE EDITION! We will make the release available for you on the FTP site. We will remind you to run your VSCANs and send them to us for analysis. This needs to be done at least a week or two pri-

or to your upgrade. What are VSCANs? They are reports that compare your program MOD library with the new release li-brary. These reports tell us which programs in your MOD library are now in the new release and should be removed from the MOD library as a part of the upgrade. This is an essential step in your upgrade planning.

We will make note of your plans in our operations calendar so that we can be sure we have resources available to support you during the upgrade.

We will answer any questions you have about the upgrade instructions. In addition to contacting CommSoft, be sure to line up any other 3rd party vendors that you’ll need to be involved in the re-

gression testing of the upgrade (i.e. your bill print vendor).

Tip: The more notice you provide, the better our ability – and other vendors’ abilities - to coordinate schedules. Let us know at least two weeks prior to your planned upgrade date so we can provide the best possible support.

7. Refresh the test environments with the cut of Production data that you will use for regression testing. On the date you identified above, refresh your test environments. As previously mentioned, be sure to refresh the databases for iCommV, Financials & Inventory and CommForce at the same time. Again, this is an essential step to do prior to the up-grade. Why is it important to refresh first? Good question! It’s important to perform the refresh of your Test environments prior to upgrading them so that the databases will not be out of sync with the programs. If the refresh is performed after the up-grade then the databases and programs will be out of sync. Remember: Refresh first, upgrade second.

8. Upgrade the Test environment Now that your Test environment is refreshed, you’re ready to upgrade the Test environment. Using the Upgrade Instructions from the Community Forum, upgrade your test environment. When complete, let CommSoft know!

9. Regression test the Test environment. Why? Even if you don’t enable a single new enhancement, regression testing is still a critical part of the release upgrade pro-cess. Create a standard, bare-bones test plan and then simply add to it based on the specifics for the release you’re upgrading to. What should be in a bare-bones plan? Here are the 5 minimal things you should test with every upgrade: Navigational “tire kicking”. Log in, surf through a few Inquiry screens, click around the framework. Basically, just navigate

around the way you normally would on a daily basis and make sure that things are working as per usual. Run a billing. When you refreshed your test environment (see above), you queued it up to run a specific bill cycle. Immedi-

ately following the upgrade, go ahead Create and review sample bills: If you use a bill print vendor, create and send a sample flat file to your vendor. If you use

the iCommV native bill print functionality, process and print your bills using your standard processes. “Tire kicking” of essential functionality.

Service orders – create a few typical service orders – new install, double play, upgrade, disconnect, temp suspends, etc – and bump them through the work flow of statuses.

Trouble tickets – as with service orders, create a few typical trouble tickets and run them through your work flow.

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16 SPECIAL RELEASE EDITION Payments – create a batch, add some payments, print a receipt, post the batch, add a payment arrangement, take a

look at the reports. Key integrations. Be sure to check that all systems that integrate with iCommv either with web services or some

other means are talking with each other.

Tip: Need some more advice on what to test? Visit the Upgrade Toolkit area on the Community Forum where you ’ll find a baseline list of recommended tests to perform with each release upgrade. Use this as a starting point for your regression test-ing. Here’s a link: http://www.commsoft.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?144-Upgrade-Toolkit

10. Perform any desired configuration in test After you’ve completed regression testing and validated that the upgrade was successful, you’re ready to proceed with turning on the new functionality contained in the release. These are the items that you’ve identified during your team planning session (step 4 above) and should include a mix of Best Practices items (these are enhancements that CommSoft has identified as essential to making the best use of the system) and other enhancements that you’ve determined would be beneficial to your company.

Tip: The Release Notes Spreadsheet is a great tool to use to track which items you and your upgrade team decide to imple-ment, when you implement them and who is assigned to test them. The spreadsheet was designed by a customer focus group to help streamline the upgrade process and has columns to track all of these things and more.

11. Establish a unit testing plan, set dates and communicate them Based on the new functionality that you’ve enabled in step 10 above, create a testing plan to verify user acceptance for the

new enhancements. Execute your testing plan. Get the testing team back together and ensure everyone gives a greenlight. As mentioned above,

use the Release Notes Spreadsheet to track which functionality you implement and who performed the acceptance testing. Go over this with your team to ensure all your ducks are in a row. And then move on to the next step: Training.

12. Establish a training plan Every release contains a mixture of changes to screens, functionality and report that should be communicated to the end users. Training for a release upgrade can be as minimal as sending a heads up email to let folks know of something new or different they may see on a screen. Or it can be as involved as holding end user training for all your CSRs. CommSoft Support Consultant Kali Aber suggests that as you make your training plan, categorize all the release items into three categories: Category 1: Impacts a large number of end users in a significant way and requires a training session for a group of people.

An example would be enhancements to service order functionality or payments that effects all CSRs. Category 2: Limited impact that is best communicated face-to-face but doesn’t require a classroom training. An example

would be something that impacts a limited number of end users. Category 3: Minimal impact that can be adequately communicated in writing – email, newsletter, etc.

Tip: Not sure how to efficiently make sure everyone in your organization knows what ’s coming in the next release? Want to

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17 Training SPECIAL RELEASE EDITION do something different from an email blast? Consider taking a lesson from long time CommSoft customer Arvig Communica-tions. Arvig’s internal training staff offers webinars and prerecorded videos with screenshots to get their folks up to speed.

13. Coordinate and communicate the upgrade date – internally, with CommSoft, with other vendors - for your upgrade to production. Once you have your training plan in place and know when all your end users will be ready for the upgrade, you can choose a date for the upgrade. Some recommended best practices for choosing a date: Monday-Thursday are the best days for an upgrade. Performing your upgrade on a weekday when the next day is also a

working day for all parties involved (i.e. not a weekend or holiday) ensures you’ll have access to resources that are needed to complete upgrade tasks and address any issues that may occur.

Pick a date during a relative lull in your operations calendar. For example, it’s best not to choose the night before your largest billing cycle. Avoiding unnecessary risks to your critical business events helps ensure you can complete the upgrade in a con-trolled, focused fashion.

When you have selected the best date for your organization: Communicate internally. All end users will need to log out of the framework prior to the upgrade to Production. Be sure you

have an internal communication plan to give everyone a heads up and a reminder to log completely out to ensure that the upgrade will go off without a hitch!

Let CommSoft know. As mentioned previously, coordinating your upgrade date with CommSoft ensures we have resources ready to assist should you need our help. Additionally, there are a few preparations we need to make in advance of your up-grade. Give us a heads up a couple of weeks beforehand and we’ll be ready when you are!

Let your other vendors know – especially those that interface with your CommSoft products. All subsystems and web ser-vices are brought down during an upgrade. Giving everyone a heads up that it’s a planned outage will be greatly appreciated by all involved.

14. Execute your training plan Now that everyone knows when the upgrade will be, they’re ready to be trained on how it will impact them. Luckily, you’ve got your training plan! Go for it.

15. Upgrade production You’ve completed testing. Your people are trained. CommSoft is standing by. All systems are go. Pull out the upgrade instruc-tions and perform the upgrade.

16. Kick the tires Login and navigate around the system. Make sure all subsystems are back up. Generally make sure that the system is ready for prime time!

17. Perform configuration of the enhancements you’ll be enabling Using the same steps you followed during your testing, perform the configuration of the enhancements you decided to imple-ment. After you’ve completed your set up, kick the tires on your changes to ensure you’re ready to roll.

18. Communicate Send out a communication internally, to CommSoft and to your other vendors that have been following along throughout the upgrade process to let us all know the upgrade was completed successfully according to your well-crafted plan. Congratulations!

Water Cooler Throwback We’ve been publishing our newsletter “The Water Cooler” for many many years. The oldest we have in our archives is from 1994 but we are pretty sure there are a few stuck out on a dumb terminal somewhere lost forever. One of our favorite ways to close out a Water Cooler was the “Top Ten List”. Yes, we stole this idea from Letterman but his lists were never this good. We had a team of gals at CommSoft that called themselves the “Newsletter Hags” (it was a term of pride, not an insult) and they would gather together during the genesis of each newsletter to come up with the perfect list for whatever was on their minds. (usually cheese oriented) Here are two that fit this time of year. Sadly, they are mostly still relevant.

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