EQL Data News

EQL Data December Newsletter

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

If you're getting this, it's because you or somebody else has signed you up for the EQL Data newsletter. We send this out about once a month. If you don't want to receive this mailing anymore, please reply and let us know; we'll take you off the list right away.

In this ongoing chronicle of our adventures:

EQL Data Live at Conferences
The EQL Blog and Documentation
New Pricing: Reducing Variable Costs
EQL Appliance Part Deux - Pricing & Development Models
More Features for Your Buck

EQL Data Live at Conferences

Thanks to the tremendous support we've gotten from you, our friends, testers, and customers, EQL is getting noticed more and more. This made the months of November and early December exciting: we were invited to present at two conferences, showing off OnWeb and proving that Access is a viable platform for Web Applications.

First, some of you caught Liz and myself at the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, ON, Canada on November 21, talking to young entrepreneurs at the Impact National Conference. After wrestling the power cord away from the Sun Microsystems guys, we had a great time talking about how our product is not only an example of innovation gone good, but a platform upon which new entrepreneurs can prototype and build their own applications. Thanks to everyone who came out!

On December 9, I took our interns, Matt and Ashok, down to the Microsoft campus in Farmington, CT, U.S.A. to present EQL Access OnWeb to the Connecticut Access User Group. A big thank you to the group for inviting us down, and giving us two hours to show off and brag about everything we've made Access do. All of our customers will get to reap the benefits of the suggestions and feedback we received.

Want to promote EQL in your area? Know of a gathering you think would further EQL sales and feed us future growth ideas? Let us know, and we'll do our best to be there.

UPDATE: While I was finishing off this newsletter, we received an invite to present in Surrey, BC, Canada, to school district representatives about OnWeb, and to students at Guildford Park Secondary School about the challenges and rewards of entrepreneurship. The tentative date is set for between January 4 and 6.

The EQL Blog and Documentation

In order to consolidate the many news briefs and updates we create about EQL, we've decided to start a new EQL Blog, available at http://eqldata.com/blog. We also have an RSS feed for your syndication needs:
http://eqldata.com/blog/rss. The month of November centered a lot around documentation, and so we produced product overviews and pamphlets galore. More work is in the pipeline for publication, but you can see some technical documents highlighting the way OnWeb really works at http://eqldata.com/kb/1070/onweb-technology-overview. If you've been wondering how we designed a system packed so full of incredible that your Access databases materialize in your browser with no effort at all: this is where we answer such questions.

New Pricing: Reducing Variable Costs

One thing we haven't gotten around to announcing well is our new pricing structure. Based on your feedback, particularly regarding your concerns that OnWeb costs could spiral out of control if you have a sudden increase in your number of users, we've decided that an easier way to conceptualize and bill for OnWeb costs is to limit the number of simultaenous connections to your applications, and give unlimited usage time to those connected. The modified pricing structure is:

$30/month for only 1 logon at a time.
$120/month for up to 5 concurrent users.
$200/month for up to 10 concurrent users.

We will cap your OnWeb database at your pre-paid number of simultaneous sessions and ensure that you pay a fixed rate every month - no overcharge risk! We want to know what you think of the new pricing, so please get in touch, and for all our existing customers: if your current payment plan suit your needs, you can continue with it, or alternatively, let us know if you'd like to change to one of the new billing options.

EQL Appliance Part Deux - Pricing & Development Models

Now that we've started promoting and offering the EQL Appliance, which lets you host an OnWeb server and data in your own physical installation, we've also started promoting its pricing. In order to offer our customers the most possible value with the hardware, we've put together some beefy servers, capable of running up to 80 simultaneous OnWeb sessions and over a hundred Access databases. We've also put together some hardware for internal use rather than OnWeb resale, and priced that accordingly. The suggested prices are:

Enterprise-level rackmount server: $11000
Small business application server: $3350
Virtual appliance (capabilities restricted by your hardware): $2000

Please contact us if you're interested in more information or for specifications.

... Furthermore, for those interested in OnWeb application resale, but with a tighter starting budget: we now offer development appliances!

Physically identical to the servers above, these appliances are nearly full-featured (lacking a few details, such as SSL support), and marked as not for resale, but allow for affordable development and testing of OnWeb solutions.

Small business development variant: $1200
Virtual development version (limited to 3 GB of memory): $500

If you've considered developing your own OnWeb hub, now is your chance to give it a shot for a low price. Of course, development versions are upgradable to full resale versions automatically, without complicated shipping or RMA schemes.

More Features for Your Buck

In our ongoing quest to better our product, we even snuck some features in under the radar while we were busy promoting EQL.

The battle to fully support Access 2007 got a large boost with a lot of newer form controls properly rendering in the OnWeb system.

Those of you with hidden tables in your applications have also found that they no longer appear (if you use Access OnWeb plugin versions 1.9.6f5p or later, available as always from your initial download link) in your WebView.

As for things which do show up in WebView, we've added a new option to let you beta-test some of our exciting new features. These features don't cause any data loss or corruption, but maybe aren't as polished as we envisioned them out to be, or their interfaces might be changed before we roll them out publically. You can try them yourself by changing the URL you use to access WebView.

If you currently use: http://eqldata.com/db// You can view beta features at: http://eqldata.com/db//?beta=1

Current beta projects:

For Windows users: if you use plugin versions 1.9.6f4p or later, try the exciting "Run in external client" link in the EQL Access OnWeb section. We've been developing our very own browser-free native client for remote Access manipulation: this will eventually be fully integrated into the plugin, but for now, still requires some website interaction. If you try it, let us know how you like it! NOTE: This viewer does not support printing yet, but will definitely do so before a full release.
For everyone: we finally implemented time zone support for your database Date/Times! While we regrettably can't change past inserted Date/Times, if you modify your OnWeb Timezone (by selecting the appropriate zone from the drop-down menu), any future auto-created dates (as created by ie. the Now() builtin function) will match the selected zone.

... and we plan to keep the goodies coming. We're glad that you're enjoying OnWeb, and providing a lot of great suggestions and feedback! We welcome more of your comments at any time - you can simply reply to this email to get in touch with us.

Thanks for using EQL Data!

Regards, and happy holidays from Toronto, ON, Canada,

Luke Kosewski
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

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EQL OnWeb 1.9.6g2p Released

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:43:00 GMT

In order to keep everyone better notified of changes we're making, we're going to start posting some of our changelogs for external OnWeb features here, so that you can more easily take advantage of the new features we're putting into OnWeb to serve Microsoft Access databases online and turn them into full-featured web applications.

EQL OnWeb client/server version 1.9.6g2p is a patch release which features the following tweaks:

Better handling of table data fields with embedded newlines during synchronization and when merging data modified via OnWeb.
Handling of labels whose "Hyperlink Address" property is an email, of the form 'mailto:user@domain.com'. Clicking on these labels in OnWeb now brings up the system's default emailer to handle the mailto.
The first OnWeb session after a Synchronize operation from the client will no longer erroneously claim that data changed if it did not.
(Internet Explorer 6/7/8) changed layout of OnWeb administration page so that OnWeb revision history doesn't run off the right-hand-side of the page.
Empty database revisions no longer generated when multiple parallel OnWeb sessions are closed, and both did not change existing data.

We encourage all subscription-based OnWeb users to upgrade to plugin version 1.9.6g2p via the URLs you received in your download confirmation email. If you've deleted or lost the email, please don't hesitate to contact us to get your link emailed to you.

OnWeb appliance users: this upgrade is available via WebConfig. If you have enabled automatic updates, it will self-update within the next 24 hours.

EQL Data mid-October update; a listing of goodies added in the last few weeks

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Dear customers and friends of EQL Data,

It's been a little while since we've posted up any informational bulletins, so I'm taking the time to email you a bit of "what's what." As some of you may have noticed, our server has been rebooted a few times late at night recently - this is because we've been working behind the scenes to mold our software into a slick machine.

October has been pretty heavy on the changes so far, and particularly if you use Geosync and you've installed the newest plugin from the Download link on http://eqldata.com (it should show up in your Control Panel's "Add/Remove Programs" listing as "EQL Access Plugin v1.9.6ap"), you can see the following:

greatly improved support for synchronizing objects with special characters (slashes, question marks, etc.) in their names. Some of you had some trouble with this, and this is mostly resolved, though we're putting the finishing touches on a few more quirks.
IP address logging for every change made via OnWeb or Geosync.
Web links embedded in your OnWeb applications opening up in a new window of your browser, rather than within the OnWeb Flash app itself.
no more strange errors accessing your database after the end of an OnWeb session or a successful Geosync.
better mouse focus using OnWeb in Internet Explorer; you shouldn't need so much clicking inside the Flash applet to retain keyboard focus now.
gradual disappearance of the mysterious "Print Server has died" messages in OnWeb, which turned out to be a logging error and not, in fact, anything wrong with the print servers.
speedup in Geosync synchronizing times.
speedup in OnWeb master database regeneration times.
more databases output correctly (without our intervention) when Geosyncing them to the OnWeb servers for the first time. Notably, databases with custom command bars now show up, and we've fixed up a lot of glitches people had with Queries and Forms in Access 2003 or
Thanks for your bug reports!
fewer glitches when using "Web View" to examine your version history and table structures known to the EQL servers, also more descriptive warnings if something unexpected happened and the software was confused.
credit card billing.

I hope that the above encourages all of our Geosync users to upgrade to our newest plugin if you're having any trouble.

Beyond this, we still have many of your suggestions to work on, and we're doing what we can to implement them quickly, without compromising the software or causing any regressions. Please keep your ideas and reports of any bugs you find coming, though! If we get ideas or find bugs which are easy to implement/fix or immediately useful to everyone, we can get started right away!

A quick note, also: eqldata.com will be getting a facelift soon, and we'd like to collect some customer testimonials from those of you who use Geosync or OnWeb on a regular basis to put up on the new site. I hope none of you will mind my approaching you in the next week or so with such a request.

Lastly, I wanted to thank you all for using EQL and, for helping us make it better - all your feedback counts.

You can look forward to more goodies in the future,

Luke @ EQL

EQL Data November Newsletter

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

If you're getting this, it's because you or someone else has signed you up for our newsletter. We send this out about once a month. If you don't want to receive it anymore, please just reply and let us know, and we'll take you off the list right away.

In this Episode

Testimonial of the Month
Windows 7 Support
EQL Appliance and MS SQL
Fancy New Demo Video
Other New Features and Fixes

Testimonial of the Month

First of all, we've been collecting testimonials from some of you over the last little while based on your (hopefully positive) experiences with our product. Here's one of our favourites so far, from Dennis at Healthcare DR Solutions:

The Microsoft Access hosting services that your company offers have been a miracle for my business. I was at the end of a lengthy Microsoft Access 2003 database development project for one of my clients, when I placed a follow-up phone call to my clients Internet Service Provider. The Internet Service Provider previously guaranteed my client that they could host a Microsoft Access 2003 database and the users did not need to have the Microsoft Access software loaded to access the database, the users would just need a web browser. At the end of that follow-up phone call I was scrambling because the Internet Service Provider said that they no longer offer that hosting service and my client wanted to put their new database into production in 1 month. ... Finally I was able to find this great company, EQL Data that was totally dedicated to not only hosting a Microsoft Access database but having the expertise on staff to help with all of the details that are usually overlooked with a hosting solution and stringent timelines. I cannot express my thanks enough to your company and employees who have come up with a cost-effective hosting solution to keep the Microsoft Access database developers in business. Thanks to your company I still have a happy client. I look forward to doing future business with your company.

A "miracle for my business?" We like the sound of that!

Windows 7 Support

In other news, we've celebrated the release of Windows 7 by... doing nothing. Our software already worked with Windows 7, as it turned out. So we updated our web site to reflect that Windows 7 is now an officially supported platform. If you've been waiting, now's the time to try it out!

EQL Appliance and MS SQL

You asked, and we've been listening! Some of you who work in bigger companies have two big problems: first, you can't let your data off site, and second, you have a lot of Access apps that you use mainly for reporting against Microsoft SQL databases. But you still want to run your Access databases in a web browser for a variety of scalability reasons. What to do?

Introducing the EQL Appliance. Available as either physical hardware or as a VMware or VirtualBox "virtual appliance," it runs the EQL OnWeb server so we don't have to. Er, I mean, you can host the server on your private network, so all your data never has to leave your site, and you don't have to worry about firewall settings or proxy servers. If you also need MS SQL, your appliance can connect directly to it. We're almost ready to put the first few EQL Appliances in beta. Let us know if you want to give it a try!

Fancy New Demo Video

As part of our ongoing web site design, we've posted a new video that gives you the basic idea of how EQL works in about 60 seconds. If you're reading this, of course, you probably already know how EQL works... but maybe your friends don't. So you can show them. Or your co-workers. Or your customers. We're thinking of doing more videos, so please let us know what you think! You can find it on our home page at http://eqldata.com.

Other New Features and Fixes

This has been a month of fine tuning for the EQL Data services. As you probably know, fine tuning can take just as long as doing development in the first place... but it's still very important. Here are some changes you'll see in OnWeb if you grab the latest plugin (v1.9.6dp):

Some significant speedups when syncing databases with large amounts of data.
Better support for custom toolbars and menus.
Support for mscomct2.ocx (including the Microsoft Calendar Picker control)
The triumphant return of calc.exe! You never know when your users will need a calculator. (You can have your app launch calc.exe by running it from a button's macro.)
Ability to "open" .xls and .doc files. You already know that when you "Print" from an OnWeb application, it actually sends you a PDF file to open or print in your web browser. Well now it works for spreadsheets and documents too! Where your app would normally generate and then open an .xls file, it now generates the file and sends it to your web browser, where you can download and open it in a local copy of Excel.

We hope you're happy with our progress and we're proud to have so many of you enjoying our services! Please stay in touch. You can email us by simply replying to this message.

Thanks for using EQL Data!

Avery
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

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EQL Data January Newsletter

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:07:00 GMT

Hello everyone,

In this edition of the newsletter:

EQL Growth and Server Upgrades
Future Presentations
New Features and Projects

EQL Growth and Server Upgrades:

After the presentations and publicity work we did in December, there was an understandable surge of interest in EQL Access OnWeb over Christmas and throughout January. Then there was an explosion of interest. Then we needed to greatly expand our server farm in North America! Thanks, everyone, for a night of caffeine-induced upgrades and scalability development. Thanks also to Slicehost, our server farm maintainers, for a total downtime of only 9 minutes during the upgrade period. How amazing is that? If you need to host a site online, and need a site providing you with full customization and control options for a reasonable price, we've been super pleased with them, and you'd do yourself a favour to check them out.

The upgrades we performed should enable us to service incoming demand throughout January, and you should experience even more responsiveness with your OnWeb sessions! For those who referred others to us - thank you for your confidence and references; through your work, Microsoft Access is becoming a slightly more prominent platform for web application development all the time. Because of your efforts, we're looking into formalizing a 'partner program' by which people like you, who promote and help resell EQL's products, can reap the benefits of your time. If you have ideas on the formal implementation of such a program, or would be interested in participating, we're always listening at info@eqldata.com.

Future Presentations

After a month of presentations in December and early January, we decided that we really enjoyed going out, spreading the word about EQL, putting Microsoft Access on the web, and the satisfaction of discussing and promoting entrepreneurship as a profitable possibility for young students.

We already have a tentative promotional presentation scheduled for sometime in February at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and if you would like to see the EQL team present in your area, let us know! Though geographical distances, costs and timelines might prevent us from making an appearance, we'll do our best to reach a mutually profitable arrangement.

New Features and Projects

The new surge of interest and customers we've seen has exposed the need for development in two key areas: scalability and ease-of-setup. Most of January was spent getting new customers up and running, and while there were a few integration issues which required careful coordination, most of the questions we fielded were ones to which we already had answers, but which weren't posted to our knowledgebase or news page, weren't present on the OnWeb administration page, or could have been supported better by the OnWeb plugin.

This means that for the near future, there will be a trickle of new features, while we work to improve the user-friendliness of OnWeb for new customers and beta trial agents, further develop our Access 2007 support, and extend the capabilities of the server software which powers OnWeb, to scale better on our own servers and OnWeb appliances.

Meanwhile, you may have noticed several new visible features as a result of these developments in the last short while:

OnWeb supports many more fonts for your databases; notably, we now support Callibri, the default Access 2007 font. For a complete list of supported fonts, see our KB article here.
The OnWeb administrative interface allows you to change the resolution of your OnWeb sessions; this feature was previously available only as a beta component.
Alternate timezone support has been merged into production OnWeb servers from beta, and is available from the OnWeb administration screen.
URL links in labels present in your Access databases now open in a new browser window/tab automatically, rather than showing up as clickable links above your active OnWeb session.
Huge speedup in the verification and data merging time for Access 2003/2007 databases.
The ability to detect, using VBA, whether your users have logged in to OnWeb in 'Read Only' or 'Read/Write' modes, corresponding to the save-on-close parameter in the OnWeb URL. Now you can pop up messages warning users that their data changes will be disregarded, or alternatively use this feature to generate a 'Guest' URL. Using the following code, a value for x of '0' implies Read Only mode; other values mean Read/Write mode is enabled.
Dim x as String
x = Environ("EQL_SAVE_ON_CLOSE")

... as usual, we plan to keep rolling the goodies out. If you have feature requests or ideas for future OnWeb expansion, and how to better serve the Access community and put Access online, you can always respond to this email or contact us through our website, and we can see if the idea fits our development plans. We're glad that more people are enjoying OnWeb all the time, and we thank you for your continuing support and feedback!

Warm regards from wintery Ontario, Canada,

Luke Kosewski
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

(If you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please just reply to this message and say so. We'll remove you right away.)

EQL Data August Newsletter

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

If you're receiving this, it's because you or someone else entered your email address into our "I'd like more information about the EQL Data beta" box on http://eqldata.com. If this is a mistake, please reply to this message and we'll take you off our mailing list right away.

So what's new with EQL Data?

Well, this is actually the first beta tester mailing we've done - we've been busy working on the product instead of selling things. That means technically, everything is new! But that's not very interesting, so let me tell you a few specific things we've done in the last few months:

We have a new knowledgebase starting at http://eqldata.com/kb/, that answers a bunch of questions about getting started and using EQL.
An all new user's guide for Geosync, thanks to a lot of help from Jim at Cahaba Data. You can find it at http://eqldata.com/kb/1023.
We just launched a great companion to our original Geosync product: EQL Access OnWeb. It really does let you run your entire Access application in a web browser - any browser on any operating system, as long as it supports flash. This is in limited beta right now, but it really works, so please let me know if you want to try it out! It's way cooler than our previous version that could only show basic Tables, Queries, and Charts.
A completely new Geosync plugin with improved performance and reliability. There are lots more performance improvements still to come, but it's much, much, better than the first prototype, and it even runs in the background so you don't have to wait while it finishes. If you haven't tried our plugin in a while, it's well worth trying again.
We revamped our pricing (again) to try to make it work out better for the different use cases people have brought up with us. Let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions about the pricing!

We're a really small company way up here in Canada. We just started in January, and we're not even old enough to have an official company phone number yet. I know, crazy, right? But we've just added a bunch of other new methods of contacting us, which you can find at http://eqldata.com/contact. Most of the methods just lead to me or Luke for now, which I guess is sort of unprofessional, but hey, how often do you get to talk to a Real Live Company Founder? Other than yourself, of course, if you're also a Real Live Company Founder, but then you're just talking to yourself, which is kinda weird. And why be weird? Talk to us instead.

What are you doing with EQL Data? What do you with Access could do, if only someone would add that one missing feature? What amazing database features are missing from your life?

Replying to this message will go straight to me, so please help yourself. I look forward to hearing from you!

Have fun,

Avery
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

EQL OnWeb 1.9.6g3p Released

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:37:00 GMT

The Vancouver Canucks beat Buffalo 3-2 in a poorly-refereed game tonight, Henrik Sedin stays atop the candidates for the Art Ross trophy with 76 points, and Luongo continues making a case for himself as the starting goalie for Canada's Olympic team.

Meanwhile, you get to win too.

EQL OnWeb client/server version 1.9.6g3p ("Lukowich") is a patch release which features the following tweaks:

Better support for some builtin buttons present in Access CommandBars and MenuBars. Databases with these buttons will now properly synchronize and run in your browser using Access OnWeb.
VBA References generated in the correct (priority, rather than lexical) order, which means declarations like "Recordset," which could map to ADO.Recordset or DAO.Recordset depending on the order of declarations now do so correctly.
News articles such as this one will no longer run off the right-hand side of the screen in any browser.

We encourage all subscription-based OnWeb users to upgrade to plugin version 1.9.6g3p via the URLs you received in your download confirmation email. If you've deleted or lost the email, please don't hesitate to contact us to get your link emailed to you.

OnWeb appliance users: this upgrade is available via WebConfig. If you have enabled automatic updates, it will self-update within the next 24 hours.

EQL OnWeb 1.9.7cp Released

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:44:00 GMT

Canada drops a hard-fought hockey battle 3-5 against the U.S.A. - congrats to our American users! We'll see you again in the Olympic playoffs! While they continue to party at Robson Square in Vancouver (congratulations to Kristina Groves of Ottawa, ON for a silver medal performance!), we in Toronto and London, ON have used this Olympic season to work on OnWeb.

To that end, all of you win.

EQL OnWeb client/server version 1.9.7cp ("Syldênia") is a mainline release incorporating a lot of back-end optimizations and changes, and a number of new features.

Fixed "Timeout (client side)" messages in EQL client which required retrying synchronization.
Fixed Access-triggered issue in activating a new database for OnWeb with the EQL client.
Support more queries for EQL API viewing and filtering.
Greatly speed up filtering views of tables and queries using EQL API.
Added support for HTTP(S) authentication for OnWeb sessions and administration pages. See our authentication FAQ for details.
Increased support for synchronizing Access 2007 queries and forms to OnWeb servers.

We encourage all subscription-based OnWeb users to upgrade to plugin version 1.9.7cp via the URLs you received in your download confirmation email. If you've deleted or lost the email, please don't hesitate to contact us to get your link emailed to you.

OnWeb appliance users: this upgrade is available via WebConfig. If you have enabled automatic updates, it will self-update within the next 24 hours.

EQL Data March Newsletter

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:46:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

You or somebody else subscribed your email address to the EQL Data newsletter. We send it about once a month. If you don't want to receive it anymore, please reply and let us know; we'll take you off the list right away.

In this episode:

Testimonial of the Moment
Newer, faster, chunkier syncs
Process isolation and your keyboard focus
Zero-downtime server upgrades
Automatic login screens
97% more fun than that other guy's newsletter

Testimonial of the ~~Month~~Moment

Here's a great quote that just came in a few days ago:

I was thinking about a design for a new multi-user Access project that I have been asked to build for some time. EQL OnWeb gives me the motivation to build it now. The technology is simple, straightforward, and easy to update. The barrier between desktop and web has finally been broken.

-- Brad Durbin, Credit Detailer, LLC

When we started EQL, we figured people would take their existing Access applications and put them on the web. But it turns out that most EQL customers want to do a major overhaul or make something totally new.

Our print-to-pdf reporting feature leads people to imagine new user interfaces. Some people want to add custom login screens. Others take the fancy graphics out of their Access app so that it embeds more seamlessly as a small part of their company's web site - which already has fancy graphics.

We love the fact that EQL gives you new ways to work with Access. That's what we're all about!

Newer, faster, chunkier syncs

One new EQL plugin feature we're especially proud of is called "chunk-based database synchronization." That's a complicated way to say that if you change a small part of your form - for example, moving or resizing an image - and then resync, you don't re-upload the entire form. You only upload the parts of the form that have changed. With big forms, that can take your sync time from several minutes down to several seconds.

Chunking even works if you move an image from one form to another, or from one database to another!

If you want to know the gory details of how chunking works, you can read about it in this blog article.

Process isolation and your keyboard focus

In the last month or so, more and more people have reported a weird problem that screwed up your keyboard focus. You'd be typing away in your OnWeb session, and suddenly your input cursor would disappear - and you'd have to click in the window before you could resume typing.

Some people saw this problem a lot, and some people not at all. We had a lot of trouble replicating it down here at EQL. What we found was your keyboard focus wasn't disappearing, it was being stolen by another instance of Access altogether! The busier our servers got, the more it would happen.

To fix it, we had to do what we call "process isolation." It was a lot more work than it sounds like, and we apologize for the delay in getting it out to you. But the problem should be gone for good.

Zero-downtime server upgrades

Process isolation also brings us another great feature: zero-downtime server upgrades. In other words, we can now upgrade our EQL server software even while your OnWeb sessions are running.

Once upon a time, we used to imagine that most EQL OnWeb users would be in North America like us, and would go to bed at a reasonable hour. So we (or rather, our night owl sysadmins) could just upgrade our servers in the middle of the night, right?

That was true at first, but nowadays there are people using OnWeb 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the middle of the night for us is the middle of the day in Australia or Singapore. There's no good time for downtime.

Easier server upgrades mean we can deploy bugfixes and new features even faster and more frequently than before, and all the servers in our cluster will always be on the latest version. That means your problems get solved faster. Enjoy!

Automatic login screens

A lot of people have asked us how to make sure users can't access their database without logging in. One way is to build your own login form in Access, which gives you total control. But if you want something a little quicker, check out our knowledgebase article about the EqlUsers table. It's a new feature that might save you some time.

And the rest...

Since last month, we've made more little tweaks and improvements to EQL than we can count. (Actually our tracking software counts them for us. There are exactly 127.) All that put together has finally made us confident enough to raise our software version number to 2.0.

All those great improvements are only possible thanks to your feedback. Every day more and more people start using OnWeb for their databases, big and small, and we love to hear how our product works for you. Please feel free to reply to this email or send a message to info@eqldata.com. Or request features (and vote on them!) by visiting http://eql.uservoice.com.

Have fun,

Avery Pennarun
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

(If you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please just reply to this message and say so. We'll remove you right away.)