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Hello 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 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.

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