Tip of the Month for December 2011
New Changes to the General Message Maintenance
One change that had a lot of interest and was added in Answers 4.2 was related to the way the General Message process worked. You can find the General Message Maintenance process under System Management -> Answers Printer Menu -> General Message Maintenance. Previously, you were limited to one message (consisting of four lines of 80 characters) that would display only on the forms selected in the Maintenance program. The General Message will display at the bottom of the detail section of the forms.
In Answers 4.2, this has been expanded to allow more flexibility to this process. You now have the ability to add a general message to forms in four different categories: General, Customer, Vendor, and Form Specific.
General: The General category will allow you to assign a message to any or all forms. This works like it would in previous versions of Answers, where you can select the form types you want and then hit Save to save the message. This is the lowest level of categories and can be overridden by Customer, Vendor, or Form Specific messages.
Customer: The Customer category allows you to put a message only on customer viewable forms (Statements, Pick Tickets, Order Acknowledgements, etc). This can be overridden by a Form Specific Message.
Vendor: The Vendor category allows you to put a message only on vendor viewable forms (Purchase Orders, RFQ's, Vendor Return Pick Tickets). This can be overridden by a Form Specific Message.
Form Specific: The Form Specific category allows you to put a message on any and all forms. You can select each individual form and put an different message on each! As stated above, this overrides all other categories.
Another new feature in Answers 4.2 is a "Clear" Button that will "Wipe the Slate Clean" and allow you to start over with your message and form selections in a certain category. Also, each category has an effective date range that controls how long you want the message to be shown.