What's New in MainBoss 3.0, Update 1

The following lists differences between MainBoss Advanced 3.0 and Update 1.

  1. Performance has been speeded up in various ways. The program may take a little longer to start, but should run faster after that.
  2. When printing a work order (with Work Orders | Print), the Advanced section has three new checkboxes:
    • Suppress Costs: Prevents labor and material costs from being printed on the work order.
    • Suppress Labor Duration Estimate: Prevents work time estimates from being printed on the work order.
    • Include Unit Specifications and Attachments: Prints any specifications associated with the unit being serviced. Also displays names of attached files (though not their contents).
  3. When you click Close Work Order in a Work Orders table viewer, the window that appears will let you the work order's current values for Work Start Date, Work End Date, Downtime, and several other fields before the work order is closed.

    When you click Close Work Order in a work order editor, the resulting window won't show these fields. Instead, you should use the window's Closing section to record closing information and you should do so before you click Close Work Order.
  4. In reports related to work orders, you can now filter by project and closing code.
  5. Printed work orders now include the requestor's phone number.
  6. The unit cost of items can now be displayed to four decimal places in reports.
  7. In the interest of clarity, the old Reset Maintenance Timing Basis button (in the Unit Maintenance Plan viewer and elsewhere) has been renamed Select Scheduling Basis. The button is now also available when setting up a unit maintenance plan record, which should make the set-up process easier (and also remind users that the basis must be set in order to start a maintenance schedule on the unit).
  8. The term Closing Code is now used consistently throughout the software. (In earlier versions, it was sometimes Close Code.)
  9. The process of importing databases from MainBoss Basic 2.9 has been improved:
    • The previous version did not preserve employee names when importing personnel records.
    For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you use Update 1 to import a MainBoss Basic database, rather than the original MainBoss Advanced 3.0.
  10. Several bugs have been fixed, including ones related to demands with zero cost.
    • Work order demands can now have a zero quantity. (In the previous release, that would have caused an error.)
    • @Requests no longer includes the entire html-email body in the request's description. It only includes the message text.
    • In the Value section of a Unit record, there was a bug that caused problems if you tried to set Purchase Date to the year 2000. This has been fixed.
    • In some operations on large database, previous versions sometimes got an error "Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding." This bug has been fixed.
    • In preceding versions, a bug sometimes prevented the display of inside/outside resources in a work order until you closed the editor window and reopened it. This has been fixed.

Release Notes

Contrary to the documentation, this version of MainBoss does not support the e-mail protocols POP3S or IMAP4S in connection with the @Requests module. We are currently working on an update that does support these protocols.

However, you can still obtain secure e-mail connections through POP3 and IMAP4 if your e-mail software supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections. For example, recent versions of the Microsoft Exchange server do support TLS with POP3 and IMAP4.

To get TLS protection, checkmark the box Attempt Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection in the Configure MainBoss @Requests Service window. This option tells MainBoss to attempt secure (encrypted) communications using TLS. Whenever MainBoss attempts a POP3 or IMAP4S connection with your e-mail server, it checks to see if the server is configured for TLS. If so, MainBoss connects using TLS and proceeds with secure communications.

Note that a TLS connection with POP3 still uses the normal port 110 and IMAP4 uses port 143.

Whats new in the preceding release MainBoss 3.0

Whats new in the following release MainBoss 3.1

The current release is MainBoss 4.2 Update 4