Full Sail Partners Blog | Wes Renfroe (2)

Activities provide a greater way to gain visibility into communication efforts across the firm about a client. They provide a detailed view of what is going on with a project/firm/opportunity and are critical for providing team backup and covering your backside.  You are probably aware of three main ways to create activities in Deltek Vision – Manually (slow), Using MODI (faster but limited), and CMO (even faster but costs more $$).  The innovation team here at Full Sail Partners has developed a fourth way, the fastest, easiest, most convenient way to create activities so far:  Just do your timesheet and let the activities be created for you! 

The way it works is quite simple, just enter your hours, as well as, a detailed comment regarding work done for a project on your timesheet and make sure the first character in the comment is a tilde symbol (~).  Save your entry and close your Deltek Vision timesheet.  Overnight all the timesheets will be scanned and those that start with the special character will have activities generated for them.  Additionally the leading character will be changed from the tilde to a carot (^) to signal that an activity has been created for this entry.  Once your Deltek Vision timesheets are closed out and before billing is run all special characters are removed. 

So just by adding one additional character to my timesheet, this: 

Becomes this:

This is a great way for you to “kill two birds with one stone” (well maim them maybe) – Keeping your timesheet up-to-date and relevant (making accounting happy) and providing the CYA and team insight into your progress on the project (making management happy). Want to learn more about this and other Full Sail Partners solutions?

So, you’ve heard about the new Vision Unleashed, Deltek Touch Time and CRM mobile applications and want your smartphone users to be able to utilize these applications to access Vision offsite. Perhaps you like the idea of your Vision users having the ability to work from home or abroad or maybe you think the new Navigator interface would be really helpful for project managers out in the field.  However, you feel opening up Vision access from the web sounds kind of scary and you have questions. Is it safe? Is it expensive to set up? Is it hard to configure? 

Well, let’s take a look!  

Is it safe?

Yes it is!  When properly deployed using Secure HTTP and a strong password policy, accessing your Vision data from anywhere is as safe as accessing your banking information. 

Is it expensive?

Only in the time to set up (generally an hour or two) and the purchase of a security certificate. The certificate is good for several years and costs only a few hundred dollars. 

Is it hard to configure?

For a single server install the process is simple and can be completed with very little downtime or afterhours with proper planning.  Multi-tier installs offer a bit more complexity and should be discussed to ensure all the nuances are covered before beginning.  Full Sail Partners has assisted many firms with the transition. Feel free to reach out to us for support.  

Here are the steps to open Deltek Vision to the internet to allow your firm access to new features like Deltek Touch.

1. Configure a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) that you will use to reach Vision from offsite. ‘Vision.yourcompanyname.com’ is a common format.
2. Purchase and install a SSL security certificate for your new FQDN on your Vision server.
3. Modify your firewall rules to allow port 443 (secure http) traffic to be forwarded to your Vision server. Note: This is a good time to try visiting your Vision login page to see if everything is on the right track, in Internet Explorer. Visit HTTPS://Vision.yourcompanyname.com and make sure it loads.
4. Verify the FQDN is also reachable internally, DNS may need tweaking.
5. In Reporting Services Configuration Manager, under the Web Service URL tab, add the SSL identities now available since applying the new security certificate.
6. In the Vision Weblink, on the reporting tab, change the Server URL to your new FQDN/reportserver. For example: https://vision.yourcompanyname.com/reportserver. Note: Be sure to click the Test button to verify you have it right!
7. Voila! You should now be able to log in from both onsite and offsite and successfully run reports.  Once verified, you can notify all of your users to use the new link for their Vision needs. 

iAccess, Deltek Touch, and Vision Unleashed can now be deployed.  Enjoy safely and securely accessing Vision, anywhere, anytime! Let us know your experience.

Hurricane Sandy spreads her reach to 13 states wide and the evaluation of the damage and impact begin to be accessed. After the superstorm subsides, the ability to communicate to family, co-workers, and clients becomes vital. This is then followed by returning to a sense of normalcy. Events like this provide a new perspective that we sometimes overlook, the ability to access our data. You don't have to wait until you lose your data or don't have a quick restore to address this issue.

For nearly five years, Full Sail Partners has been responsible for our hosted Deltek Vision clients a guarantee of 99.5%.  To meet that uptime guarantee, a way to monitor, maintain, and protect our clients was mission critical.  Three services are now available to all Deltek Vision clients who maintain their own on-site server with our best of breed tools and techniques.

Bulletproof

On a monthly basis Full Sail Partners will conduct an eyes-on, comprehensive inspection based on a checklist of over 30 parameters, deploy the latest Full Sail Partners scripts and tricks to maximize uptime, install the latest hotfixes, and perform a soup-to-nuts database restore to test your backup plan to ensure your backups are something you can count on.  We’ll also set up that restored database as a hidden test database so you have the ability to try/test/play without disturbing your production data.

Overwatch

Chances are good there’s more information in your database today than yesterday, and the database isn’t getting smaller or using less resources.  Most companies only discover these conditions when it is too late and Vision is already ‘down’.  That would be unacceptable for our hosting clients, so we developed ‘Overwatch’, a real time monitoring system tailored to all of the Vision critical metrics and services.  Overwatch allows us (and now you too!) to check the health of your Vision servers via a webpage and see up to date information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  Additionally, even when you’re not looking, Overwatch is.  Warning and escalating emails will be sent to your staff whenever something like memory usage thresholds are reached.  This allows IT to be aware of issues in time to react before they become showstoppers.

Catastrophe Protection

Even though Full Sail Partners utilizes multiple hosting locations and redundancy, we wanted the additional protection of an independent, standalone backup solution for our client’s database archives, logos, and custom work.  We felt so strongly about this strategy that we decided to make our solution available to our on-site clients.  If there is absolutely nothing else you do to protect your Vision data, a dependable, tested, offsite backup solution is critical.  In addition to providing anytime access to your encrypted database backups, we also include 30 days of free hosting and will have your database online and available within 24 hours of your loss of server casualty.

To learn more about implementing these solutions in your disaster prevention, protection, and recover plans view our Comprehensive IT Services to Plan, Protect, and Prevent.

It's not a matter of if, but when a failure will happen! During a recovery effort, your firm's need to recover quickly is vital to your firm's existence. The lack of access to data can impair production. The longer the delay the more it can cost your firm and even result in failure of your company.

It recent article by Gartner, they discussed how IT failure can bring down a company and the writer, Richard Hunt, made some great points. "The interesting thing isn’t that some companies have failed when their IT failed; the interesting thing is that the risks are almost certainly increasing. Plenty of executives don’t yet understand that while IT spend only represents 5% or less (on average) of enterprise revenues, the impact of IT on revenues is far higher than that. To put it another way, many executives don’t yet realize that their businesses don’t run much, if at all, without IT, and when IT is misused or fails, the impacts can be very large indeed."

So, do you have a backup & recovery solution?  How quick is your data recovery? Would you lose any of your data if:

• Your computer was stolen?
• You have an IT system failure?
• You have a hardware failure?
• There was a fire?
• There was a natural disaster?
• Your backup solution didn't work?

Are you confident that you'd be back up in less than a day if any of the above items occurred? Could you be up in less than an hour? Next to hardware and software malfunctions, human error is one of the biggest reason for data loss. Doing a back-up is only half of the equation. Verification is the most important part of data back-up. Statistics show that 77% of tape backups fail.

Below are data recovery statistics that demonstrate the likely hood of failure and the impact to businesses when they are unable to recover. For firms that want to be proactive and eliminate preventable failures and learn how to recover quickly when a failure does occur, view our webinar.

 Infograph presented by Dell

In today's world it's important to make sure your resources are effectively allocated and outsourced expenses are doing all they can to keep you ahead of the pack. No matter whether your IT support is outsourced, dedicated, or part-time, there are expectations your firm should have to ensure your Deltek database is properly managed. We invite you to take the IT challenge to see how you can improve. 

IT Challenge 1:

IT Challenge 2:

IT Challenge 3:

Did You Pass the IT Challenge?

Full Sail Partners can assist you with any of these concerns to ensure your IT staff is providing your data the security your firm needs. In addition to these services, our hosting division can offload the expense of servers, peripheral software, redundant back-ups and allocation of resources to address your Vision IT needs. Our hosting professionals only provide hosting services for Deltek Vision and coordinate with Deltek support on known issues. This specialized expertise comes with years of hands-on experience and provides your organization a high level of confidence that your data is secure. Outsourcing your IT Management of Vision with Full Sail Partners allows your firm to focus on your core business, while we ensure your IT landscape is fully prepared.

To find out more about how Full Sail Partners' application hosting can ease your worries and save your firm money, visit our website. To speak to someone about these services, contact Scott Seal at sseal@fullsailpartners.com or 888.552.5535 x118. We look forward to relieving your IT worries and helping your firm Reach Full Sail!