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After a productive week of interaction with an enthusiastic customer base at this year's User Group Association conference in Florida, the R&D team was right back to work on the next wave of topics to be included in the next set of product releases. Over the next several months we will be releasing a series of PTFs so that we can satisfy the most pressing issues, and culminate those with a 4.1 release due out in March of 2009.
Our first goal was to finish up a series of improvements to the benefits processing area, mostly in the benefits wizard, in time for this year's open enrollment period. Additional benefits modifications include the ability to now define plans as not visible during Open Enrollment, while still being able to manage them in Current Enrollment. These changes were packaged in a PTF that was released in the last week of October.
The next goal was to help the requirements of some specific customers who were better served by the "pay-by-position" concept that was utilized in the 2.x versions. This is a configurable option that would allow position (and job) based entry of pay rates and labor information into the system. This information is then considered by a payroll pre-processing routine when generating time cards. Again, this is a configurable option to the system and not likely to be used by the bulk of the customer base, and this will come out pre 4.1 to meet specific customer commitments.
Messages, such as errors and warnings, are being removed as hard-code from the payroll processing executables, and will now be stored in database tables. This allows them to be modified and customized as needed. This idea of tablizing output messages is part of a bigger package that we are calling the "translation project". The goal is to pull out as much hard-coded text in the system as we can, and store this information in the database. This then allows the text to be customized, either to customer-specific language or to actual foreign language translations.
Security issues are also being addressed in the next few months. The much requested addition of location security is being added to the system, and with it we will be giving the customers the ability to have a more locally tailored security model. For example, a site can give priority to organizations and locations for their security access, while ignoring company-based security information.
A few more issues, such as web-page based performance improvements, will be part of 4.1. General ledger updates, specifically expanding the charge number, are currently being worked on. Specifications for international currency and address information are being written for consideration, and of course as many of the brainstorming items that we can address in the given timeframe will be included as well. All in all, the R&D department has a lot on its plate, but as always we will be doing our utmost to make Vista HRMS the best product that we can.
Bill Davies
Director of Product Technology
PDS
.....and of course the rest of the PDS family!
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