Release v08.05
Dateline: Roseville - June 2008

This release is our biggest ever! Amazingly, there are 120 CRs for this release: one heck of a busy month.

As Bob Towery has been discussing in his series of news articles on performance enhancement, Escape Technology is dedicated to improving performance. So, we are happy to report that dozen of the CRs were related to improved performance.

Performance

This release includes the UI enhancements that Bob discussed. Users should realize a major improvement in the closing of forms. But that's not all (in fact that was only one of the dozen CRs).

We speeded up report processing. We minimized record locking. We revisited activities, looking for revisions to the database (indexing) and stored procedures (streamlining). Essentially, where ever we were in the software, we searched for ways to improve the processing time and efficiency of Escape Online 5.

We have marked the CRs in the v1.08.05 Release Notes that include performance enhancements.

We also paid close attention to known issues and dedicated ourselves to testing the software before it was released. Ninety percent of CRs completed testing. This is higher than any Escape Online 5, Escape Online 4 or Escape Classic release!!! This is fantastic considering the number of CRs.

New Features for Ongoing Implementations

Twenty percent of the changes for this release were for new and ongoing implementations. Shasta, Sacramento City, Placer County, Ventura County, Santa Maria will all be testing their new POs, checks, interfaces and custom reports.

New Features and Fixes For Everyone

The most comprehensive changes were made to year end processing and budget on the Finance side, and permissions to employee notes, new search criteria and payroll calculations on the HR/Payroll side.

And, as users have come to expect, we updated and introduced quite a few reports: Eight for finance and eleven for HR/Payroll, including the new County Object Summary new options for Vendor Detail, and several new HR/Payroll reports: Leave Transaction snapshot, Addon Pay Rates and major updates to the Labor Distribution Detail.

In total, there were 33 changes to finance, 55 to HR/Payroll and eight to the system/infrastructure.

Please Join Us

We invite you to join us for a release review on Thursday, June 12th at 9am to get a comprehensive look at v08.05. Contact Escape Customer Care to get your invitation!

Comments? Send us an email and let us know what you think.