Devit!

When deploying a .NET web application with Crystal Reports you will need to install the appropriate crystal reports library on the server to use any reports you’ve built.

I recently ran into an issue where Crystal Reports Images (images in a report) would not show up on a new Windows 2003 Server.  After extensive web research with no solution in sight I decided to try to solve the problem on my own.

Note:  If you’re having problems with the images in the header bar (BusinessObjects toolbar) then please see this site below:
- http://www.gutgames.com/post/Crystal-Reports2c-issues2c-and-fixes.aspx
- or simply google “toolbar images for crystal reports not showing up”

To resolve my error I went into the Web Server(IIS) manager and performed the following steps:

1) Clicked on ‘My Website’ where I was using crystal reports
2) Clicked on ‘Handler Mappings’
3) On the right side under ‘Actions’ I selected ‘Add Managed Handler’
4) Request Path: CrystalImageHandler.aspx
5) Type: CrystalDecisions.Web.CrystalImageHandler, CrystalDecisions…….
6) Crystal Reports Image Handler
7) Press OK
Success!

I was able to track down this issue by looking at the URL for non-working images.  All pointed to the following:
http://www.MySite/CrystalImageHandler.aspx?*****useless info******

As you can see, the system is trying to access a handler to read out images specified in the report.

I hope this solution can save you hours of potentially wasted time and frustration.

With the rapid rise of social media over the past year or so, one of the things I’ve struggled with most is how it can benefit small and medium businesses. There are case studies aplenty on the effectiveness of Twitter and other social media campaigns for large corporations. However, what about the small business? Would a social media strategy work for a small business in our local marketplace?

Well, let me tell you a tale of Two Frosties:

Two Frosties - Mint Oreo and Peanut Butter Cup

You have to go back to Friday, September 11 and this tweet fora FollowFriday recommendation from @LocalLondonLife for @WharncliffeDQ. I looked at the twitter feed for @WharncliffeDQ and it looked like an active, interesting feed, so I followed them.

For out-of towners, the Wharncliffe DQ is London Ontario’s first  DQ location, established in 1954. My family and I visit them occassionally throughout the summer, but not much in the fall/winter.

Fast forward a few days. DQ posted their Secret Twitter Treat special for September. Buy one small Frosty, get another small Frosty, free.  Sounded like a good idea – I wondered how effective the campaign would be.

The following weekend my wife and I were thinking about taking our daughter to the Western Fair.  She is 3 and, no doubt, would  have enjoyed it. However, the cost of parking made us question the value of going. We concluded that she would enjoy an afternoon at the park with her parents just as much as the Western Fair.

Before long, I realized we were a short drive from the Wharncliffe DQ decided to see if we could get the September Twitter treat! After running the little ones ragged at the park, we trekked off for some Ice Cream.

I have to admit the poor girl working the counter may have thought I was a bit crazy when I asked for the September Twitter Treat at the serving window, but we soon sorted that out. They even managed to upsell us to a small dipped cone (pictured above) when I found out you could get it coated in sprinkles! (I knew my daughter would love sprinkles!)

The beauty of social media is that this transaction would not have happened if not for the Follow Friday recommendation from @LocalLondonLife. And that recommendation would not have happened if @LocalLondonLife did not find DQ’s twitter content interesting. I would not have been following @LocalLondonLife if I did not think her feed posted  interesting content. The seeds of participation that the staff at the DQ had put into maintaining their twitter feed probably took a while to bear fruit – but here it is, a tangible sale they made by partipating in the medium.

My recommendation for organizations over the past 6 months has been – JUMP IN and participate. You never know when it will result in a sale.

P.S. It helps if you offer sprinkles.

Or “Did I actually just learn a business lesson from David Lee Roth?”

Thanks to Twitter, I recently stumbled across an article on Snopes.com about Van Halen’s infamous “brown M&M clause” in their concert contracts. For decades, the story has circulated about the band’s insistence on having a bowl of M&Ms in the dressing room at every show, with “absolutely no brown ones.” The tale became a cliché – a textbook case of prima donna behaviour, or pointless extravagance.

I was familiar with the story and when I found it featured on Snopes with all the other urban legends, I expected to learn why it was untrue. Surprisingly, not only was the M&M clause real, it had a very specific purpose.

For a band that employed massive, technically complex stage shows, the brown M&M clause gave Van Halen and their management an instant spot-check on the level to which the show’s organizers had followed instructions. A single brown M&M could be a portent of sloppy wiring or other more serious problems with the show’s setup.

When I read this, it struck me as pure genius. Why?

At the time, I was up to my eyeballs in the minutiae of preparing a response to an RFP for a potential client. I was not feeling particularly charitable towards the authors of this RFP. The details, the complexity, the inconsistency! Where was it coming from? Were these convoluted requirements the product of sadism or incompetence?

Refreshed by a good laugh and a with a new favorite story tucked away, I found it a lot easier to dive back in to the writing process and pick out all the Brown M&Ms. Oh, it’s possible that the authors of the RFP were being prima donnas, but it’s more likely they were providing themselves with some easy spot checks.

Besides, who wants to lose a good gig just because of a technicality?

Thanks to City Lights Bookshop for providing me inspiration through distraction with their prolific and varied tweets!

Welcome to our new “Our Traction” blog. Formerly known as “ITSter!”, we have re-branded it to focus more on strategies, ideas and initiatives we think our clients and our community could benefit from.

Over the 13 years that I have been working in web development, I have seen many changes in our industry. When I started, Netscape was all the rage and nobody had heard of IE. I remember the pundits saying that online advertising as a revenue source was dead, and organizations should look to other ways to monetize their online activity. Then came Google. The dramatic increase of open source technology took the concept of Content Management Systems out of the hands of corporations that could afford that technology to smaller organizations and ultimately to individuals.

The latest buzz is Social Media, but this time it feels different.

In some ways it is new, after all Facebook and Twitter have not been around that long. But the “web 2.0″ elements of social media (such as Amazon.com’s crowd-sourcing of book reviews) have been around for over a decade.

The new concept that became known as Web 2.0 was that the web could host two-way conversations rather than simply pushing top-down, editorial style publishing. Social Media is simply an extension of Web 2.0. If you think of Web 2.0 as a set of tools, then Social Media is our culture’s rapid adoption of those tools and how we are apply them to our everyday life.

So where does that lead us? I am now firmly in the camp that the way that we do business online is changing fundamentally – and will continue to change, evolve, and test our creativity. If change is the medium – the ever-pressing evolution of new technology and more importantly the ways in which people interact with this technology – and the Medium itself is the Massage, (yes, it’s Massage, not Message) what does that mean for rtraction?

Simply put, it means we embrace the change, and look forward to the challenges that it presents.

Hopefully this new blog will capture the spirit of the discussions we’ve been having here at rtraction, provide some inspiration and provoke some discussion. Let us know.