Can’t wait to get on the road again?

Well, the time is at hand. If you haven’t already been to one of the art industry exhibitions yet this year, chances are good that you will be going to one soon. And, whether you’ll be exhibiting at the shows or just visiting, you probably have plans to take your digital companion with you. That would be your notebook computer – not your MP3 player.

Who would have believed, just a few years ago, that one would need to be connected to email every day to survive. It’s getting so prevalent now that some of you are using your palm pilots, or even your mobile phones to get your email.

That’s great, but how about all the other information that you get out of your computer on a daily basis. Like your inventory lists, customer names, sales results…

Here’s a thought. Suppose you’re exhibiting at a show. Instead of taking every physical piece from your gallery or studio to the show with you (like you would anyway…Duh) wouldn’t it be nice to take a notebook computer with digital images of every piece? Or, what if you had a computer that you could use to process sales with and then, when you returned after the show, all your bookkeeping would already be done!

Whether you use it for email, digital images, checking your inventory, or actually selling products from your show stand, your notebook computer can be really useful during one of these road trips.

The issue you will face, however, is how to make sure the data you update or change while you are away from the gallery gets onto your main computer when you return.

There are four ways to make this happen. First, you can simply use the data in only one place at a time. Second, you can use a merge program to merge the data from your notebook with the data from your main computer. Third, you can use a product like pcAnywhere to connect to your main computer while working remotely. Finally, you can dial in, or use the Internet, to access your data while on the road and update information on a central database server.

Option 1 - A place for everything and everything in its place.

Do you ever go back through your inbox to find email that was sent to you days, weeks, or even months ago? Well, when you go on the road and want to get your email, it’s very nice to copy your email files from your main computer to your portable computer before you go. By doing this, you can look at past emails just like when you were back in the gallery. And, when you do get back to the gallery, you will have your email history all in one file, including the messages you send and receive while away.

This is possible because, while you are on the road, you know that you won’t be checking your personal email from the gallery (you have your own private account, right?) So you will only be using the data in one place at a time. That is, you will use your email either on the road, or at the gallery, but not both at the same time. You can copy your email files to whichever computer you will be using. So long as you always know where you have the active data, you don’t have to worry about merging data.

The same thing can work with your inventory files so long as you will be closing the gallery while you are away (or at least nobody will be using the files while you are away.)

Option 2 – We have to stop meeting like this.

What happens if you DO have to add information in two places at the same time? For example, suppose your staff in your gallery are busy selling to your normal clientele while you are out on the road selling to the show visitors. When you return, you will have sales recorded in two different databases. You will want to have the portable computer tell the main computer which items were sold, and to whom. This will let you print out a report for your accountant that shows ALL of your sales.

In order for this to take place, you need to have a management program that has a merge feature built into it. This is NOT an easy thing to do for a programming company. You see, when you add a new piece of inventory in one location, it will probably be given an inventory number. When you merge that new piece into another database, you probably want that piece to have the same number. But what if the database you are merging into already has a different piece with that number? The same thing can happen with client names and sales. Suppose the gallery director makes a sale 98537 in the gallery and you make a sale number 98537 at the show.

The merge program will take care of all the issues it can and then print a log of the areas that it can not resolve automatically.

In general, having a program that can merge is a pretty slick, and inexpensive solution. The only real down side is that you can conceivably sell the same piece from two or more locations – each one thinking that the piece is available for sale. This is one of the areas that the system can NOT resolve automatically. In effect you have two clients that both expect to receive the same piece. That might be OK for a Serigraph if you didn’t promise a particular edition number, but it is not Ok for an original Oil.

Option 3 – Remote Control – the next best thing to being there.

There are several products out on the market that allow you to connect two computers together so that you can use one computer to control another. We do this all the time when we help our customers. Suppose a customer wants help installing a new receipt printer. We could walk them through the process over the phone. But if they have pcAnywhere, or a similar product, we can dial into their computer and see their screen, move their mouse, and type on the keyboard as if we were standing there.

Where this helps you is that you can use the same technology on the road to sit in your hotel room and dial into your office computer. Then, you can use that computer as if you were physically at the office checking your inventory or making a sale. You don’t have to merge the data later because you are doing the work on the main computer to begin with. You just happen to be sitting 1000 miles away while you are doing it. It’s a wonderful thing! But is does have a couple of drawbacks.

For one, you will need to have two computers; One to take with you, and one for you to access. That’s probably not a big deal. Next, you will need a way to access the office computer. The most common way is by dial up modem. If this is long distance, you don’t want to be connected for hours while you enter a lot of data – especially if you are paying hotel room long distance rates. Also, if your computer in the office is using the phone line to talk to you, it probably can’t use the same phone line to dial up the Internet to check your email.

Option 4 – How the big boys do it.

Have you ever gone into a department store to pick something up and found that the store was out of the product you wanted? Then, some nice sales person got on the computer and let you know that the store across town had the piece in stock?

What’s happening here is that all the stores are using a central database and logging their inventory and sales information into one big computer. Stores like Sears might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up a system like this.

The good news is that there is a gallery management system out there that will let you do the same thing for a couple of thousand dollars. You can set up a server in your gallery and access it while you are on the road. If you have multiple gallery locations, they can all access the same information in real time. So when one gallery has a piece, or sells a piece, the other locations, and the business office, and the sales people out on the road, all know that the piece is available or not.

In a setting like this, you don’t have to merge the information because all the data entry and point of sale work is done on the central database in real time. You don’t need a dedicated computer in the gallery either, because you can access the data over the Internet via a secure “virtual private network” or VPN.

See my article on servers from the last AWN issue for more information.

So, each of these options is valid. And each one could be the subject of a whole article in its own right. The good news in this case is that you should be able to contact your software provider and ask them to help you decide what you need as far as merging data.

One last thing. When you take your notebook computer out on the road, be sure to set up your passwords. If the computer gets lost or stolen, you don’t want whoever gets it to have access to all of your sensitive company information. This is so important that I plan to devote my next article just to the issue of passwords.

See you at the Shows !!