There's been a lot in the news lately about the WannaCry / WannaCrypt ransomware attack.  This particular piece of malicious software gained notoriety by, among other things, bringing down large portions of the United Kingdom's healthcare system.  What can you do to try to protect yourself from this sort of attack?

The most obvious and important thing that you can do is make regular backups of your data and get it off of your local computer.  This includes backups of your important documents, but also your point of sale database. In the current software, you can make this in the launcher under system administration -> backup database.  Using a cloud service or a flash drive should help.

The other big thing to do is to make certain you're applying windows updates regularly.  The WannaCry attack, for example, exploits a vulnerability that Microsoft patched out back in March.  Customers frequently set their computers not to automatically update, to avoid inconvenient restarts, but updates should still regularly be done.

The new customer search tools will allow for both quicker searching for your customers and more powerful marketing tools.  In the existing software, you can do reports that will allow you to export all email addresses for customers, or print a mailing label for a single customer or for all customers.

The new software will go several steps beyond that, allowing you to copy all email addresses or print labels based off of a search, while simultaneously  greatly increasing your options for searching.  Want to send a mailing to all customers whose birthdays are in march, or get the email address for customers who have bought a specific item?  The new version will allow for you to quickly get this information, and if doing a physical mailing to actually print labels through your supported label printer.

Your searches have expanded from name, id, and company to include all of the fields and options in the above screenshot.  This isn't necessarily the absolutely final form, so if you have something you'd really like to be able to search by for customers that aren't listed there, please let us know.

Until June 5th, 2017, or while supplies last, with the purchase of a Musicware, ExtremePOS or Praiz license we are giving a computer bundled in at no cost, software configuration included.  Contact sales at (919) 387-7597 x100 for full details.

We will be closed Monday, May 29th for Memorial Day.

The current version of the software, available for supported users, is 4.6.3.  If you want to get back on support, contact sales at (919) 387-7597 x100.