Seasons greetings!
Last week we released Macro Scheduler maintenance update 15.0.20:
If you are signed up to the Windows Insider program you can already try Windows 11. Here’s Macro Scheduler 15 running happily in Windows 11:
Did you know that since v15 you can run Excel VBA macros from directly within your Macro Scheduler code? We’ve added a helpdesk article showing you how it works here.
Hi all. Just a short note to say Happy Christmas/Hanukkah/interdenominational festive holiday time to everyone.
Here’s a fun post from a few years ago:
Case Study: Macro Scheduler Saves 3600 Elf-Hours and Gets Presents Delivered On Time
All the best from Marcus, Dorian and all at MJT.
So it’s Black Friday. Sounds so gloomy. A day where many appear to go mad and gorge.
There’ll be no extra discounts from us today, but what we will do is donate 10% of today’s sales to The Woodland Trust and St Mungo’s charity for the homeless.
So if you buy or upgrade Macro Scheduler today, or renew your maintenance you’ll be planting some much needed trees and providing for people who really need stuff. 🙂
“It can’t be done.”
We’re always meeting people who have been told by consultants and technical folk that moving data from one application to another can’t be done.
We prove them wrong every time.
One of the most popular uses for Macro Scheduler within corporations is automated data entry. Time and again we learn about projects where systems are replaced and renewed but gaps still exist which need to be bridged by manual “rekeying”.
In an ideal world there will be an API, database access, or an interface to export/import data files. But the reality is we still don’t live in an ideal world.
Surprisingly often, especially with older legacy systems, none of these things exist. More often than not they are technically possible, but for various reasons just don’t get implemented. It might cost too much, system vendors may not be willing to open up their technology, IT staff may be too busy on other projects.
And quite often it seems that IT departments are busy working on the “big picture” and consider these “rekeying” jobs too small to worry about.
Taken in isolation the fact that one person in one department might be rekeying patient records, or invoices once a month for three hours might seem a trivial problem. But it’s not just one person in one department. In our experience every team throughout an organisation has someone doing something like that. Added up the total time wasted by the organisation is huge. More often than not these people are being taken away from more productive work.
As an example consider a hospital we are currently helping.
Hospitals are huge organisations, with hundreds of departments and all kinds of systems where for all kinds of reasons people are keying data into one system that was extracted from another.
In a few days we’ve already helped four departments remove the need for monthly manual data entry jobs. In total this must be saving at least 2 man-days per month. In actual fact what it really means is that the clinicians who once had to do this work can now treat two or three more patients a month each.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It may seem like small gains. But we have only just got started and I’m quite sure that every department has at least one person doing manual work that they don’t need to do. In this age of austerity and cost cutting it is fantastic to see the hospital making lots of small efficiency gains that together make a big improvement.
The trouble is that most people don’t realise that what they are doing can be automated.
Most of our customers are an exception, and the IT guy at the hospital thought outside the box and found a solution.
But most people are told “it isn’t possible” so carry on tapping away at the keyboard.
Most IT people, bless them, sometimes think too technically. It’s understandable. So you ask IT “can we automate this data entry procedure” or “can we connect these systems” and words and abbreviations like API, SOAP, XML, SQL will fill their heads, and they’ll come back and say “No sorry, can’t be done”. If you’re lucky someone will contact the system vendor who will naturally want payment for building a custom interface and then it will turn out that the vendor of the other system needs to be involved, or a new module needs purchasing, or someone needs to go on a training course, and all of a sudden it’s looking far too expensive and going to take far too long, to make it justified. So the conclusion is it isn’t possible.
But if you’re reading this blog you know there IS another way to do it.
We CAN automate data entry at the user interface level. And it CAN be made reliable and robust.
Is it the most ideal solution? Some would say not. But are we living in an ideal world? No.
We can demonstrate, our customers can demonstrate that it works. It allows the process to get automated quickly, without specialist technical resource, without reliance on the system vendors or even the IT department and without a large investment. For a relatively tiny outlay the invoice clerk’s life can be transformed, the human resources department can avoid rekeying appraisal data every month and clinicians can stop doing tedious tasks and get back to doing what they love, what they’re best at and serving the community.
I heard about a project in another public sector body near here the other day which has cost a fortune. New systems were brought in and inevitably there was some part of it that would have to remain manual. Consultants were brought in at great cost to look for a solution and after several months and lots of money their conclusion was that while they might be able to improve it a bit there will still be the need for some manual “rekeying”.
Macro Scheduler could have saved them – and the taxpayer – thousands. But it never occurred to them that there was another way.
So my challenge, our challenge, is to reach out to these people, reach out to ordinary people and tell them “it IS possible”. We can simplify your work, we can automate those repetitive tasks, don’t believe everything consultants might tell you – they can’t help thinking traditionally or too technically.
There IS a way.
If you use Macro Scheduler to simplify your own processes, reach out and tell people in other departments, tell your colleagues, tell your friends. There will be someone in other departments with similar problems who could also benefit.
Spread the word. We have a duty to save people time, make people more productive, make companies more profitable, and in the case of the public sector – save our tax money!
Electric cars and hybrids are becoming more common and it’s great to see more and more of them on the road. My next car, due next month, will be a plug-in hybrid.
I see the industry moving rapidly. Advancements in battery technology and range are happening all the time. If I didn’t have a large family I’d be happy with a small pure-EV with a range of over 200 miles. But I don’t think it will be long before larger family sized cars can do the same. In fact Tesla recently revealed a prototype 7 seater – the Model-X – which promises a range of 270 miles. Right now it’s a bit pricey, but it won’t be long before other manufacturers catch up. I can’t wait.
The same technology is now being tried in other forms of transport. Near my home town of Harwich this month the first battery powered train was tested. Much of our train network has been or is being electrified. But inevitably there are gaps which at present must be filled by diesel engines. A battery powered solution would allow trains to continue to work on electricity through the gaps and recharge when back on overhead power.
Recently I read about a battery powered electric chain ferry in Norway. It has now been sailing for over a year. Great stuff. There’s a chain ferry near us in Poole Harbour. I hope they look to similar technology.
Of course we also need to make sure the electricity used to charge these batteries is not being made by burning coal. But it’s good to see this kind of progress towards a reduction on our dependence on oil, which is sorely needed:
I’ve never really worried too much about SEO for mjtnet.com. We’ve certainly never done anything black hat or spammy.
All we’ve ever done really is made sure we have contextual content on the site that caters to human beings and does all the obvious things like make sure we have our important key phrases in the text of the page.
But earlier this year I became aware that our organic search traffic had declined. And looking at the trend over time I realised that our rankings for keywords like “Macro Recorder” had taken a tumble just after Google’s Panda update in 2011 and then again with Penguin in 2012.
I felt a little silly. I should have noticed at the time. But I guess I was focused on other things. I remember reading about Panda and Penguin and sniggering quietly to myself whenever I heard that someone who had employed dubious SEO methods had been penalised. Little did I know that somehow we’d suffered too!
I’m not really sure why this is. Like I said we’ve never done anything black hat. We’ve never bought links.
Our domain has existed since 1997. We’ve been around a long time in Internet terms. In the early days of the web there was no Google. There wasn’t even a proper search engine. If you sold software what you did was upload your trial (or shareware) versions to a number of download sites. That’s how people found our software.
Over the years we’ve continued to list our software on download sites but their importance has diminished while search engines, and more recently Google, have become the most important way to be found.
Many of the download sites have suffered as a result and have resorted to dubious means, such as forcing downloaders to use their own installers which bundle downloads with adware and browser extensions.
I wonder if we have been penalised for our association with these sites. Once our software is out in the wild, we have little to no control over who lists it, so it seems a bit unfair if it is the case that our rankings have suffered because of these sites.
In the mean time competitors have appeared who seem to rank better for some of our key phrases, despite having fewer back links, and less longevity and in some cases less context for the key terms.
We’re doing our best to fix that but there’s not a huge amount we can do other than keep writing content and keep helping our customers and hope that they share and bookmark our web pages and blog posts – hint hint ;-).
Frustrating. But that’s life these days I guess. We dance for the Google god.
I usually write about technical stuff here in this blog, but today I have my marketing hat on and I’m thinking about how we describe our favourite piece of software.
Up in the sky, look: It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!
A while ago I asked in the forums how people described Macro Scheduler. Do they call it a Macro Recorder, Windows Automation Tool, Scripting Language, or something else altogether?
Interestingly the winner was scripting language! followed closely by automation tool.
The forums are mostly read by existing users and those who responded to the question were mostly old hands.
I suspect if we asked relative newcomers, they would be more likely to answer Macro Recorder, or Windows Automation tool.
Does it matter? Well, to existing users, those of us already benefiting from the tool, what we call it probably doesn’t matter too much. Personally, I prefer the term Windows Automation Tool. But from a marketing perspective it matters more.
You see, far more people search Google for Macro Recorder (and similar terms) each month than Windows Automation based phrases. An order of magnitude more. Both terms describe a tool for performing automation, so both terms attract people who would benefit from the software.
And since more people search for Macro Recorder related terms it is important that we use those terms on our website. We all want more people to benefit from the software don’t we? We all want the community to grow. And we want the business to grow and be here in another 17 years (yes, we’ve been continuously improving and supporting Macro Scheduler since 1997 and we are still going strong).
We use an email support system called Help Scout (it’s brilliant by the way, if you’re looking for a way to support your customers we recommend it).
When Help Scout started out they wanted to build an email only, personalised support system which treated customers like people not numbers. So when they started out they didn’t use terms like Help Desk or Ticketing System. In their minds it was quite different. They didn’t think of it as a ticketing system.
However, when they started trying to get the word out and marketing it they realised they would have to use terms like help desk and ticketing system or no one would ever find them. And at the end of the day it IS a help desk. Just a different one. A better one.
Macro Scheduler, at its most basic level, is a macro recorder. Just a different one. A far more capable and flexible one with many more features to aid automation of software.
When it comes to marketing it seems it’s not how WE describe it that matters, it’s what people are looking for that is important. Assuming of course we have something that solves their problem.
I suspect that many of those who answered Windows Automation or Scripting Tool in the forum may well have originally found us way back by using more common terms like macro software or macro recorder.
What do you call it when you tell others about it? If you had to describe it in two or three words? And do you remember how you found us?
