A very busy morning for the Microarea headquarters. The Genoese head office came under sharp attack...no, not by Assagne (he has got nothing to do!) but rather by water, an element found in nature that is precious and essential for life, that nevertheless can cause serious damage if spilled where it should not be.

by Fabrizio Perricone
Product Marketing Manager

A dull and insignificant connection pipe, belonging to one of the many fan-coils found within the company building (useful indeed for the offices heating up during the cold winters and cooling during the boiling summers), pulled out from its original position causing a major break-down (lasting several hours) of the company's activities and operations.

What happened exactly? The water that was intended for the thermo convector poured everywhere instead! Over ten offices, found on the three levels of the building, were literally overwhelmed by water. As most of you can imagine, the electronic equipment found within the Microarea premises was "unhappy" to say the least of this unscheduled event. The Microarea website remained unreachable up until mid-morning, time in which the situation started to turn back to normal thanks to the effort and work put into practice by the Microarea personnel.      

Microarea, in order to ensure an ongoing availability of the essential services, provides a constantly active validation back-up service for Mago.net on servers that are external to the Microarea structure. Such service has allowed (during the blackout period) 765 users to validate their Mago.net and work as though nothing ever happened.
To say the truth, there has been a small number of situations (less than ten) in which it has been necessary to modify the firewall of the end user in order to accept the replies coming from the domain microarea.eu (this latter domain is home to the back-up validation service) as well as microarea.it.

This short video can help you realise what the situation was like in the Microarea offices at 9.00 am, 9th of December 2010.

What happened has offered the possibility of verifying the quality and effectiveness of the disaster recovery systems utilised currently by Microarea. This experience has also been able to underline the importance of improving communication in such a way to be safe from the effects of a catastrophic event.

Considering the fact that the technological infrastructure is a vital factor towards ensuring a full and ongoing service, Microarea is taking into consideration a collaboration with Amazon.com (company holding a consistent number of server farm and cloud services that are available from all over the world) in order to reach a top level safety with systems fault-tolerant at 99.99999%.
You will be duly informed by Microarea when the new backup service will be all set.

Mago.net 3.2 Service Pack 3 is now available! All End Users who have subscribed the M.L.U. service can download the new S.P. free of charge.

Plenty of new features have been included,some of which specifically addressing the Italian End Users, the Polish, Swiss market...and lots more.    

by Fabrizio Perricone
Product Marketing Manager

To be more precise, there have been 16 improvements brought to the product by this new update. Further improvements for the Italian End Users in regards to the management of business operations engaged with countries having a favoured taxation and privileged tax systems (Black List). Expressly for Switzerland instead, the image updating as in regards to the Vat Report with official documents. Furthermore, the VAT rates utilised in Poland have been updated.     

A new procedure now allows aligning any change regarding the VAT rates in force: VAT default codes, buyer and supplier information, documents to be invoiced and so on, are all updated rapidly and efficiently by the procedure.   

The Manufacturing area is home to the excellent revision relating to the complex algorithm MRP (Material Requirements Planning): currently, under certain conditions, its speed is 5 times higher than before!   

Uncover all details by reading the release note of Mago.net 3.2.3.

In order to update Mago.net, you simply need to have subscribed the M.L.U. (Microarea Live Update) service made available by Microarea. The M.L.U. service also provides further important services to your company with over 200 on-line courses in order for you to use Mago.net at its top, access to the Microarea Community Forum where you can exchange information, suggestions and ideas with other End Users as well as with the Microarea Partners and Staff.

If you wish to receive further information or subscribe the Microarea Live Update (M.L.U.) please get in touch with the Microarea International Sales Department.

It is always advisable to seek the assistance of your Microarea Reseller referral when wishing to update your Mago.net.

Microarea relies and invests in the foreign market, since it is considered to be a very important resource. A highly significant task has been completed in these days that will allow a better use of Mago.net and consequently give rise to a greater personal and corporate productivity. 

by Fabrizio Perricone
     Product Marketing Manager

Over 300 companies use Mago.net in the five nations in which Microarea has aligned the product to the national legislation in force. It is worthwhile knowing that the number of foreign companies that use the ERP software Mago.net is in constant growth!

The number one aim of Microarea is to ensure all users a superior experiencing of the product, providing a fast and decisive support in the native language of the user.  

135,000 (one hundred and thirty five thousand!) is the volume of words translated in the Help & Information Center. The translation covers all of the main functional areas of Mago.net, ranging from the basic functions to the Administration area, and all the way into logistics. In order to achieve the best possible result, besides having employed a specialised company, there has been an internal revision carried out by the Microarea staff mother tongue Hungarian, Polish and Romanian. 
The number of translated words is equal to a pocket size book containing 400 pages!

Surely an important task that is not quite finished yet: the product help is in constant evolution in light of the new features provided by the constant updating made available by Microarea. This means avoiding to "rest on one's laurels", hence carrying forward the work and the solid foundations build so far.  

The 24th of October has been the closing day of TTG 2010, the number one Italian tourism exhibition which took place in Rimini. Travel Software, together with its two prestigious IT partners (Microarea and Open Informatica), has underlined its presence throughout a 32 square meter stand that hosted, during the three days of the exhibition, a consistent number of travel agents and operators eager to see and test the products being presented.  

A staff consisting in 10 individuals has been made constantly available throughout the entire exhibition, for the demonstrations of the software Easy-ADV, Easy-TO (committed to Travel Agencies and Tour Operators) and Overlook Hotel (Hotel management).

The presented products have been subject to great interest also on behalf of many Tour Operators and Networks, "attracted" by the ease of use of the software. The long lasting (and deserved) success of the software is also due to the specialised after sales assistance.

Various Microarea representatives were present at the stand, providing evidence of the perfect union existing between the application "Easy", Overlook Hotel and the ERP accounting software Mago.net.

The ease of use of the ERP accounting software Mago.net has convinced a number of visitors that the choice made by Travel Software is indeed the right one.
"We are confident that the many contacts which took place at the exhibition will soon become our loyal clients. We are still receiving requests on behalf of people who have not been able to visit the stand, because of the soaring attendance, but still confirm great amount of interest" said Marco Gozzi, CEO of Travel Software.   

Mago.net proves to be the winning choice also for the Hotel and Tourism industry!

Two years have gone by since the first major restructuring of our website. Strength, productivity and completeness of the Microarea offer: these were the elements of the message we wished to convey back then. Today we have decided to change things with the aim of making our website (including its contents and on-line services created in the past years) become a valuable and efficient marketing tool, exactly as every company website should truly be.   

by Germano Traverso - Technical Director for Support & IT services

In order to reach the set objectives, the communicative paradigms, throughout which we wish to address not only the whole spectrum of individuals potentially interested in our products, as well as the internet search engines, had to be totally redefined.
  
Visual and browsing paradigms, that will drive the Microarea website guest through pre-established and easily recognizable paths. Consequently, the Mago.net potential user and the potential Partner will be able to identify themselves whilst finding the correct way towards providing answers to their overall curiosities and questions. 

We are not merely talking of an aesthetic restyling. There has been a proper re-planning of the paths through which the guest shall benefit from the “Mbyte content” and information registered on our system. Starting from a new homepage, passing through the specific appealing graphical elements, and leading all the way to the aim that the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) theories consider to be of primary importance: maximization of the so called “conversion rate”. In other words, turn the highest possible number of website visitors into clients (Mago.net Users or Microarea Partners). 

The landing of the guest on our website shall not be “traumatic”: thanks to simple and clear-cut paths, the guest is guided throughout a "tour" naturally leading towards leaving the personal contact information. All of the areas have been heavily restructured and rationalized in order to be even more coherent with the pre-determined browsing schemes. The end result consists in having a website that is now faster (100% speed increase), “lighter” and less abundant of textual information (this true at least for the higher browsing levels), the latter being an aspect that often intimidates the website visitor causing him to “jump away” in a undetermined manner in order to find something more stimulating.  

A further improvement, browsing wise, has been provided by the “customization” of the home page for the User that has entered his/her credentials. Whether we are dealing with an End User or Partner Microarea, the home page will adapt accordingly, offering simple access paths to those functions (found in the Private Area) that are inherent with their profile (e.g. the User will have direct access to the MLU management rather than the on-line courses while the Partner will have access to the orders areas rather than the management of the sales opportunities).

Two services of primary importance, for both the Mago.net users and Microarea Partners, have been profoundly re-designed:

1. Training area: the reports and catalogues have been re-planned both in the public and Private area. Furthermore, customized reports have been implemented in such a way to keep track of the courses followed by everyone and, for the End User, reports that suggest the courses that “cover” their current Mago configuration. 
2. Support Area: in the private area you can now find a search engine that sets forth queries regarding the efficiency of the entire Microarea Knowledge-base (Help Center, e-learning courses, FAQ, Etc.) with a “full text indexing” method and by means of a modern and easily understandable interface...the Microarea “Google”.    

In summary, hereunder is a list of the areas on which we have particularly concentrated our efforts:

• Create immediate browsing paths
• Guide the browsing throughout “Call to Action”
• Provide answers to the most frequently asked questions (...how much does it cost? Where can I buy it?)
• Introduce a more direct and “friendly” type language
• Simplify and “target” the information request module
• Improve performances (loading speed
• Maximise the compatibility with all browsers

Similarly, to the “last version”, the website will continue to evolve, not only in regards to the contents but also in relation to the offered services.
I wish all of you a pleasant browsing experience on www.microarea.it!

The Microarea electronic invoicing management project has been presented at the SMAU Milan in cooperation with the lending institute Unicredit and the Mago.net user Renner Italia SpA.

by Fabrizio Perricone - Product Marketing Manager

A highly interesting workshop has taken place Thursday 21st of October 2010, at SMAU Milan, relating to a growingly important subject: electronic invoicing and document dematerialisation. IT managers, administration managers, and individuals representing different professional associations crowded hall 5 of wing 4. Their aim was to acquire information regarding the benefits and investments level needed in order to exploit such opportunity, available not only to the SMEs but also to large multinationals and public administration.

The case history being presented included three main participants: the company Renner Italia SpA (Mago.net user), Unicredit and Microarea. Unicredit presented its Invoicecomm service for the management of the document dematerialisation. Microarea has outlined how Mago.net allows obtaining a communication interface in order to manage the flow of information in electronic format (XML). As explained very simply and effectively by Mr. Andrea Rinaldi (Microarea ERP Development Manager), in order to bring forward the management prototype of the electronic invoicing, all that had to be done was create an "adaptor" or "translator" (call it as you wish) in order to read and write the data in the form required by the Unicredit platform.

The project will benefit all Mago.net Users: once that this prototype has been defined, it can be "industrialized" and included within the standard functions of Mago.net, hence allowing its immediate use on behalf of those companies that rely on Mago.net for the management of their business and that use the Unicredit platform for the inter-exchange of information. However, looking forward in time, there might eventually be the possibility of creating further "adaptors" able to manage the flow of data that wants to be channelled towards other lending institutes. 

The road to be followed is now clearly outlined: with Mago.net, Microarea can now be considered the perfect solution for the management of the documents dematerialisation and their operating in electronic format.