Newsletter: Holiday Letting System.  22nd September 2016

Note: This newsletter covers version 4.1 of the Holiday Letting System, released today.

In this newsletter we discuss:
- The new release, which offers improvements to data integrity and security.
- Other topics relating to the use of LetSys, including data recovery and Windows 10 support.

1. New Version (V4.1) available.

We are pleased to announce a new release, which focuses on data security and integrity, and also provides improved data recovery. There are also a few improvements and fixes.

Highlights of the new release:

• Data Integrity: The booking data base file read and write routines have been rewritten to be more robust and to improve performance. If booking data is corrupted by a hardware or system failure this is detected more quickly than previously.
• Data Recovery Improvements: If an error causes loss of bookings data, you have always been able to recover it from the change log, but this involved much manual work. The "Extract data from Change log" tool which processes the change log (file changed.hls) for a property is substantially improved to automate the process better. Deleted records are now placed into the change log in addition to the deleted bookings log and this enables the tool to detect these and hence avoid recovering them. The tool also allows you to merge new and changed bookings from the change log into your last backup file for the property. Once installed, read the Help Topic Recovering lost data.
• Better options to locate bookings in the logs and other files. When recovering data you open the change log by double clicking it. You can now view all the records in this log (or indeed any file containing bookings) once open by selecting View / View bookings as list. or clicking the tool bar icon. The bookings are all shown in a list and can be searched, sorted, copied etc. The last updated date is shown so you can quickly view the date of the transaction.
• Secure Email. If you use the built in SMTP client, this now supports a secure (encrypted) connection to your email server. This does involve additional configuration settings. Once installed, read the Help Topic Configuring LetSys as an email client. Note that the previous special setting for Gmail is removed, but Gmail can still be used as described in the referenced topic.
• Viewing HTML Email: If you use HTML Email, then the draft can be seen in a small "web browser" window. In previous versions, when you clicked a link in your draft you were taken to the web page for that link, but you couldn't get back to your email. With this release then if you click a link, that link will open in your default web browser, not in LetSys (the email is still shown). Thus you can check that any links work, but not have the problem mentioned above.
• Comments in rates files have leading and trailing blanks removed. This was affecting the publish to web feature. When rates were published to the web it caused comments to be lost when the rate did not change, but the comment did.
• Larger comments: In the booking form, the free form comment can now contain up to 500 characters.
• Proforma messages improved: If you have a missing proforma you now get a clearer message which tells you the type of the missing proforma.
• Some other improvements and fixes are incorporated.

Existing users can upgrade to this new release free of charge, as discussed below. The new version has been tested on all current versions of Windows.

The new version can be downloaded from http://erwwen.com/holletsys/download.htm

The full list of the new features is here: http://www.erwwen.com/holletsys/releasehistory.htm

• First, take a backup (we strongly recommend the built-in backup tool found under tools on the menu).
• Do not uninstall the previous version, or you will lose your settings and data. Just install “on top” of your existing version.
• All options you have already set are preserved. You do not need to re-enter your registration code.
• It is essential that LetSys is not running when you run the install module.

Please note that this version will now become the only supported version. Users are advised to upgrade to this new version.

2. Windows 10 support.

We continue to be asked if LetSys supports Windows 10. The answer is "Yes, indeed!". Windows 10 has in fact been less of a problem than some previous upgrades, although there have been some issues. These all occurred for users upgrading from a previous version of windows. In some cases LetSys needed to be reinstalled. In other cases, the language and time settings within windows were changed which gave problems with dates fitting in the available space. Microsoft appears to have resolved most of these issues now.

You can read more detail in the following two topics on the support forum:

LetSys and Upgrading to Windows 10: http://support.erwwen.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=48

More information about Windows 10" http://support.erwwen.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=49

LetSys itself is still a 32 bit program but it runs fine on either 32bit or 64 bit windows. If you are running 64 bit windows, then LetSys is installed into the Program Files (x86) folder.

3. Better data integrity and recovery.

When you read that the main focus of the new release is on these areas, you may conclude that some users have lost data! There have indeed been one or two cases of hard disk crashes or computer failure and also cases where hardware errors have corrupted data. In all cases where we've been involved we've managed to recover the data from the transaction log (called the change log in the documentation). This new release should be even more resilient and makes recovering data easier and more automated. But there is still a need to run regular backups and we strongly advise you do this with the built in backup tool (available from the menu, by clicking tools and then backup). Everything you need to recover your system, including both data and settings, is saved into a single file. Your bookings data is critical to your business so we also recommend keeping backups off site, perhaps using physical media or alternatively one of the many Cloud Services.

In our last newsletter we discussed "Keeping your Data in the Cloud". That is, putting your data into a folder that was backed up by a Cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. See Newsletter 13. Since then, there's been a case where a customer needed to recover a file more than a month old as the most recent copy had somehow become corrupted. Dropbox does, of course, keep backup copies, but only for a month in the free version. This gave us a bit of a headache as the Dropbox backup no longer existed. We therefore strongly advise you take monthly backups even if using a Cloud service. You should check how long your own service keeps old copies of data, of course, and if it is longer than 30 days, you can backup less frequently. Again, this was covered more comprehensively in the last newsletter.

4. Housekeeping!

Don't forget to occasionally clean out old data, or you data (root) folder will become very large, which will increase the size of your backups and/or your usage of cloud backup space. There are tools provided to archive old data. See help topic The Archive / Cleanup Window for more information, including more on the benefits of regular housekeeping.

There is also a tool to clean out old data from previous versions of LetSys, run from the Configuration program. See the Clean Up Data button on the Special  Tab of the Configuration Program. This will only apply if you have been running LetSys for more than four years and upgraded from an old version.

5. Help improve your search engine ranking.

If you have a web site, I'd like to repeat my usual offer. Search engine ranking is significantly influenced by the number of other sites that link to you (preferably in the same or similar business areas). Would you be willing to put a link to our web site into your site? In exchange I’ll add a link to your web site into our list of users. Better still – give me a reference quote to use as well. See the current list (including references) here: http://www.erwwen.com/holletsys/refs.htm
Here’s my sample link: “For other owner/managers: this property is managed with Holiday Letting System software from www.holletsys.co.uk or www.erwwen.com/holletsys/ “
Please ask your webmaster to add this link, and then send me an email, and I’ll link to you!

6. Comments please!

I hope the system is proving valuable. Your views are always welcome.

Finally, you might be interested to know that one of our users is successfully running with over 250 properties. We were not sure LetSys could scale that far, but it is running well. It does take a few seconds to start up and it is running on modern hardware.

Best wishes to all users.

Brendan Blake.