Purchase-order tracking application with Excel 2007: kickoff

The company I work for, Cogniview, offers customers various ways to purchase its products. A customer can use PayPal to purchase online, send a fax order, or send a purchase order by fax or e-mail.

We have had an unusual amount of purchase orders lately. Everybody is happy when a PO comes in, but our accounting department started complaining that tracking those purchase orders is becoming difficult.

We had a meeting in which we agreed that some sort of purchase tracking system should be created. I persuaded everyone that it would take a tenth of the time to write it in Excel 2007 then in C++ (the language of choice for our programmers). So I have been awarded the pleasure of writing it myself.

In the coming week or so, I will share with you the process of designing this system and implementing it–successfully, I hope.

I will also make the Excel application available to anyone who’s interested.

Cogniview is now a certified partner of Microsoft

I am pleased to announce that Cogniview has achieved the rank of Microsoft certified partner. We were always putting off becoming a certified partner because it seemed to be a big hassle. We were right about that. We had, however, an ace in the hole that I wasn’t aware of: you, the customers.

Our customers deserve the credit for our becoming a certified partner. It seems that if you have a product that is used by thousands of customers, you just fly through the product-certification tests (we submitted our PDF-to-Excel conversion product).

The best part was the testimonials. As an ISV, you are required to submit customer testimonials to Microsoft and have the customers who gave those testimonials approve them. It took us just three hours to get approval for our testimonials. The speed with which the approval came moved me.

Thank you, dear customers.

Here are a couple of pictures of the gang and PDF2XL with the goodies that you get from Microsoft.

The Gang with the Microsoft flag

PDF2XL and the ISV competency plaque

2006 summer vacation

I will be on vacation until the first week of september. So posting will be light. Here is something to keep you going.

First things first

My name is Yoav and I hold the position of CTO at Cogniview. This blog is partly Cogniview’s unofficial voice but mostly a reflection of my thoughts and ideas about Excel, software and life in general. In the future I hope to convince other (far more interesting) people to post here. But for now…read on and have an Excel(lent) time.

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