I know some of you have looked into getting Wireless
Access Control for Patron Edge, and then reconsidered after seeing how much a
quality wireless scanner costs these days. The Symbol MC55 is about $1000 a
piece, and lower-end scanners tend to be less reliable in scanning
successfully.
One of our clients recently became fed up with their scanners' lack of
reliability and network connection problems. Instead of giving up on scanning,
they found a clever solution that allows them to scan tickets for less than half
the cost of a high-end scanner. How did they do it? They purchased cheap
netbooks with Windows XP Pro, installed Patron Edge, and attached wired
scanners. To scan, they launch ScanningValidation.exe so that it doesn't require
a Patron Edge user license.
While this solution may not work for everyone, it's an easy way to do
entry-level scanning. You can use it to figure out if moving to wireless
scanning and purchasing high-end scanners makes sense for your
organization. Laptops have legs though; I recommend either having very
trustworthy volunteers to handle access control, or locking the laptop to some
kind of permanent fixture.
How has your organization managed to meet your technical needs on the cheap?
Share some advice in the comments.
As updates to our security release continue over the summer and our PA-DSS-compliant build is being finished, we've hit all of the usual issues that come up with any update. Here are a few things you can do now that will make sure your update goes as smoothly as possible.
Get the environment right - You can update to Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 at any time. As long as you are already on 3.310, go ahead and do this update. Since SQL 2005 isn't the latest, several organizations have purchased SQL 2008 and then contacted Microsoft to "downgrade", where they were provided with a copy of 2005. This will save cash on future updates by not having to buy another version in the future. You can always check out the latest system requirements at http://systemreqs.blackbaud.com.
Review the guide - I know it's long, but the update guide covers everything required to update the core pieces. You don't have to read every page, just skim the headings and then dig into the steps that are different from past updates.
Prepare for encryption - This update requires you to create a new SQL login that's going to manage credit card encryption. Create this ahead of time and give it 'db owner' rights to the Patron Edge database. It won't take you two minutes and will save time later on. The update will ask for this login and have you create a master key. This is just a password used to encrypt credit cards while they're being processed. To prevent getting hacked, make it strong. Give it at least eight letters, a number and a special character.
Do big changes ahead of time - If you're planning to move servers around without an experienced network administrator, it will make life easier to move them before the update, especially if you're dealing with firewall changes and Internet stuff. If you have an IT person with solid understanding of your network, feel free to do it at the same time as the update.
Test PCCharge - This one should only take about 15 minutes, but there have been some rare cases where we've had to get help from Verifone after the PCCharge update to version 5.8 (usually when FDCN is the processor). When you're testing the update, be sure to check credit card processing so we can work out any issues with that.
Just follow these guidelines and your update should be pretty painless. Have you had any update troubles? Leave a comment to help out the folks who are still planning theirs.