TrustWin

Now we have 5 trustees on 3.2. They all seem to be functioning ok now. We have, however had a few more bumps along the way. The biggest issue has been that the court has started changing the format of the case number that is contained in the email. The nasty part is that it is inconsistent between the emails. some emails have one format others have another format and now we have found a third format. The ecf programs have been built to handle 2 case number formats and clean them up. We are now going to add the ability to have as many as needed so we can keep up with the court's "creativity". In addition we are modifying ecfquemanager to have a master case number mask that the case number must match prior to downloading the document(s). If the case number does not match the correct format, the documents will not download and an email will be dispatched to us indicating that there is a problem so was can fix it as quickly as possible. This should help prevent entries going in to the indexing queue with invalid case numbers due to bad formatting from the court. These updates will be available by end of day Friday, but will only be available to those on CM/ECF 3.2 or those that are going on it in the next week. Once we have verified that the updates are working as expected, we will expand the availability.

Well, it appears that all of the courts have or will be upgrading to CM/ECF 3.2. It most definitely changes some things for the automation. It changes the way the links in the emails work. It appears that EVERY link requires an extra "click here to view the document" page to get to the actual document. ECQueManager handled this ok by default. (Lucky design :-) ) The big change comes in the multiple document per docket entry emails. Traditionally when an email of this type was recieved, the link in the email took you to a web page with links to all of the documents that comprise the docket entry. ECFQueManager would then parse out each of the links and navigate to the link and download the document that the link pointed to. CM/ECF 3.2 has changed that somewhat. The email link still points to a web page of links. The change is that the link no longer point directly to the document. Instead they have added some programming on the web page to capture a click event (a human using a mouse to click the link) and doing some manipulation behind the scenes to get to the document. Even then you don't get directly to the document, but to the click here to view the document page requiring yet another click. This change breaks the currently released version of ECFQueManager. All of the multidocument docket entries will not be downloaded at all, but the first free look will be used because there is no indication in the email that this is a multidocument entry.
As is usual, there was no real notice of this fairly major change to CM/ECF so we have been put in to the position of reacting to this change and in the mean time the affect offices are having to spend a fair amount of time tracking down the missing documents and downloading them manually and then indexing them to the case. What is even worse it that it took almost 2 weeks for us to realize what was really going on here and why so many que items where coming in as a status of 5 instead of a status of 30 and ready for indexing.
As most of you saw yesterday, we sent an email warning everyone of the issue with 3.2. This email prompted opening a dialog with the AO about the issue and how to deal with it. We hope the result of the dialog will be a more open commincation of the changes to the various versions BEFORE they are released in the wild. We will also bring up the issue of web crawlers with them and see where that goes. In the meantime, I think after a very long day yesterday that we have worked around the issue with 3.2. We got a bit lucky in how ECFQueManager was designed and how the downloads occur so that changing the method did not require a massive rewrite. The workaround is most definitely a hack. If a future version of CM/ECF changes how the underlying programming on the web page works, it will break the automation yet again. We are going to try to mitigate this by putting in some checks to attempt to catch that a change has been made and stop the downloads until a solution is in place. This should prevent a massive amount of extra work in the trustee's office doing manual downloads.
We try to keep you up to date on the discussions with the AO and hopefully something good will come out of this.

Ed

Steering Committee, members include all Satori & Associates employees, Russell Brown, Mark Bonney, Deb Miller (Trustee's), Brad Kloiber (Operations Manager), Naliko Markel and Bill Drake (System Managers). If you have a special request for the Steering Committee to consider, please put your requests and notes in here. This area will be reviewed periodically for information and program requests.

The Report Runner tool now has a document on the Wiki about how to set up and run it.


http://docs.satori-assoc.com/index.php/TWReportRunner

Today we rolled out a pair of minor changes to End Month Reports specifically effecting Statistics.


First, is a change to the Active Over 60 months entry. Thanks to a catch by one of the offices, there was a discrepency. The new Excel spreadsheet for statistics asks for over 65 months, not 60 as in the past. That has now been resolved, but does require an update to both Show Case Statistics and the Database.


The second bit is directly in End Month Reports. The issue was that the printed statistics report was trying to use the wrong month. That has now been fixed, and should address the bulk of the issues with the June runs closing May counts.

In our ongoing documentation efforts, we have added a couple of new articles to the Docs wiki that might be of interest to the customers:


* HowTo: Administer the Trustee13 Website

* HowTo: Get information from TrustWin into Excel

Hi all! With the seminar quickly approaching we are all working to get a great line up of information to you. Seminar packets will be going out in the next week or so to all offices. If you would like a packet emailed to you individually please email me (ldavis@satori-assoc.com) and I will send you what I have. Remember the packets will be going out to your offices as well. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Portland May 12 -14.

We are using 5 priority code levels. Note that the response time for these code levels is when we begin work on the item. We cannot flatly state that an item will be resolved within a specific time since the complexity of the issue determines that.


NIRTS: Need it right this second. The system is down and people are sitting on their hands. Usually this is hardware related. It could also be a “in the middle of disbursement” issue. We will begin work on this item as quickly as possible.


Critical: Very important item that needs to be addressed with a day or two. Obviously you would all like your items to be in one these first two categories, but that is not practical.


Important: Normally these are items needed within the month or by next disbursement.


Normal: Needed within a month or two.


Wish List: There will be some short and long lead time wish list items. We may put some Normal items in the wish list group if we think they might cause a problem for other users, or if we know that they relate to a project that is in progress.

The TrustWin Annual User Meeting will be held 5/12 to 5/14 in Portland, Oregon, at the Embassy Suites Downtown. We will be sending out more details in the next month. Please advise us as soon as possible how many hotel rooms you think you will need. We have to guarantee payment for the total number of hotel rooms that we have them hold. Therefore the more accurate we can be the less we are financially exposed, and the more likely it is that you will be able to get a room in the host hotel.

We have been advised that some creditors are now putting a reference number on their proof of claim. Although they have not yet requested that it be used, it is apparently a way around the account number being redacted on their payment vouchers. If they get the reference number then they have a unique number to use for posting the payments. We were asked by one office to add a new field to the claims screen for the reference number. Before we do this we want to share this information with you. It was our understanding that account numbers were only to be redacted for external viewing, therefore the payment to the creditor for the claim would not have to be redacted and there would not be an issue for the creditor. (We received a call from IRS several months ago expressing concern that we might redact the Social Security number on their vouchers. We assured them that the Trustee office controlled that, not us.) Secondly if the Proof of Claim shows a reference number then shouldn’t the reference number be used in the account number field instead of a redacted account number? Thirdly we want you to be aware that if we add a new field, then that field would have to be printed on the voucher in order to be useful to the Creditor. If the account number must also print, even if redacted, then it would require an extra print line and would cut in half the number of items on a voucher. That, in turn, would be mean that you are printing and handling more checks. Please let us know what you are experiencing on this issue.

A number of you have asked us why we do not have a “web crawler” program that goes into Pacer and gathers data on new cases and new claims. Up until now we had been led to believe that data enabled forms were imminent and that these would provide a better answer than a web crawler. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if data enabled forms are going to happen anytime soon. The other reason that we have not previously addressed this issue is that “data mining” is specifically forbidden in the Pacer agreement that the Court had you sign. If we are able to get approval from enough Courts then we will write the programs to “web crawl” Pacer and extract data for import into your systems, which is “data mining”. Please be aware that extracting the data and loading it into your system may reduce data input effort, but it will switch your office task from data entry to data verification of the automatically entered data. You will find a letter attached to this email regarding access to Pacer. If you are interested in extracting data from Pacer, we suggest that you put your version of this on your letterhead and send it to your Court Clerk.

Hi all, we have been busy getting new documentation for both new and old programs out to our website. Please check it out and if there is something you would like documented, email me and I will see about getting things done. The link is http://docs.satori-assoc.com/index.php/Main_Page

Tuesday we had a fairly nasty power outage that took much of our infrastructure down for an hour or so on the Tuesday. It raised a couple of issues that we need to address in terms of our infrastructure. Fortunately, we should be able to handle them without impacting you, our customers.

Some of you may have noticed a brief mail outage over the weekend. It would appear that both of our ISP's took a beating this weekend in the storms. Late Saturday night, a line of thunderstorms rolled through the Atlanta area that took out power to some 200,000 homes, this apparently included our offices. While everything server-wise is on a back up power supply, including the internet connections, the actual telco lines also went down. When everything came back up sometime early Sunday morning, the routers and modems failed to reconnect cleanly.


Fortunately, we identified the problem fairly early Sunday, and service was restored before noon Sunday.

If you office employs a Spam filter, please make sure that satori-assoc.com is whitelisted. There are several offices now that have setup a confirmation type of spam filter. This prevents us from replying to the support emails until the confirmation is dealt with slowing down the support process even more.

We have had a couple of inquiries about Vista. The subject of Vista is like pandora’s box. It is full of, well, we’ll call them surprises. So far we have not found anything in Trustwin that will absolutely not work on Vista. There are caveats though. Many of the programs will require that you click the allow message every time you run the program. We are working on getting around this, but it will be at least January 08 before we have something ready for that.

Vista itself poses some other challenges outside of Trustwin. The driver database is get better every week but there is still a fair amount of hardware that does not work well with Vista. The whole security model that Vista uses could very well pose other “challenges” in other office processes. If your server is not already on Small Business Server 2003 R2, I would recommend that you get the server updated before doing Vista. When you are ready to start doing Vista, I would highly recommend starting very slowly with one computer and a patient person so you can figure out some of the things that need to be addressed before ramping up to using Vista throughout the office. The bottom line is just step in to Vista cautiously and slowly and expect some bumps along the way.


Ed

This is a very minor refresh addressing several load errors as well as several cosmetic errors. New Case and New Claim functions remain disabled until editing is validated.

We have just made a website update that will disable case look up when the database is being updated during the nightly website update. The message will look like this.

The message is only active while the database is being updated and is immediately turned off when the update is complete. Clicking "get case status" will refresh the screen and if the update is completed, the case lookup prompts will return.