News - Data West Corporation

How to Encourage Customers to Use Web Payments

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Joan Green | 0 Comments

BillMaster WebShare offers significant cost savings to your utility – for statement printing and postage and customer service time – and many advantages to your customers. It is a clear Win / Win circumstance… but only if your customers sign up! So how can you increase customer use of web payments? First, focus on the message. What’s in it for…

C’MON BACK – DEEPFREEZE

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Richard Brown | 0 Comments

This is the story of the most spectacular data recovery operation I’ve been involved with at Data West. It happened in 1978. The details are fuzzy, and I may not understand what actually happened, but somehow the drive device had slowly and routinely overheated for a while and the drive heads had written to a slightly different place than they…

C’MON BACK – SCENARIOS

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Richard Brown | 0 Comments

The following are just a smattering of the really creative things our clients managed to do with fixed/removable minicomputer drive devices of the 1970’s and 1980’s: The cat (from the previous blog entry) was very happy atop the drive device until the heads crashed due to a massive amount of hair in the removable drive. Needless to say, kitty found…

2014 User Conference Registration

Posted on March 6, 2014 by DataWest | 0 Comments

The 2014 Data West User Conference is an opportunity to: Participate in informative sessions Exchange ideas and solutions with fellow users Learn about offerings available from our Partners that can benefit your organization Click the link above for more information!

C’MON BACK – Back-up

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Richard Brown | 0 Comments

Dear reader: Having bared all in previous blogs, it’s time to move on. As you may expect, the most interesting backup and restore experiences have been provided by our clients over these many years. Of course, the names have been changed to protect the guilty, since no one is innocent. In the early days before personal computers, there were minicomputers….

C’MON BACK – Auto-Save

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Richard Brown | 0 Comments

My daughter Danielle has always been interested in science and her school projects were interesting. Some of my best memories are having the entire family closed up in a warm, humid bathroom in the dead of winter and trying to measure the surface tension of bubbles as opposed to the bubbles she created outside in dry sub-freezing temperatures. Hurray for…

Making Wish-Lists Happen

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Joan Green | 0 Comments

What if you could tell your software provider exactly what you want? Better yet, what if they actively asked you for input, and produced it – fast? Companies like Google, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo – and now Data West! – do exactly that, with a technique called “Agile” or “Scrum” methodology. This means we: Develop what our customers want. We prioritize…

C’mon Back Chronicles

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Richard Brown | 0 Comments

We all truly learn about backups only after a personal disaster. Until then, the need for a backup is only an intellectual exercise that doesn’t seem worth the effort. I earned my wings at the tender and arrogant age of 22 while working for the Navy in Virginia. After some suitable training classes, I had impressed my superiors enough to…

Upcoming Webinars

Posted on December 13, 2013 by DataWest | 0 Comments

On a monthly basis, we offer webinars that extend the functionality of BillMaster and Geospatial software products. Here are our upcoming webinars for December and January. Bill Codes and Bill Overrides December 19, 2013 12:30 PM (GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada) Don’t Let the Home Screen Pass You By! Thursday, January 2, 2014 9:30 AM (GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US…

Quit Being Mousey with Your Water Billing Software

Posted on November 6, 2013 by DataWest | 0 Comments

The first thing I do when I sit down at my computer is reach for the mouse. How could I possibly function without my mouse? It has become so easy for me to forget that there are ways to function beyond the mouse. When I use our water billing software I often forget to switch my brain over to the keyboard. …

800-748-2271