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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – October 2009 Website: www.sdsrocs.com And you can see Steve’s blog at: www.railresource.com Greetings: I am writing this a couple of days after returning home from the ASLRRA Eastern Region meeting in Indianapolis, while in the midst of getting caught up from being away for six days, and working on my schedule through Thanksgiving. Things have been exceptionally busy here at SDS, and in this update I will try to get you up to speed on what has been going on, and what will be happening over the next six weeks or so. ASLRRA Eastern Region Meeting For those of you who have the opportunity to go to the ASLRRA Regional meetings and don’t take it, you are really missing a huge opportunity to get your arms around what is going on in our industry. There has been more new regulation in our industry over the last year than there have been in the last five years, and the presentations in Indy were from the people who were in charge of these regulations. I saw individuals in the audience that I have known for a very long time who came to me later and expressed their shock at everything that is going on. These are people who I consider “with it” in the industry. The Southern Region meeting will be in Panama City Beach, Florida, November 8 through 10, and I hope that if you have the opportunity to be there, you will take and go. ROCSTM Our work on the new UMLER system is continuing. Fortunately, Microsoft AccessTM does support XML import and export directly from the program. What this means in English is that the new message formats can go into and out of ROCS with just some programming on our part, and we will not need to use a third party program to write the software for the new communications. We are going to hold off on any new distributions of Version 12A of ROCS until Version 12B is ready which will include the new UMLER communications. This will minimize the scrambling to change over the users that are already using Version 12A. HOSSTM We have distributed Version 1F of our Hours of Service program to our users. This version covers a number of issues and requests that have come from the users. In version 1F we have added a pop up form that displays the last record entered into the system so that the user can keep track of where they are for data entry. We have also added a screen to check for duplicate entries in the database that should make finding any duplicates easier. Finally, we have added a quick release function to the system that will allow the user to enter a release for an employee or crew before the paperwork is received in the office. The system will retain the quick release information until a proper record is entered, and then the “official” record will overwrite the quick release information. We will be releasing the next revision in the next couple of weeks to reflect the current Limbo Time limits (30 hours/month), as well as a couple of “nice to have” things that customers have requested. ROCSDispatchTM We haven’t forgotten about our dispatching system users, and we have been working on some revisions to Version 6 of ROCSDispatch. The biggest change that is coming is a new display, which will be easier for people to read, and condenses the data into a smaller area. The release of Version 7 will probably be sometime in 2010. Travel Schedule Here is our current schedule, as we will be on the road a bit over the next six weeks. October 21-22 – Cary, NC for the SLIC committee meeting (more about this next month) November 6-11 – Panama City, FL for the ASLRRA Southern Region meeting November 16-18 – Baltimore, MD for a ROCS Installation
Well, that’s all for now. We will be back next month with all of the goings on at SDS. Stay safe, Steven Friedland President |
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