The latest Fairport News
Monday March 31st 2014
In this issue
Roger's Ramblings
What's New
- PAMShare
- Videos.. Lots of Videos
- FieldRex
- PocketPAM2
- PAM - InfoPest Importer
I hope the season is treating you well. Welcome to all our new clients.
Here at Fairport HQ, we have had one of the most productive first quarters to a year for a long time. For many years we have been wanting to create help videos to help our PAM and Mapping clients with getting to know the software and its many features. Finally we have made a start on this process and the number of videos on our web site support pages is approaching 100.
PAMShare - See below. Is this the "Perfect World?" ... producers can record all the daily events in PocketPAM2 as they go about their daily business. Consultants can record recommendations and crop monitoring recrords in FieldRex ... and to tie it all together PAM generates reports and "posts" them up to the PAMShare web site for everyone to keep track of all cropping and livestock activities.
New dealers: We welcomed new dealerships to our world this quarter: In China, Ukraine & Georgia. Welcome & thank you for coming on board, Yolanda, Bachana & Simon. Currrently Simon is having PocketPAM2 re-transalted into Georgian and Yolanda has completed the transaltion of PAM into Chinese. She completed the Chinese translation of PocketPAM2 earlier in the year.
InfoPest - With InfoPest (the chemical database of all registered chemicals in Australia) changing hands from the Queensland Government to Growcom a year or two ago, we lost the ability to import the data from their DVDs into PAM. Growcom made a decision to end the DVD subscription business model and move to a free on-line subscription model. Well ... the good news is we've developed a new importer for InfoPest data than can accessed freely from the web site ... See below.
PDP Lite - This will be a light weight program used to create Variable Rate projects for a multitude of different controllers. Mikhail, now based back in Russia, has been working on this project for the past three months and it is very close to being released. Aimed primarily at consultants wanting to produe variable rate maps for clients, but it will be suitable for all of you wanting to do Variable Rate application work.
Colin recently returned from a week in the "East" where he spent time with Paul Drendel, our man in Victoria, presenting a training and 'catchup' seminar to many clients. He also did some presentations to prospevtive clients.
The Fairport Data Exchange has been given a new role ... it can now upload special PAM reports to the new PAMShare website: www.pamshare.com ... Rather than describe how this works and what its for, please visit www.pamshare.com.au and read all about it there. A few clients have already started using it and are finding it to be a great concept.
Over the past three months we have created lots of PAM and Mapping help videos. This number will grow over time. The plan is to cover all areas of the software and fully replace the manuals and contextual help. So ... if you are just starting out with PAM or Mapping or have a need for some in-depth in-house training on any area, please check out the list of videos on this page.
The section of PAM covered so far are:
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- Customise your PAM (9 videos)
- Configuration of PAM (19 videos)
- Entering Data Overview (5 videos)
- Entering Data - Paddocks & Crops (13 videos)
- Entering Data - Livestock (15 videos)
- Mapping (12 videos)
FieldRex has had a major update. Agronomists and in fact anyone running PocketPAM or FieldRex can now record Crop Monitoring records across multiple cropped areas. A special request from our friends growing Kiwifruit, in New Zealand.
This will enable you to record something like : A nutrient deficiency across all Wheat crops in one pass.
Since the beginning of 2013, there have been a total of 42 enhancements made in PocketPAM2. They include a number of useful reports that PAM transfers to the device. With the exception of a few of them, they have all been at the request of the users. Thanks for the feedback.
In recent weeks we have fully revamped the Time Keeper module. This module is designed for producers running teams of workers performing manual tasks. Typically in horticulture.
A full rewrite of the program is underway to move it into the latest version of the development tools. These tools have come a long way in a short time, so we are hoping for some major performance improvements when we finally release the rewritten version.
PAM development never stops. Probably our biggest enhancement so far is the new InfoPest data importer.
InfoPest is an extremely comprehensive chemical database of all registered chemicals in Australia. The database was originally maintained by the Queensland Department of Agriculture (DEEDI). Unfortunately, they had funding reductions and had to abandon the service. Many years ago we built a data importer for InfoPest data in PAM. The data was copied from the DVD or CD that subscribers would receive quarterly.
But now, the good news is that Growcom (www.growcom.com.au), an industry funded body based in Queensland, have taken over the job of keeping the database updated. It is now all located at www.infopest.com.au
The even better news for growers is that there is absolutely no charge for subscribing to the web site. Once on the web site you can search for any chemical, view all the data relating to that chemical and also download the data.
Now, even better news still for PAM users... we have built an importer into PAM8 (version 8.5.4 and later) that will import the data that you download from the InfoPest site. This data imports into the PAM Chemical database just as before. Once there, you are able to use that list as your master list when you want to add new chemicals to your PAM chemical list.
We also import all the active ingredients and much of the other relevant data. We also provide a convenient link to the InfoPest & AVMPA websites, directly from PAM.
We will publish a video on how this works very soon. PAM users will be notified.
Assigning the events and their costs to a crop.
As you will know, when recording a planting events (or seeding event) in PAM, PAM will ask you if you want to allocate any jobs that you recorded earlier, to the crop.
In addition there was an option from the Tools menu in the Paddock - Season view that enabled you to perform that allocation task as an afterthought. We removed the option as it was causing some undesired effects under some circumstances. Well, the good new is, in the past few months, we have introduced a new way to quickly assign all those jobs to a cropped area.
Look for the option on the "Tools" menu in the Paddock-Season View: "Assign Paddock or Un-Cropped jobs to a Cropped Area" ... this option enables you to assign all paddock events to a crop.
In Closing