Ratchet-X and conflicts with keyboard shortcut applications

Ratchet-X is highly unintrusive in terms of its impact at the desktop. However, there are instances when it may conflict with other applications (usually utilities), that work with the keyboard buffer. An example of such an application is PhraseExpress from Bartels Media GmbH. This very useful utility allows the user to create global keyboard shortcuts that when typed, are replaced with a larger phrase thus reducing typing and ensuring textual consistency. In order to do this, the application must monitor what the user is typing into every application at the desktop, perform a recognition, eat the shortcut keystrokes when entered and replace it with the mapped long form text from its database. While this would not normally cause a conflict with Ratchet-X, if your action makes heavy use of stuffing keys in the keyboard buffer or your regwin hosts a conflicting keyboard shortcut, a conflict may arise. If an action does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to do or is exhibiting odd behavior and your action or regwin uses the keyboard buffer or shortcuts, check to see if the user is running a utility that intercepts keystrokes. This might save you some action debugging time.

Ratchet-X Jump2 - Jump Anywhere

Have you heard about Ratchet-X Jump2? Ratchet-X Jump2 is a new, low-cost offering from RatchetSoft that allows you to add simple, yet critically important and pervasively needed features to your existing applications. Ratchet-X Jump2 allows you to extend the context of the entity you are working within an application by enabling you to jump” to the same context in another application. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a customer record in your CRM system and you want to see all the related documents for the same customer in your document management system. Ratchet-X Jump2 allows you to add that functionality quickly, easily and at a fraction of the price it would cost to enable this feature using the full-featured version of Ratchet-X.

To learn more about Ratchet-X Jump2, which was recently announced at the annual AIIM conference, click here.

Ratchet-X Version 5 Released. And There Was Much Rejoicing!

Drum roll please......After 9 long months of development and testing, we're proud to announce the official release of Ratchet-X, Version 5. While our existing customers have been banging on some of these new features for a while, this is the first time we've been able to roll out all these improvements in one major release. And we're quite excited about it!

Besides a plethora of new features, we've streamlined the code in a major way. By stripping out tens of thousands of lines of code and depreciating infrequently used features, we were able to improve runtime performance and focus our precious resources on the features our users say they love most. Needless to say, our developers are happy and take great joy in telling Marketing how wrong they were in pushing for some of these "must have" deprecated features.

For more information on the release, check out our new web site at www.ratchetsoft.com. Better yet, if you want to see the product in action, download it today at http://ratchetsoft.com/html/downloadform.html.

Thanks again, and as always, please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of the product.

See you at IASA

Sunday marks the start of the IASA National Educational Conference and RatchetSoft is proud to be a sponsor of this year's show. Come see us at booth #609 and get a demo of the latest and greatest in desktop application integration. We'll be showing a series of new integrations and automations along with some old favorites.

Also, don't forget to ask us about the new and exciting RatchetSoft releases due out this fall.

Looking forward to seeing you in Grapevine, TX.

How Does A Ratchet Work?

One of the downsides of working for a company named RatchetSoft is the inordinate amount of click-throughs we get on our website for the search phrase; “How does a ratchet work”. I realize it’s because we have a page on the site entitled; “How Does Ratchet-X Work?”, but I’m still amazed at the number of people that pose the question, and based on the search snippet returned, still think it’s relevant and click through. It’s kind of funny.

Calling All MGAs To Orlando...

If you are planning to attend the AAMGA Automation and Technology Conference the week of March 14th in Orlando, please make sure you stop at booth #29 and say hello.

We will be demoing several interesting Ratchet-X integrations including ACORD forms integration and Ratchet-X for ImageRight. Every day more and more agents, brokers, MGAs and carriers are adopting Ratchet-X as the tool of choice to solve their desktop integration challenges.

So stop by and find out how putting a Ratchet-X magic button in your applications will dramatically increase your productivity and reduce data entry errors.

Hope to see you at the show.

Thank you to all who visited our booth at the IASA Northeast Regional Conference last week. The reception was quite good as we were demonstrating both Ratchet-X for ImageRight and our ACORD forms integration plug-in. Folks had lots of questions across a number of fronts though there seemed to be a particular interest in Ratchet-X uses in the areas of corporate and government compliance. As I’ve written about extensively on this blog and in other places, Ratchet-X is a wonderful addition to any organization’s compliance program. Ratchet-X can be used in the following ways:


- enforce new regulations and policies not built into your application
- create helpful dynamic links to external sources of information
- dramatically expand your ability to track user/application interactions for the purposes of auditing and corrective actions


If you are interested in discussing how Ratchet-X can assist with your compliance program, give us a call. Further, fell free to view the following video which touches on the compliance use case.

Ratchet-X For ImageRight Plug-In Video

Ratchet-X for ImageRight was released at the Vertafore/ImageRight User Conference back in August. We finally got around to creating a demo video of the plug-in and have posted as Ratchet-X Video Series video. If you’re interested in viewing the demo video, click here.

Ratchet-X for ImageRight is compatible with all version 3.5 and higher of ImageRight and is available from Vertafore. You can contact us or Vertafore for more details.

ImageRight User Conference Follow-up

Thank you to all who visited the Ratchet-X booth at the ImageRight User Group Conference. The tremendous response we received at the conference further confirms our belief that Ratchet-X and document management are beautiful match.

We announced at the conference the official release of Ratchet-X for ImageRight. If you’re an ImageRight user and have been deferring on integrating more of your applications because of the integration costs, I recommend you give us a call and check out the new release. Ratchet-X for ImageRight is compatible ImageRight versions 3.5 and above.

Special thanks to George Weihs for performing a yeoman’s job and pulling double duty in the booth.

Ratchet-X and ETL

We recently exhibited Ratchet-X at Microsoft’s TechEd 2009 show in Los Angeles California. Thank you to all who visited our booth and made the show such a big success for us. While there was no shortage of ideas as to how Ratchet-X could be used within the organizations of those who took the time to receive a demo, there was one repeated use case that stood out. Let’s just say that despite all efforts the industry has made to create better integrated systems, ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), is alive and well. We heard a number of stories about how organizations still continue to struggle with creating and maintaining reliable ETL processes.

No doubt, modern application development and deployment technologies coupled with “smart” infrastructure are enabling organizations to integrate more-and-more systems in real time. However, despite the advances, ETL is still a reality of life in organizations of all sizes. So the question asked often asked of us at the show was; “Where does Ratchet-X fit within the ETL process?” Glad you asked.

Let me first say that while Ratchet-X does extract, transform and load data between systems, it is not a traditional ETL tool. When I think about ETL, I think of scheduled batch jobs that process and move data between queues and systems. Generally, ETL processes are executed during non-prime time usage or maintenance hours for the purpose synching data across systems. While the term ETL can be used to describe other related processes, I think this is what most folks mean when they refer to ETL.

So, if Ratchet-X extracts, transforms and loads data, why isn’t it an ETL tool? It’s mostly a matter of perspective. Whereas most ETL processes are scheduled to run in batch, work with large data sets and have little end-user interaction, Ratchet-X is an on demand data processing platform that processes a single record set at a time and is often guided by the end-user.

Most of our customers use Ratchet-X to add new features to existing applications without changing those applications in any way. These new features usually involve:

• Acquiring data from an external source (e.g. web services, web site, electronic form, database, API, etc).
• Sending application screen data to an external source.
• Processing application screen data for the purposes of either transforming it in some way or kicking off a down stream process.

In most cases, Ratchet-X is processing one or more application screen’s worth of data that collectively constitutes a single record set (i.e. a composite customer record, an insurance policy, a shipping manifest, etc.). Ratchet-X is not usually used to process thousands of these record sets at a time. Further, Ratchet-X is almost always used under the watchful eye of the end-user. In reality, Ratchet-X is an “assistive” technology that allows an end-user to acquire, push or process data to and from the systems they use without having to rekey data and reducing errors. This doesn’t sound like ETL to me.

So, uh, where is it that Ratchet-X fits into the ETL process? Oh yeah. No ETL process is perfect. In fact most ETL processes have an error handling stage where exceptions and records that fail validation are kicked out to an exceptions queue. Once in the queue, the user then must manually review and rekey the corrected information into the target system or error handling interface. This is precisely where Ratchet-X can be very useful. For example, we have customers that set up Ratchet-X’s task list as the exception handling queue so users can easily review the data, make whatever corrections are necessary and immediately paste the corrected record into the target application.

So while Ratchet-X is not an ETL tool per se, it can serve as an important part of the error handling stage of most ETL implementations. If you have any questions or comments regarding how Ratchet-X can be used to supplement your ETL process, please drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

If you'd like to see a video regarding how Ratchet-X can be used as part of your ETL efforts, click here.