Do You Want Auto Updates of Acquired Data?

When pitching Ratchet-X, I’m often asked the following question; “Once I paste data into an application screen, will that screen be updated if the data changes at the source?” Currently, the answer is no. But there’s no reason it couldn’t assuming this is truly what customers want and are willing to accept the manner in which we can do it. Allow me to lay out the issue below and I welcome your feedback regarding this concept.

Currently, after data is pasted by Ratchet-X into an application screen, the data is “disconnected” from the source. This means if the data changes at the source, your application data will not reflect the change. Why is this? It’s because Ratchet-X is currently only aware of the data that is actively available on the desktop. In other words, the only data Ratchet-X knows of is the data that resides on application screens to which you’ve navigated and currently have open. While Ratchet-X does have an existing mechanism to automatically query this active data and perform a refresh, it doesn’t have a way of refreshing data that it has previously acquired.

Based on customer demand, we expanded Commander’s Clipboard function and renamed it the Commander Task List. One of the new task list features is the ability to export data to disk so it can be reused at a later date. Well, what if we were to expand this feature so that data that passes through the task list (which includes all the data that is pasted), is automatically saved on a server. Once that data is stored on a server, it then becomes a discrete data object that can be have a number of functions performed upon it independent of the application that requested or houses it. One of these functions could be source monitoring for the purpose performing data updates.

Let’s look at the following example. Imagine you’ve just pasted a credit rating for a customer into your accounting system. Currently, that rating will not be updated until you explicitly navigate back to that customer’s record and ask Ratchet-X to refresh the data from the source.

However, we can expand Commander so that it stores the pasted credit rating on a server and be given an instruction to monitor the credit source on a monthly basis and notify you when the rating changes. When it does, you will be notified within Commander at which point you can elect to go to that company’s record in the accounting system and paste the updated credit rating.

At the end of the day, this data is your data. Whose server should it live on? What functions can be performed upon it? How often? At what cost? At RatchetSoft, we recognize that information is one of an organization’s most critical assets so we are vigilant about allowing only the owner to control its flow. However, as customers look at Ratchet-X as being more about structured data trafficking and less about cutting and pasting, we get bombarded with these kinds of advanced data processing requests.

Is this a feature you’d like? Should it be a priority? What do you think? If you have an opinion, leave a comment or send us an email at info@ratchetsoft.com. I look forward to hearing from you.