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Where have We Been?LICHEN Software has always done custom programming for businesses and organizations. Some of the same features keep being requested. Over time as we saw the demand we began collecting those features in separate programs. In 2001, we built our first scheduling program for a lawn care company. They wanted to see a week in either direction of the appointment they were viewing. Shortly after that, a sales agent wanted to see his appointments calendared. Putting these needs together, Simple Schedule was born. A contacts database linked to a scheduling engine with day, week and month views. By 2003, we had requests for multi user calendaring. We developed Group Schedule. It had all of the features of Simple Schedule but added Work Groups and Work Group filtered events. Group Schedule went through several versions. By version 1.5, the final version of this program, communications capture , letterhead formation and the products database with price list formation were included In 2006, we began the Version 1.x series of Little Helper. Preformatted display templates, labels and form letters made their first appearance. Communications capture was expanded. The E-mail parsing routine for copying and pasting formatted e-mail directly into the contacts database was put in place. Version 1.x of Little Helper ran from version 1.2 through 1.7 released to the public. Through the versions, the interface was modernized and the Opportunities module was added to support lead generation and monitoring. Which Brings Us To NowTo obtain the features and structure we wanted, Little Helper was completely rewritten. The architecture was modernized, giving better performance locally and over a WAN. Support for Windows versions prior to Windows 2000, Service Pack 4 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 is not longer available. Similarly, on Macintosh , the minimum platform is OS X 10.3.9. This still supports a large platform range and we are proud of that. We believe that you should not need the absolute latest and greatest to be productive. But we did have to put a cut off somewhere. The contacts database interface has been totally rewritten to take advantage of a modern tabbed interface. We have greatly expanded the contact data that can be collected, adding family data and retooling what was Billing and Shipping into Alternate contact information. We have facilitated the import and export of data to make Little Helper a more open system. New in this version, a business intelligence link section to the contacts database, giving direct web links for maps, street view and personal information based on contact information. We have also added the ability to store client files under their contact record. The Opportunities and Communications windows from the contacts database are now much better. The Scheduling section has had minor changes to give better displays, support start and finish times and to give better drill down from one display to the other. The individual event screens were totally retooled and the event reports were similarly redesigned. They are also now callable in separate windows so you can view multiple events in detail on a large screen. There are now a lot of calls to separate windows throughout the program just for this purpose. We have added a complete financial section to the program. This was huge. The challenge was to make it comprehensive enough to be useful without making it so complicated that people would not use it. We believe that the result is very flexible and can be used almost anywhere that supports dollar currency. Adding to the multiuser functionality, every Work Group Member now has the facility to have (a) their own letterhead and (b) an hourly billing rate assigned to them for use in the financial section. The Financial section of the program is under separate account and password protection at the database application level. Normal users do not even know that this level exists. They just know that they cannot enter that section of the program. For the first time there is explicit support for Groups. Any contact can be a member of many groups and the groups are searchable. We have also added the concept of a "Prime Group" to the contacts database. This is to support the export of data to other programs that only support one group per person. In addition, Groups are integrated into the financial section in that a group rate can be applied to a Group and all members of the Group can be billed at once. A lot has happened. We hope it makes you more productive.
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