I just returned from a 3 week trip to our development office in Thailand. That 3 week trip took me 6 weeks. I did however survive my first "silent coup". The political uprising in Thailand, highlighted by the take over of the international airport in Bangkok, happened just as I was checking in for my flight home. Quite an interesting event, if you put aside the inconvenience of 300,000 + stranded passengers and the halt of most freight going into or out of Thailand. To put this into some perspective, imagine 4,000 + people (men, woman and children) storming JFK and LaGuardia or Dulles and National within days of each other and completely occupying and shutting down both airports. Then, keeping both closed for over a week and doing so almost completely peacefully. The end result in the entire 4 month protest was 1 dead and about 700 some injuries from rival parties clashing. No tourists injured.

      Police and Army, while on standby, did not intervene and all was settled through negotiations and the eventual annulment of the current government. Corruption, graft, bribes, etc., aside, it says volumes for a country to get through such a crises with limited bloodshed and loss of life. However, the economic damage is expected to be significant. Some insight into the type of people involved: Most of the shops, including all of the Duty Free shops, were left "as is" and unattended for the duration of the shutdown. Everyone had full access to the international terminal, including access to all merchandise sitting out on shelves. Several thousand bottles of liquor, gifts, perfumes, etc. -- not one single item was looted or damaged! Oh yea - most protestors were paid daily to be there. Wages varied from approx $6 per day for being there to $35 per day if willing to fight and or die, to $175 + per day if you were on stage giving speeches. Hey - it's the Wild, Wild, East!

      Major initiatives addressed during this trip for our software development team.

1. Preparation for the PA-DSS audit: This will occur in mid January and certify the CPS POS for credit card processing. This time-consuming and expensive certification on our part will protect you from liability when using our application to process Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc. This has forced us to put a lot of other development projects on the back burner until this is finished, but since it affects almost every one of our customers, we made it the top priority.
   
2. Software Development / QA / Release cycles: We made some significant changes in the development, testing and release process for the products. We also invested in some automated software testing tools. Overall, this will slow down the "release" of new versions initially to once per month and eventually to once per quarter. However, the benefits will be that there will be fewer bugs in new releases. This will result in less resources (programmers) needed to address bugs in production code. This will result in being able to shift those unused support resources to our Development team. In addition, ultimately this will result in faster delivery of new development efforts. This was a big change for the staff and the effort is into the 4th week of a 5 week change over. We feel the retooling will have noticeable results by the end of the 1st quarter of 2009.
   
3. New version of the integrated Web-Store: We have completely re-vamped our integrated Web Store! Click here to take a look at the live Santa Monica Museum Web-Store. This is the new version of the CPS Web Store product you can integrate into your CPS POS today! Contact Mike Stanovich at (800) 793 1872 for details on how you can have your own Web Store.
   
4. A few surprises in store to be announced for the PGA Merchandise show in January.

Until Next time,

Enjoy :)