Author Archives: David [ChaosSoftware]

A New ChaosHost Experience

As many of our regular users have already seen, www.ChaosHost.com has been significantly updated over the last couple of weeks. Many of these changes guide ChaosHost toward an interface similar to the local installations of our latest releases of Time & Chaos or Intellect.

One of the most requested recent changes is the ability to scroll through your longer lists of Contacts, Appointments, and other data with more than just the scroll bar. Our new look has also enabled your mouse scroll wheel to roll up and down the list. In addition, once you have clicked on a row, you can use your keyboard arrow keys to quickly move up and down these lists as well.

Here are some of the more significant updates to ChaosHost.com:

iPad users will no longer be sent to the mobile interface automatically and will instead be greeted with the full ChaosHost.com interface which now works great through a desktop or tablet based browser.
The Name column has been added to the Contact views. What appears in this name column (e.g. Last Name, First Name, Company) can be modified by clicking on Options and setting the Name Style preference.
All record entry and edit screens have been revamped with tablet friendly features including a proper Group edit field, improved date pickers, and updated sliders and spinners.
For users with a larger set of Contacts, you can now choose a default Group filter. Under Options, you can set a default Group for Contacts specifically. Once set, when you log in to www.chaoshost.com,the Contact area will be automatically filtered to only show that specific Group.

There are still more changes planned for the near future, so keep checking back here on the blog for updates!

Merge Fields for Drag and Drop Text

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One of the “hidden” features in Intellect and Time & Chaos is the ability to customize the drag and drop text when creating a new Appointment or Task from a Contact.

While using the Classic view for instance, you can drag a Contact’s name to the Appointment or Task area and a new record will be created. The same holds true for dragging a Contact to the Calendar or Task navigation buttons at the lower left of the program or for dragging a Contact to the left hand calendars for creating an Appointment specifically.When you create an Appointment or Task through this drag and drop process, the description will be automatically filled with some text based on a setting in Options such as “Meeting With” or “Call” followed by the Contact’s name.

If you click on Options at the top of our software and then go to the Calendar or Task section, you can then modify the text that creates this description. The cool hidden feature here is the ability to add merge fields to this text. In both the Calendar and Task area of Options, the “Default Drop Text” can contain special merge fields.

These fields must be formatted properly to make sense to the program. Each field is essentially given a corresponding number. For instance, the Primary Address Line 1 field is field number 8. So if you changed the default drop text for Appointments to:

Meeting at «8» with

The Appointment description would automatically fill in with something like:

Meeting at 123 Main Street with John Smith
NOTE: The type of brackets used are important. You can copy and paste the brackets from this article to use in your merge fields to make sure the correct brackets are used.For reference, the fields and their corresponding numbers (in brackets) are given below. Keep in mind, the Contact’s name is included automatically after the drop text. If copying and pasting using the following information, you would only need to copy the number and brackets.

«1» Last Name
«2» Company Name
«3» Create Date
«4» Last Modified Date
«5» Group
«6» First Name
«7» Title

«8» Primary Address Line 1
«9» Primary Address Line 2
«10» Primary City
«11» Primary State
«12» Primary Zip
«13» Primary Country

«14» Secondary Address Line 1
«15» Secondary Address Line 2
«16» Secondary City
«17» Secondary State
«18» Secondary Zip
«19» Secondary Country

«20» Category
«21» Prefix
«22» Suffix
«23» Notes

«24» Custom Field 1
«25» Custom Field 2
…
«43» Custom Field 20

«44» Phone Label 1
«45» Phone Label 2
…
«63» Phone Label 20

«64» Phone Field 1
«65» Phone Field 2
…
«83» Phone Field 20

Troubleshooting 101

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Whenever we run into any issue, there are a number of basic steps we will almost always take. The majority of problems we see can be corrected using one of the following procedures.

1. Reset Program Options. Within Intellect or Time & Chaos, click on Help and Reset and choose Program Options. Close and restart the program and see if the issue still exists.

2. Reset Dock Panels. Similar to number 1, click on Help and Reset and choose Dock Panels. This will reset the various areas within Intellect or Time & Chaos back to their defaults.

3. Reset Columns. If you right click on any current column header such as the word Name at the top of the Contact area or Description are the top of the Appointment area, you can then choose Reset Columns from the context menu that appears. Many display issues can be solved by resetting columns in a given area.

4. Repair Data. As with any database program, it is possible data can become corrupted. Our software contains powerful tools for attempting a repair process. First make sure all of your data is safely backed up and that no one else has this database open across a network. Then click on Help and DB Tools and repair the database in which you are seeing a problem. Step through the rebuild, reindex, and compact processes one by one until each completes.

5. Keep windows up to date. Yes we know updates install automatically, often there are optional updates that should be considered. Hardware driver updates are usually in this category as are browser updates. Intellect uses Internet Explorer to view and create HTML message. IE does not need to be your default browser of course but does need to be kept up to date along with your other drivers and Windows itself.

6. Here in technical support, we will often use the Report screen to quickly find “odd” data. If you click on the View menu and select Reports, you can then (at the top left of the Reports screen) choose the database in which you are having an issue. If you then simply click the Go button on the left hand side, the Reports screen will find all existing records in that database.

You can then click any of the visible column headers to sort by that column. A useful check is to sort by a given field such as Date in the Appointment area or Name in the Contact area and look for any oddities at the top or bottom of the list. A date field filled in with something that is not a date or odd characters in a name field can be easily spotted using this technique.

Keeping Things Fast

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Everybody’s computer is different. This can lead to sometimes radically different speeds using the same data on different systems. Intellect is designed to be fast. Within shared databases here internally, we can search through about fifty thousand messages in a matter of seconds using systems a couple of years old and searching across an average network.

If you are seeing performance issues within Intellect or Time & Chaos, there are a number of optimization steps you can take that may increase the speed considerably.

My first recommendation would be to not keep the data in an online folder such as a Dropbox directory or a folder that syncs the data with another location such as a Sugersync directory. Though backup files can be kept in one of these online or sync folders, the data files themselves should not be kept in one of these locations and should instead be stored on your local drive or a system immediately on your local network.

For Intellect users, keep your Inbox as lean as possible. We recommend keeping less than 1500 messages in the Inbox in general but the less messages the better. Messages that exceed this number can be dragged to a folder under Saved Messages where you can keep as many messages as you like and create several folders and subfolders. The speed of opening Intellect can be negatively affected by too many folders under Saved Messages. Go crazy but not too crazy.

If you’ve been using our software for a while or recently made a large number of changes to your data, a reindex may be helpful. First make a current backup of your data and make sure no one else has this data open. Then click on Help and DB Tools and repair the Mail Cache. Step through the rebuild, reindex, and compact processes one by one. When those complete, repeat these steps with the Appointments, Contacts, and other data.

Keep the number of records in each database reasonable. Typically under 10,000 records per database. Mileage may vary depending on your computer hardware performance and network speeds. This is not a hard set limit but a round number to use as a guideline.

Don’t try to network shared data across a network using wifi. Wifi is great for web-browsing or streaming audio and video but not that great for databases.

Keep windows up to date. Yes we know updates install automatically, often there are optional updates that should be considered. Hardware driver updates are usually in this category as are browser updates. Intellect uses Internet Explorer to view and create HTML message. IE does not need to be your default browser of course but does need to be kept up to date along with your other drivers and Windows itself.

Finally, make sure our software is up to date as well. We do periodically release new versions and these updates will normally add functionality and address previously found issues as well. Current versions can usually be downloaded by simply clicking on Help and checking for a newer version but can also be found directly on our site.

Moving Back and Forth… and Back

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We do have a small number of users who try Intellect 4 for a period of time and then move back to the old Intellect 3 only to again install Intellect 4 at a later date. What these users encounter is data that existed when they first tried Intellect 4, not the up to date data when they installed Intellect 4 for a second time.

Basically, the data exists as it did when you first converted the information from Intellect 3 to Intellect 4. When you first upgraded, the data was converted up to the newer format. What you are seeing is still that same old converted data.

To address the issue, we need to delete the files that store the newer format data so the old data is reconverted up to the newer format. First create a current backup of all your version 3 data. I would then recommend uninstalling Intellect 3 so it is no longer used in the future.

Then browse to your data directory or, if you are not familiar with this location, within Intellect 4, click on Help, choose Information About My Data, and then simply double click on the path by “Data Home”. Just be sure to close Intellect after doing so.

In the data folders, delete the files beginning with Contacts, the files beginning with Calendar, and also Tasks and Project files as well. Do not delete any file beginning with a ~. The ~ files are your Intellect 3 data and the files we are deleting are your Intellect 4 data. There should be at least three Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Projects files each.

Then double click on the Mail folder to enter the mail directory. There, delete the “Mail Cache” and “Mail Address Cache” files. There should be at least three of each of these files as well.

Once all files have been removed, restart Intellect 4. It will take longer to start as the old data is converted up to the new format. Let that process complete without trying to run Intellect 4 again or stop the process midway. It may take some time. Once it finished, all of your current Intellect 3 data should be converted up to Intellect 4.